769 - Henry Cow Box Set "7 : Later & Post-Virgin"

The group had, by this time, left Virgin Records, with Concerts being released by Caroline. Like Stockholm & Goteborg, disc seven (Later and Post-Virgin) again creates the semblance of what a 1977 performance might have sounded like. The inclusion of two tunes that would ultimately be associated with Art Bears—the plodding and melodically abstruse "Joan" and appropriately funereal "On Suicide," with words by Berthold Brecht put to music by Hans Eisler—show that, while Cow would ultimately dissolve over artistic differences, those differences weren't at all visible to the public. Like Soft Machine—whose best music was often driven to greater places by a tension resulting from four musicians with different musical goals—Henry Cow may well have been experiencing internal difficulties, but the music was still as compelling as ever, perhaps even more so.

The group returned to composed material from early albums, including a particularly vicious "Teenbeat 2," with some of Frith's most searing guitar playing of the box; an even more idiosyncratic "Brain Storm Over Barnsley"; and another kick at "Teenbeat 3," this time with Hodgkinson's saxophone at its most visceral. Greaves and Cutler's "Would You Prefer Us to Lie?" looks back to the group's Canterbury roots with a fuzz-drenched solo by Frith, while Cooper's episodic "Untitled Piece" challenges Hodgkinson and Frith in its complexity, foreshadowing some of the contemporary writing that would ultimately appear on her A View From The Bridge: Composed Works (Impetus, 1998). A defining characteristic of Henry Cow was its textural breadth, the result of most members being multi-instrumentalists. Frith, in addition to guitar, also played bass, violin, xylophone, piano and other percussion; Hodgkinson added clarinet and voice to his organ and alto saxophone; Cooper's jaw's harp, flute, piano and accordion augmented her more regular work on bassoon and oboe; and Cutler had already begun an early experimentation into electronics that would be more fully realized on later works including Solo: A Descent into the Maelstrom (ReR, 2001), in addition to considerable and distinctive piano work throughout the group's history.

With the group's use of tapes still a defining characteristic of its live improvisations, some of the free playing on Later and Post-Virgin is its most extreme. Repetition and the combination of piano and xylophone give a Steve Reich-like feel to the spontaneous "Chaumont 1," while Cooper and Hodgkinson join forces for "Chaumont 2," a duet that gradually finds its way to a piano-heavy take on Frith's "March" where Krause doubles the melody with Cooper's bassoon.

AAJ