Charles Hayward (This Heat, Camberwell Now, Quiet Sun etc.) continues his unique and extraordinary journey through music with the release of One Big Atom on the artist-led label Continuity...

From the 1970's to the present day, Charles has developed and built some of the most radical music of the European underground. Following on with a series of solo projects that have each made bold proposals for possible futures, his new recording One Big Atom is yet another departure for Charles, taking his song writing further into the personal and political, shifting focus towards a "dread bass" sensibility. It was devised, performed and engineered by him in his South London studio, affording an even more integrated and radical approach to his sound.

One Big Atom stands outside of genre and any easily identified signifiers, jump-cutting between song, collage, sound field, noise, signal, melody. Made over the space of a year as the world went through a series of far-reaching changes, the music is a sort of tangential response.

''If it hasn't got some quality of 'science fiction', some feeling for a schism inside the everyday that throws us all into an unforeseen future, well, if the music isn't doing that, then I'm not interested. One Big Atom is meant to feel urgent, incomplete, rough, like a message from the resistance just before the paramilitary kick in the door and shut down transmission.'

Poverty as strategy: Also asymmetric, using the simplest of means at hand to broadcast against the overbearing mainstream leviathan. This economy of means in turn promotes a complexity of imagination that involves the listeners' engagement as a necessity: Process, not Product.

In order to enable a worthwhile and genuine process, no computers were used until final mastering. 'Certainly, computers are convenient and clean sounding,' says Charles 'but the paths and routes within the creative act are becoming proscribed and increasingly useless as strategies for survival and independence because of the constraints of digital protocol. Just as my work needs to have a sci-fi proposition, so it also needs to commit violence against the representation project, the idolatrous need to push our technologies towards a more and more 'realistic' capability that leaves no room for the audience to fill in the spaces and trace their own connections. Instead, I've tried to look at the plasticity of sound, to mould and shape it as material towards a consciously 'recorded' artefact.'

Jumping at will between analogue and digital for purposes of sonic attack, One Big Atom unfolds as a series of highly charged gestures and events, not in the pursuit of an abstract perfection but rather a coming together of sound in unique moments: Abandon perfection.

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


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