#avant-prog

Tracklist:

Lemmings (Including Cog) • Man-Erg • A Plague Of Lighthouse-Keepers

The Work, founded in 1980 by Tim Hodgkinson and Bill Gilonis, with Mick Hobbs and Rick Wilson- one of my fav band, ever

Slow Crimes (1982)

Live in Japan (1982)

Rubber Cage (1989)

Dry and angular guitars, tense vocals, subterranean politics, almost punk energy, but with fractured mathematics

Tim Hodgkinson is one of the secret pillars of European experimental music.

Structural composer — he thinks of music as political architecture.

Fierce improviser — clarinet, sax, electronics, guitar.

Researcher — trips to Siberia, study of ritual music, shamanism, sound ethnology.

He is not just an “ex-Henry Cow”: he is an entire philosophical system, a walking laboratory of sound, politics and anthropology.

Born on May 1, 1949, in Salisbury, Hodgkinson studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge, but left academia to found Henry Cow with Fred Frith in 1968.

Since then, he has become one of the most consistent and radical figures in European experimentalism.

Hodgkinson is the author of pieces such as Living in the Heart of the Beast, a political manifesto in the form of music.

Independence, anti-commercial, explicit politics, intellectual rigor

Bill Gilonis

Guitarist, producer, sound engineer, central figure in the British experimental scene.

Co-founder of The Work, but also a constant presence in

The Lowest Note

Officer!

The Work's Japanese Tours

Gilonis is one of those names that doesn't appear in the books, but without him half the scene wouldn't exist.

MICK HOBBS — the shy poet of experimental post-punk

An essential figure in the London scene of the 80s.

Member of The Work, but better known as the founder of Officer!, one of the most beautiful and strange projects of chamber post-punk. This Heat / Charles Hayward

Family Fodder

The Work

The Lowest Note

Half Japanese (occasional collaborations)

Rick Wilson — drummer of The Work; dry precision, punk energy.

Lately I’ve been reading quite a bit about mid-to-late twentieth century New York, and as someone who is neither from the city nor ever visited, the spectacular glamour and grotesque violence of it all seems not just disjointed but ridiculous. How does such horror and romance exist simultaneously, even in concordance, even in harmony? 

Naked City, in my ears, puts New York’s contradictions and apparent incoherence in musical form. The sensational wealth and camp drama, the flourishing art and vibrant internationalism, the brutal, brutal violence and chasms of inequality – it’s all here in a collagic portrait of precisely composed, revelatorily vivid scenes. 

Japanese Freaks / Weird Japan