Part of the Henry Cow boxset, now available for individual purchase, compiled from live recordings, radio transcription, or early recordings, remastered and presented to give a complete look at the history of Henry Cow.
Label: Recommended Records Catalog ID: RERHC14 Squidco Product Code: 23557
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2016 Country: UK Packaging: Jewel Case Recorded at Radio Bremen, Bremen, Germany on Marc 22nd, 1978, by Dietram Koster.
Personnel:
Tim Hodgkinson-organ, alto saxophone, clarinet, mbira, voice
Fred Frith-guitar, tubular bells, marimba, xylophone, violin, piano
"Extracts from a live radio broadcast on Radio Bremen for New Jazz Live on 22 March 1978.
Henry Cow perform here as a quintet of Hodgkinson/Frith/Cooper/Born/Cutler; Dagmar Krause had left the band the previous November due to ill health. "Armed Maniac/Things We Forgot" is a titled improvisation with references "in ambience" to contemporary classical composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyšrgy Ligeti.[nb 4] New Suite is a Fred Frith composition with an instrumental version of Tim Hodgkinson's "Viva Pa Ubu" added. "Viva Pa Ubu" is a song that had been recorded, with the whole group singing, during (what became) the Hopes and Fears recording sessions in January 1978, and was the start of a musical production by Hodgkinson of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (Pa Ubu being a character in the play). It was later released on the Recommended Records Sampler and re-released as a bonus track on the CD reissue of Western Culture. Die Kunst Der Orgel is a 34-minute improvisation that ends with an instrumental version of Tim Hodgkinson's "Erk Gah"."-Wikipedia
"Assembled over 15 years, this collection gives for the first time some idea of the breadth and depth of Henry Cow's work. Always very much a live band, performance was their metier, and a concert might range far - always driven by an intense dialogue between tightly knit compositions and radically open improvisation. The officially released LPs tell at best only half this story, and one purpose of this definitive collection is to set the work back into its broader context.
These are all previously unreleased recordings, that include many compositions and improvisations new to anyone who only knows the official releases, documentation of a number of one-off projects and events and - where different or remarkable enough to justify inclusion - live versions of parts of the LP repertoire. Many of these recordings are high quality radio transcriptions taken directly from the original masters, others are less hi-fi, but justified we think by their historic and musical quality. And everything has been carefully transferred and re-mastered by Bob Drake to the best audio quality that current technology allows without interference or tampering. It's all a million times better than the terrible bootlegs that are swimming around.
Altogether, the 9 CDs embody some extraordinary, and occasionally prescient music. Taking this box together with the officially released albums, it is possible at last to get some impression of the extensive ground Henry Cow covered in it's 10 short years. Finally, there is the DVD: 80 minutes of the 1976 Cow (with Georgina Born and Dagmar Krause) performing many unreleased pieces as well as Living in the Heart of The Beast, Beautiful as the Moon &c. This is the only known video recording in existence - professionally made, multi camera - and has not been recovered since its original broadcast (just scour U-Tube, HC is conspicuous by its total absence). And last but not least, there is a great deal of written, photographic and textual documentation."-ReR Megacorp