FEATURED ALBUM: Henry Cow - Western Culture

[Hunchentootz]

It's so strange to me - for some reason this one is almost like a pop album compared to the rest - like its the easy listening one for me - dunno why - just is.

Amazing music. Might be my 2nd fav after Legend.

[NogbadTheBad]

It took me a long time to start to get Henry Cow, I first listened to them in my teens when I was all about Iron Maiden, Motorhead & Black Sabbath. All of it was way too far out there for me back then. Western Culture was the toughest one to connect with for the longest time. It's now my favorite Cow, though I love all of them, and it's top 5 all time for me.

Focused & Challenging is correct.

[mozo-pg]

IMO don't start here, start with Leg End. Play that sucker as many times as you can until you can't take it anymore OR you start loving it. Its waaaay more accessible than Western Culture, and leans heavily into the Canterbury sound at times. Once you grasp what's going on with their sound in general (and Cutler's very unique drumming approach) then this sucker might make more sense. But this album leans heavily on dissonance, so you have to be mentally ready for that...there's no getting around that fact.

This album is essentially written material (or contains very little improv) so think about these pieces actually written on sheet music as you're listening....I do that trick with hardcore dissonant classical music sometimes and it helps my brain "imagine" the composition in a different way. A little puff puff puff or magic gummy will certainly do wonders too - no joke there - Cannabis can open many musical doors imo. Good luck and its ultimately OK if this isn't in your wheelhouse, enjoy what you enjoy! Cheers. -Frankie

Thanks for the suggestion Frankie. I'll definitely check out Leg End. I really love Vander's drumming, his performance at NF was stunning, so maybe Cutler's drumming may resonate.

Feel sorry for Greg that is not getting much enjoyment for his HC boxset (which one was it?) and I do understand him, because not everything HC did rattles my fibers to good way.
TBH, I only moderately have mileage from some of the discs in the one I own.
Yes, Leg End is their most accessible album by a margin (Un-Rest remains fairly difficult to my ears), but yessssssssss, Cutler is one of the most bizarre and entertaining (fascinating to watch him play too) drummer around.


One entry point possible is Wyatt's End Of An Ear, IMHO.
A little tougher would be to watch HC's filmed concert of Vevey (Switzerland) 1976 - as watching them play their music might be the doorknob to the Cow's pastures, though that line-up was unusual (or didn't last long), as the feminine forces equaled the masculine ones. Vevey 76 is also a stand-alone DVD, but YT also carries it


Elsewhere, I'm not much a Slap Happy fan, so sung albums like In Praise Of Learning and Art Bears stuff are not my cuppa (I prefer News From Babel in most aspects).
And I've always thought that one of WC's side can be like an instrumental version of that type of Slap/Cow - Though the A-side is all Hogkinson's compos and the other being mostly (all?) Lindsey Cooper's compositions.

I can't remember the name of the box set because it was 10 years ago. Maybe I confused it with Art Bears.

[NogbadTheBad]

Cutlers drumming is sublime

[chalkpie]

Cutlers drumming is sublime

Yep. Even amongst the universe of amazing players, he has an approach and sound that doesn't even remotely sound like anybody else. He should always be mentioned when speaking about the greatest of all time imo. Totally unique and completely erudite as well. Fascinating to watch too. I could keep going....

[pb2015]

I have to include myself in the group of listeners who don't get this album. I keep it around in case someday it clicks.

[Zeuhlmate]

Yep. Even amongst the universe of amazing players, he has an approach and sound that doesn't even remotely sound like anybody else. He should always be mentioned when speaking about the greatest of all time imo. Totally unique and completely erudite as well. Fascinating to watch too. I could keep going....

[Steve F.]

I have to include myself in the group of listeners who don't get this album. I keep it around in case someday it clicks.

Well....things tend to click if you continue to listen to them (not to the point of making yourself mad but to the point where you might hear the intent that you don't hear with a lack of familiarity).

IF you are interested in having it click, I would suggest that you play ONE song from the record every few days (I would suggest either Industry or The Decay Of Cities, but that's just me) and see if familiarity with it begins to bring understanding (if not 'clickity-ness').

IF it doesn't, at least you will be able to more clearly understand *why* it doesn't click for you. And I bet that whether it clicks for you or not, it will be very much of interest to hear from you more about it in this thread.

