Henry Cow Discussion

[Bazcrim]

image.jpgBelle Antique have just released a set of papersleeve editions of Henry Cow on SHM CD. Very nice they look and sound too!

[Scrotum Scissor]

Krizzt... Henry Cow on Belle Antique now?!

[miamiscot]

I really want to like this band. Where should I start?

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

[mogrooves]

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin?

Yes.

[Jay.Dee]

And I wonder: Had he scored it for something closer to a chamber ensemble - the Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, say - would it be perceived differently, perhaps as classical music?

A similar thing happened to Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", which had been considered as an aleatory sound experiment (recording "improvisation") until it got notated, re-arranged for electric guitar, classical string and wind instruments, piano and accordion, and performed live by Zeitkratzer Ensemble with its author in 2002:




Here is a Pitchfork review of another version of the now "composition", this time in all acoustic arrangement, that was recently released by Zeitkratzer:

To be a student of pop music history is to grapple with the story of Lou Reed’s 1975 double album Metal Machine Music. No record by a major artist on a major label is so puzzling and so contradictory—it’s simultaneously dismissed out of hand and written off as a joke and cited as both important and hugely influential. Where you fall on that spectrum has a lot to do with how receptive you are to the idea of noise music in general. While there was music before MMM that was just as harsh and intense (parts of John Cage’s “Cartridge Music” come to mind), Reed’s album was the first to re-imagine noise for the post-acid-rock era.

Pure noise had previously been a classical phenomena, the logical endpoint of the dissonance introduced early in the century by modern composers like Schoenberg and Webern (and in fact Reed had originally hoped MMM would come out on a classical label) combined with the tinkering of musique concrète. In the late 1960s, the idea that extreme distortion, static, and feedback could be a part of popular song changed the way people understood noise, turned it from exclusively the realm of “art music” into something that could be appreciated more viscerally—a pop intensifier.

So the context of Metal Machine Music is what made it so revolutionary (or repulsive): listeners found it in the racks next to the rock’n’roll records, a 2xLP “electronic instrumental composition” by the guy who the year before had charted with a funky number called “Sally Can’t Dance”. The idea that MMM was a joke or a contract-breaker has been convincingly discredited in the last couple of decades; it seems clear that, whatever Reed’s state of mind in the mid–1970s (and there’s a great deal of evidence that heavy drugs were doing strange things to it), he created the record and put it out there because he thought it sounded neat. “I honestly thought ‘Boy, people who like guitar feedback are gonna go crazy for this.’ Count me among them. If you like loud guitars, here we are,” he told Pitchfork in an interview in 2007.

I’m not a connoisseur of noise but I’ve heard my share, and Reed’s original Metal Machine Music strikes me as one of the more unique albums the genre has produced. You hear it and know what it is immediately. It’s heavy in the midrange and high frequencies, so it can be overpowering at even modest volume, but there is a tremendous amount of textural detail the more closely you listen. Even though it was apparently created with what seem now to be simple tools (guitars, a few pedals, amps) there always seems to be so much going on, and most of all the whole thing is constantly changing, a vibrating sculpture that looks different every time you see it.

A little over a decade ago, the experimental music ensemble Zeitkratzer began performing a live arrangement of Metal Machine Music. It was the sort of thing that sounded ridiculous: how could you possibly notate this stuff? Composer Ulrich Krieger, working with Zeitkratzer accordion player Luca Venitucci and with Reed’s blessing, found a way. The key to the live MMM project is that the scored version pays particular attention to what’s changing in the music, where our ears initially lock in to what stays the same.

Metal Machine Music throbs, with feedback in constant modulation, and that’s part of what makes it sound so alive. Zeitkratzer evoke that quality by having rapidly sawing violins mimmic the squall of the feedback, and with those central oscillations established, the other instruments interject with their drones and squawks and cries and blasts. They performed the composition live with Reed in 2000s, with the orchestrations augmented by his electric guitar, and recordings from those shows were released on CD and DVD in 2007. This new version of the recording is made from more recent Zeitkratzer shows, all acoustic and without Reed, and it’s the first orchestrated version to incorporate the original album’s four 16-minute pieces in full.

The first thing I can say is that Zeitkratzer’s arrangement enriches my appreciation of Metal Machine Music as a whole. The spirit of the music, as well as its general sense of shape structure, is rendered so well it gives you a deeper understanding of what the layers of sound in the original are doing, and how the interplay between the competing bits of noise adds up to something that exceeds the sum of its parts. There’s no question that hearing the music rendered on acoustic instruments (clarinet, trumpet, trombone, piano, bowed guitar, percussion, violin, violincello, doublebass) changes its essential character, and makes it seem more controlled and less dangerous. But the fact that it’s less of a pulse-quickener is offset by the sheer beauty of the sound, and sometimes that sound moves to surprising places. The held trombone drones, for example, lend the music a feeling of symphonic grandeur, and there’s a sense that the piece is in a constant state of collapsing and re-assembling itself.

Metal Machine Music in any form isn’t about dynamic range; the music never really gets noticeably quieter or louder; it changes, yes, but only within strict parameters. As such, it’s not “emotional” music in the way I usually think of the term. There is very little in the way of contrast and, since individual emotions acquire meaning by how they differ from other emotions, it’s never about evoking easily named states as “sad” or “frightened” or “angry.” That’s partly why Metal Machine Music works as a mediation piece, a wavelength of energy that some want to be carried along on and others want to avoid at all costs. Zeitkratzer’s version taps even more deeply into that meditative energy and provides another intriguing chapter in a story that, it’s clear now, will have no end.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/...machine-music/
http://www.zeitkratzer.de/

[chalkpie]

I really want to like this band. Where should I start?

