posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.
The sole Acid Casuals album, Omni, a document of a carefree era of collective, anything goes creativity in Cardiff in the mid-noughties approaches its first ever vinyl pressing, reissued in remastered form by Circuitry Electronic on Fri 30 October 2026. Following the band opening their archive with the yearning harmonies of Bowl Me Over last month, Acid Casuals now reveal new visuals for Wa Da Da, a low-key cut of evocative electronica, typifying the album’s freewheeling creative approach.
Wa Da Da’s spacey bleeps, electronic pulse and murmured, intermittent vocal, expanding into a cascade of synthesised bells and beats, is a notable product of Acid Casuals’ experimentalism. While welcoming an ever-changing roll call of artists, Omni’s creation was thanks to the nucleic trio of Super Furry Animals’ Cian Ciarán, former Big Leaves bassist Kevin Tame and musician and actor Llyr Evans, coming together free of agendas to see where the combination of technology, instruments and melody might lead.
Refocusing on Wa Da Da just weeks before Omni’s overdue reissue, it comes days ahead of the band’s first ever live performance of the album at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama as part of Cardiff Music City Festival on Fri 2 October 2026. The video release also brings the band back together with visual collaborator, Bobby Klang.
“I think ‘Wa Da Da’ stemmed from listening to a Lee Scratch Perry double album, where the instrumental versions followed the singing versions. Not being able to remember if we’d played the album in full, it was played over and over until one of us remembered if a song had already been played,” says Cian Ciarán. “I miss those days. With the title meaning ‘love’, I think the track reflects this sentiment of ‘one love’.
“We must thank Greg Haver, the engineer who also recorded ‘Guacamole’ with Super Furry Animals, here too. He let me borrow his Proteus, which is the backbone of this track with all the bells and twinkles,”
Finding members between their ‘day jobs’ in music and film, with Evans notably starting in the cult classic film, Twin Town, collective’s activities stretched well beyond synth soundscapes. Acid Casuals ran an art gallery in central Cardiff, working with local artists and exploring street art, and later opened Capsule, a pizzeria, gallery and beer garden that hosted openings, listening parties and album launches. Then there was the Acid Casuals fashion line including a distinctive pair of jeans called The Scoop, designed to retain the loose shape of 1990s baggy denim without the hems being destroyed underfoot, each pair made in a small factory in Port Talbot.
Such a broad span of activities, alongside a spread of external interest including a Mixmag cover feature and landing a track on an episode of global hit US crime drama, CSI Miami, means that the story of Acid Casuals will never be one reduced to the status side project or tangential curiosity.
Originally released on Mon 30 January 2006, Omni arrived between the Super Furry Animals albums Love Kraft and Hey Venus! and has since become a singular document of the adventurous musical and creative community found within the cheaply rented studio spaces and commercial property of a pre-regeneration Welsh capital city. Pressed on coloured LP for the first time, the remastered edition is accompanied by CD and digital versions that feature additional tracks picked from the Acid Casuals archive.
Published post no.3,035 – Thursday 1 October 2026