YMMV. But giving yourself small doses to build up a mental immunity to something is something I often suggest for people who don't like a particularly thorny piece of music [think of it as the Henry Cow vaccine] but are interesting in and willing to work at trying to like it.

[Munster]

Cutlers drumming is sublime

Well....things tend to click if you continue to listen to them (not to the point of making yourself mad but to the point where you might hear the intent that you don't hear with a lack of familiarity).

IF you are interested in having it click, I would suggest that you play ONE song from the record every few days (I would suggest either Industry or The Decay Of Cities, but that's just me) and see if familiarity with it begins to bring understanding (if not 'clickity-ness').

IF it doesn't, at least you will be able to more clearly understand *why* it doesn't click for you. And I bet that whether it clicks for you or not, it will be very much of interest to hear from you more about it in this thread.

YMMV. But giving yourself small doses to build up a mental immunity to something is something I often suggest for people who don't like a particularly thorny piece of music [think of it as the Henry Cow vaccine] but are interesting in and willing to work at trying to like it.

Good advice. Western Culture is not my favourite either but the way I got into earlier Henry Cow (specifically In Praise of Learning) was to listen to Cutler's superb drumming and expand from there - I even hear whistlable tunes in Dagmar's vocals these days!

[spacefreak]

A timeless masterpiece.

[EBES]

I bought Leg End in 2011ish and never clicked with it, but kept it around because I could tell there was something there. One of my pandemic projects in summer 2020 was to buy the Cow Box Redux and the Piekut book. I did eventually come to feel like I'd wrapped my head around most of their catalog, well enough to hear hooks, repeated themes, points of emotional connection, etc. Leg End & Unrest started to make sense if I processed them as an especially intricate version of Canterbury. Desperate Straights is rather easy to like, and In Praise of Learning felt more like classic prog. I don't listen to any of those albums every day but I can dip into them when the mood strikes, knowing I'll hear something familiar enough to bring some pleasure but still with nooks & crannies which remain unappreciated.

This one, though. This one. Couldn't do it. I've gotta try Steve F's program.

[Scrotum Scissor]

I think it's a complete masterpiece.

I probably still listen to Unrest more than this one and arguably enjoy its warmth more as well, but the compositional valor of Western Culture is second to absolutely none in "advanced" rock music. There's a feeling of literal artistic menace to the entire atmosphere and construct of this album that I've actually never encountered anywhere else in overall pop culture except for maybe in the intensity of performance with characters like Jacques Brel et al. (no comparison as such). As if you're indeed witnessing and potentially becoming a part of a revolution of sorts while submerging into the conceptual principles of its expression.

After my own band folded in '95 and our pianist excelled at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, he promoted radically formalist progressive rock (like Univers Zero, Magma and Egg) to his educators, to fairly little avail. Then, in 1997 when he had joined a booking committee at the conservatory and wanted to commission Tim Hodgkinson's Stop Mortal piece for execution there, he took Western Culture (featuring Hodgkinson's three-part "History and Prospects") with him to convince a professor of contemporary music of its "serious" merit. The latter then admitted to never having heard anything even remotely like it, ascribing much of his experience to its electroacoustic might of volume and the authority of musical prowess so evident. Consequently, Hodgkinson and his tiny ensemble of friends and associates were invited to a slot for Stop Mortal and went down like, well, not a storm but perhaps at least a strong wind.

This work - Western Culture - remains immensely loud in sound, mentally penetrating in each and every aspect of instrumental presence, imposing in creative representation and purely offensive in contrast to just about anything else imaginable in rock music - which so definitely is precisely what it consitutes; an accomplished and realised level and stage of rock music evolution.

[TCC]

Henry Cow is a favorite here, so this album too!

[trondis23]

After my own band folded in '95 and our pianist excelled at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, he promoted radically formalist progressive rock (like Univers Zero, Magma and Egg) to his educators, to fairly little avail. Then, in 1997 when he had joined a booking committee at the conservatory and wanted to commission Tim Hodgkinson's Stop Mortal piece for execution there, he took Western Culture (featuring Hodgkinson's three-part "History and Prospects") with him to convince a professor of contemporary music of its "serious" merit. The latter then admitted to never having heard anything even remotely like it, ascribing much of his experience to its electroacoustic might of volume and the authority of musical prowess so evident. Consequently, Hodgkinson and his tiny ensemble of friends and associates were invited to a slot for Stop Mortal and went down like, well, not a storm but perhaps at least a strong wind.

