Henry Cow - Volume 6: Stockholm & Göteborg
SKU
21-ReR HC 12
This is high quality live Swedish radio recordings from Goteborg (1975 - with John Greaves) and Stockholm (1977 - with Georgie Born). The sound is great here; Bob Drake worked from the original 8 track and stereo 2 track masters and you can finally hear Tim's follow-up masterpiece to "Living in the Heart of the Beast", entitled "Erk Gah". There's also some nice improvisations and other tunes and Fred's never otherwise released "The March", which is a really great one as well. Highly recommended.
"This is the first new release in 30 years from this legendary audience-splitting British group, and the first featuring Georgina Born, the group's bassist from 1976-78. Remixed and re-mastered from the original Swedish radio tapes. Henry Cow were never going to fit in. Their compositions were way too composed and their improvising was way too improvised - a tendency that only got more extreme as time went on, as these recordings from 1976 and 1977 demonstrate. Stockholm and Goteborg fills in some of the missing history between In Praise of Learning (1975) and Western Culture (1978) and offers music that has not been heard on record until now. First is Tim Hodgkinson's late and fiendishly complicated epic composition 'Erk Gah' (a working title), that took many months of sweat to learn and resolutely eschews any hint of riff, solo or modular assembly. At the other extreme are the two wide-ranging improvisations built around heady extended instrumental techniques, aleatorics, quotations, more-or-less randomly inserted prepared materials and a blithe disregard for genre rules. Between, constantly shifting ground, are a straight-ahead version of Phil Ochs' No more Songs (one of only two covers ever performed by the band), an unreleased composition by Fred Frith, and a version of the Ottawa Song: a typical live set from that period. Finally, Stockholm is a snapshot of a band of exceptional talents having fun. And it reflects what the studio albums could not - that Henry Cow's natural habitat was the stage - and the real-time pressure of public performance - because it was there that the music could live and breathe. And evolve."