The 1st new Henry Cow release in 30 years, live concerts from '76-77 Swedish radio shows, remixed and remastered - 16 tracks including recordings with Georgie Born.
Label: Recommended Records Catalog ID: ReRHC12 Squidco Product Code: 10621
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2008 Country: Great Britain Packaging: Jewel Tray Recorded by Sveriges Radio, 1975 & 1976. Non invasively re-mixed and remastered 2007/8.
Personnel:
Georgie Born-fretless bass, cello (1-7, 12-14)
Lindsay Cooper-bassoon, flute, recorder, sopranino sax, piano (1-6), tapes (13)
Chris Cutler-drums, electrification (13), piano (10)
"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."-ReR USA