Stop Mortal is one of my favourite classical works by Hodgkinson. Unfortunately, it was never professionally recorded. But I have a couple of tapes, one from 1995 that Hodkginson sent to me, and one from 1997, which I recorded myself in Trondheim. The work is written for piano, violin, cello and sampler, plus the voice of Dagmar Krause. It is a complex and original piece with a virtouso piano part, but more melodic than his later works. It was the Nordlyd festival for contemporary music that invited Hodgkinson and co to Norway on that occasion, and I suggested them to the other local sections of ISCM in Norway. Bergen was the only taker, unfortunately. Cutler and Zeena Parkins played the other set on our concert. Two years before we arranged a duo concert with Cutler and Hodgkinson, and Hodgkinson got one of his other works, a percussion trio, performed at the Nidaros cathedral. They also played a concert further north, at a small place called Sortland, that Hodgkinson thought was a great experience.

[Scrotum Scissor]

a) The work is written for piano, violin, cello and sampler, plus the voice of Dagmar Krause. b) It is a complex and original piece with a virtouso piano part, but c) more melodic than his later works. d) It was the Nordlyd festival for contemporary music that invited Hodgkinson and co to Norway on that occasion, and I suggested them to the other local sections of ISCM in Norway. Bergen was the only taker, unfortunately.

a) I still recall the cellist; a rather large but good looking lady with heavy makeup, glasses and huge earrings wearing what amounted to a cross between a blouse and a bra! My pianist friend promptly uttered to me in a whisper; "I don't think any of the staff here have ever seen a cellist like her!"

b) He also told med that the pianist chosen for the task of performance in Bergen was firstly somewhat infamous for often being a bit inebriated during performance (apparently due to a certain stagefright and the consequent conviction that he'd usually play better after a few drinks) and secondly for sometimes not truly bothering about studying the charts all the way through on rehearsal. My buddy's own piano pedagogue from the academy was present during the performance himself and had indeed checked the charts thoroughly, also expressing a whiff of fright at whether everything would turn out fine - and eventually the whole ordeal went down with a smooth! That impossibly dense part sent facial expressions of disbelief across the hall, but boy - was it ever impressive and an experience simply just to watch.

c) Hodgkinson's next work, IIRC, was the far more abstractly challenging Pragma, which I suppose did a lot to forward his stamina for strictly contemporary tone but to my ears never reaches the highs of Stop Mortal or the fabulous pieces (with or without Dagmar) on Each In Our Own Thoughts. I guess it's the everlasting rock'n'roller in me calling for some tom-tom action after all, although that composition called "SHHH" for taped voices (all of them his own!) is fascinating and at times overwhelming. But yes, I agree that the detection of anything even imaginably resembling actual "melody" takes second seat here.

d) I can still remember when J.L. enthusiastically announced that the Stop Mortal performance had found its way onto the local programme and would actually happen; obviously this was partly as a result of your very own efforts! We were rightfully in awe at having Hodgkinson's music staged in Bergen at all.

I still cringe at the mandatory contrarians in the audience who predictably proceeded to declare afterwards that "[...] meh, I've heard that kinda stuff before - I much prefer Naked City!", not least considering how Hodgkinson's particular language of writing was greeted as idiosyncratic even by ordinary standards among "scholarly" composers of the academy back then. I asked my fave contrarian whether he'd perhaps been more welcoming if the exact same music had been executed on a dishwasher, and he was visibly upset by my insinuation that his listening ear was not an acumen of formal context or reading but of sensationalist tropes and shallow artistics.

The funniest moment was when Hodgkinson received a bundle of plastic-wrapped tulips in the aftermath of the applause, staring at it and grinning as if he'd never really seen a bouquet before. We all sat laughing at this scene, mostly in relief, but it was a joyous and sincere laugh in gratitude towards a genuine artist who would never chose an easy way. I mean, listen to that clarinet improv on Splutter where he honks the horn through his nostrils ("Nose-Jugging"); you simply don't commit to such a bizarre idea if not for the innocently childish game of wanting to try!

[Polypet]

One of my very favourite Cow albums. Lindsay's piece being truly masterful