Broken Flag was never only a noise label. Never Say When, the compilation Gary Mundy assembled in 1987 as the imprint neared its end, is the evidence: ten tracks mapping a network that ran from Croydon to Udine, almost none of them behaving the way the label's reputation would predict.

Mundy founded Broken Flag in 1982, out of a bedroom in South London, alongside his own project Ramleh. Across the decade it issued early work by The New Blockaders, Consumer Electronics, Skullflower, Maurizio Bianchi and Controlled Bleeding, mostly on cassette, mostly in editions that disappeared on contact. The label became shorthand for British power electronics, a scene defined as much by its confrontational packaging as by its volume. Never Say When documents what came after that: an international roster, quieter tactics, and a set of artists who would spend the following four decades in motion.

The record opens with Ramleh's Bite The Bolster, which sits closer to a soundtrack cue than to the overdriven electronics the name usually summons. Cranioclast, the German project responsible for the sleeve design, follow with ...And Still the World Exists: a bell tolling, voices slowed to a crawl, white noise pooling underneath. Total, Matthew Bower's vehicle in the years before Skullflower's ascent, stretches Face to Face in the Howling Night across most of a side. Andrew Chalk's Thack is sub-bass synthesiser rumble, an early trace of the practice that would later produce Organum and Mirror. Controlled Bleeding turn toward orchestral tone; Uncommunity and Jonathan Briley build dense tape collage; The Grey Wolves work in cut-up.

Two Italians close the picture. Giancarlo Toniutti, then at the centre of the correspondence networks linking Udine to Cologne and Melbourne, contributes Covar Peste in Cagna. Mauro Teho Teardo, still in his early twenties and decades away from his film scores, offers Stefania Lobilunghi I Do. Their presence is not incidental: the compilation is a document of postal traffic, of tapes crossing borders between people who had mostly never met.

Nothing here is a song. Grinding metal, nursery-rhyme fragments surfacing through feedback, field material, unstable rhythm. The pieces share a method more than a sound: short-form work made on limited equipment, edited with patience, released without expectation of an audience.

Pressed in 1987 in an edition of 500 and out of print ever since, Never Say When has become one of the harder Broken Flag artifacts to locate, its title borrowed back by the label's 30th anniversary festival in 2012. Following Fourth Dimension's 2025 CD, it now returns to vinyl for the first time: a double LP remastered by Puppy38, restoring the two tracks that appeared only on the original cassette, The Grey Wolves' untitled piece and the Teardo, and reproducing the Cranioclast cover.

Limited edition of 500 copies.