Henry Cow - Volume 8: Bremen
SKU
21-ReR HC14
Nearly 8 years after the big box set by Henry Cow was unleashed on the world, they’ve made the sets available individually!
This is a high-quality radio broadcast from early 1978, just a few months before the end.
“Bremen is another live performance beginning with a lengthy improvisation that, in ambience, references contemporary classical composers Krzysztof Penderecki and, at times, Gyorgy Ligeti. Henry Cow was often considered, by those trying desperately to find a label with which to pigeon-hole the group, more related to jazz because of its penchant for free improvisation. Electricity and Cutler's sometimes backbeat-driven playing also associated the group with rock...but if anything, Henry Cow represented a new kind of classical chamber music; one where spontaneity was a partial component, and the instrumentation used created textures that defied those looking for tradition and convention. While every Henry Cow studio release represented a clear evolution, Western Culture remains, in many ways, the polarizing album of the group's decade-long career. Its..near-exclusive emphasis on composition ultimately dissolved the group. Still, while Frith would go on to pursue more song-based writing with Cutler and Krause, he was still (and remains) a distinctive writer of more complicated through-composition. He was also, despite his being categorized in the experimental and the avant-garde, a writer for whom the beauty of a strong melody was never lost--a penchant that can be heard on The Happy End Problem. As oblique as some of Bremen's "New Suite" is, with its inclusion of an extract from Hodgkinson's "Viva Pa Ubu," there's also some of Frith's most lyrical writing as well. On the other hand, the group continued to explore the most extreme boundaries of improvisation, with the 35-minute "Die Kunste Der Orgel" as jagged as ever, and the group at this point no longer with a singer--Krause's ill health, exacerbated at times by the rancor within the group, had forced her to leave the group. Hodgkinson's description is, like Cutler's earlier writing on the nature of improvisation, eye-and ear- opening.”AllAboutJazz