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

I would say 'Leg End' and possibly side one of 'Unrest'. Have you ever heard Dagmar sing? If so, then you could tolerate 'In Praise'. But yeah, 'Leg End'

[zombywoof]

I really want to like this band. Where should I start?

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

Sounds alright to me!!

[Jay.Dee]

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

Alternatively go for "Concerts", but only in a version remastered by Bob Drake in 2006. I had not been a fan of this release until I heard the remaster, which was like a masterful restoration of renaissance frescoes bringing all the nuance and dynamics to light.

The double live boxset "The Road" is essential too, but it might be an overkill to start with it. Still it contains some of the finest moments ever recorded by the band, or any "classic period" prog/rock band in general. IMO.

[zombywoof]

Honestly, Concerts is the one Henry Cow album I don't like. First 20 minutes are great, but the rest I've never been able to get into. Bad, bad sound quality.

[NogbadTheBad]

Leg End is where to start

[chalkpie]

Honestly, Concerts is the one Henry Cow album I don't like. First 20 minutes are great, but the rest I've never been able to get into. Bad, bad sound quality.

Yeah, but the whole thing was scored out on staff paper!

[chalkpie]

Honestly, Concerts is the one Henry Cow album I don't like. First 20 minutes are great, but the rest I've never been able to get into. Bad, bad sound quality.

All kidding aside, I did disc two in its entirety today (the 2006 BD remaster), and once the ear gets accustomed to the sonics, you might hear past it. Or maybe try just two or three tracks at a time - I really think there is some amazing music there and knowing you - I think there is stuff you could latch onto and enjoy. Just think of a nipple and you're in.

[Mister Triscuits]

image.jpgBelle Antique have just released a set of papersleeve editions of Henry Cow on SHM CD. Very nice they look and sound too!

Are Legend and IPOL the remixes or the originals? If the latter, are they still vinyl sourced?

[zombywoof]

Just think of a nipple and you're in.

So, usual plan, then.

[Steve F.]

I really want to like this band. Where should I start?

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

Yes x 2

[Steve F.]

Honestly, Concerts is the one Henry Cow album I don't like. First 20 minutes are great, but the rest I've never been able to get into. Bad, bad sound quality.

First 20 minutes (side one, originally), is possibly my very favorite Cow. The rest I don't like and never listen to either.

[Steve F.]

Are Legend and IPOL the remixes or the originals? If the latter, are they still vinyl sourced?

Only Legend's original mix was vinyl sourced, NOT IPOL. As far as I ever heard.

[Mister Triscuits]

Only Legend's original mix was vinyl sourced, NOT IPOL. As far as I ever heard.

Thanks for the correction.

[zombywoof]

image.jpgBelle Antique have just released a set of papersleeve editions of Henry Cow on SHM CD. Very nice they look and sound too!

That's a sweet looking box!!

[Scrotum Scissor]

Sounds like Leg End is the favorite but is it the right place for a newbie to begin his Henry Cow ride?

Yupz, but even there one has to listen with precious attention to get the full effect of what they're actually doing and achieving. There's effectively more actual Music in a single piece like "Amygdala" than in whole outputs of many other 'progressive' bands. But the album as such contains it all; fairly melodic chamber-jazz/rock, through-composed ensemble works (which still somehow 'rock' to a certain extent), free-to-modal improvisations, tiny ditty ideas, and even a downright song to boot. It's a seemingly disparate yet very, very coherent and planned record.

[Phlakaton]

All kidding aside, I did disc two in its entirety today (the 2006 BD remaster), and once the ear gets accustomed to the sonics, you might hear past it. Or maybe try just two or three tracks at a time - I really think there is some amazing music there and knowing you - I think there is stuff you could latch onto and enjoy. Just think of a nipple and you're in.

Having been into bad sound for far too long... this doesnt sound bad at all. Everything is pretty clear and nothing is "bad" to me. The music blows away any sound issues you could have IMO.

[Scrotum Scissor]

The thing about Concerts - to me - is that some of it comes across as a bit redundant in the aftermath of the Mammoth boxsets. The Peel session on side 1 is astoundingly fabulous of course, but the live tracks appear uneven in places - and the opening to "Ruins" isn't even *there*...

[Bazcrim]

I love Concerts. Ok Oslo is a tad taxing in its entirety and good idea of Bob Drake to put lots of track markers on it, making it more "digestible" in smaller chunks. For me the live version of Ruins is incredible. Frith's solo is completely manic and intense and what is he doing to his guitar on Croningen? Yes, the sound quality is a bit sub par, but the performance more than make up for that. The first side, those BBC sessions is complete perfection!

[polmico]

and even a downright song to boot.

That namechecks Wordsworth and quotes from 1 Henry IV ("An if we live, we live to tread on kings" (V.ii.85) ).

[polmico]

Bad, bad sound quality.

Don't bother chasing down the Box, then.

The resurrection of this thread has me pulling stuff out of there. I've got Vol. 9: Late (two Cooper compositions! Hooray!) on now. Perfectly acceptable sound quality but definitely dodgier than Concerts.