July 25, 1978
"In Milan, in Piazza del Duomo, a traffic officer approaches Frith to tell him that someone complained about the noise; thus interrupting the last concert of Henry Cow, during which they were joined by members of Stormy Six for the wind parts of some tracks like "On The Raft". Lindsay Cooper and Anne-Marie Roelofs continue to play around the square for another half hour."*
After the breakup of Henry Cow, Tim Hodgkinson, a founding member and significant composer within the band, begins a long-lasting collaboration with Scottish drummer Ken Hyder and starts with The Work a journey that includes a long hiatus and ends in '92 with the last album "See". Even those less attentive would not have missed that Henry Cow knew how to move with great dexterity between original and rich compositions and intricate improvisations; hence it seems that Hodgkinson seeks in his solo career to divide these two characteristics of Henry Cow into two distinct projects: on one side, the unconventional rock of The Work, and on the other, explorations in the field of spontaneous improvisation with Hyder. And it is precisely the latter that we are interested in discussing here.
Improvisation can simply be defined as the performance of music that cannot be written in a score, and although it may seem to belong to contemporary music today, it was actually the first form of music performed by humans. Certainly even great and small composers logically improvised without leaving anything of it to posterity; a comparison that in some respects mirrors the legacy of the written and oral tradition in various cultures worldwide. The studies conducted by Hodgkinson and Hyder on improvised music, already at its inception far from free-jazz schemes, primarily focus on shamanic music. The musician's relationship with their instrument (Hodgkinson is not tied to a specific instrument) concerns them little, even less the musician with themselves (like the self-feedback technique dear to Evan Parker) and not even the logic according to which improvisations would be centered on the constant challenge between unusual combinations of musicians (in fact, they are a long-term fixed duo).
"Our interest in shamanism comes from our continual efforts to understand the methods of magical acts in music. A component of the shaman's arsenal of techniques is the ability to bring the participants (the audience) into another mental state. They can succeed by focusing their energies and also elevating the audience through stratagems that induce concentration. Thus, the shaman will use disorientation and ambiguity."**
A fundamental stage in the couple's evolutionary process is a trip made in the early nineties to Siberian territory, in the southeastern tip of the Russian republic near the Chinese border, where, although not meeting shamans, they encountered the Siberian spirit, even in their audience, which showed a marked sensitivity toward the more spiritual aspects of music. Playing with local musicians instead allowed them to clarify the perceptions of the more peculiar aspects of Siberian music;
"...the natural organization of sound is an integral part of the musical aesthetic of shamanic cultures. When we played with some musicians from Yakutia, we discovered that their aesthetic approach allowed them to easily apply the irregularities of nature to their music. Conversely, it is an axiom of Western music to distinguish musical sound from noise, not only through the regularity of vibrations of musical notes but, more significantly, through the regularity of relations between musical notes."***
And again; "...time swings between the downbeat and the upbeat very freely. Accents are placed randomly. And when two or more musicians play together, the rhythms desynchronize with the natural irregularity of raindrops."**
K-Space is a project, believed to still be active, of the Hodgkinson, Hyder pair with the Siberian master originally from Tuva, Gendos Chamzyryn.
Infinity is their third album released in 2008. The uniqueness of Infinity is not revealed by what has been written thus far, which is nonetheless of fundamental importance to approach the listening of the album with a certain awareness of intent. The uniqueness of Infinity lies in the fact that it is not a normal audio CD but rather a CD-ROM readable only by a computer. In it, besides some videos and photos, there is a single track of about twenty minutes that sounds different every time it is played. It works through software that plays audio samples using algorithms, and therefore not randomly, modifying parameters such as volume, dynamics, and duration each time.
The author of this fantastic solution is called Andy Wilson, a name that the most tenacious fans of Faust should know. The result is absolutely curious, and despite its narrow objective, it shows an interesting and original path for the evolution of a certain type of musical solutions. In short, the ability to unite two universes as apparently distant as shamanism and digital technology has created a perfectly successful work where software works with musical material free from Western organizational rules, and music has an ally that allows it an unthought-of freedom of results, reproducing the uniqueness of the event as it happens live or the singularity of every shamanic session.
* Alessandro Achilli - Musiche n.18 Spring 1997;
** ken Hyder - Musiche n.10 Summer 1991 (In Search of the Spirit);
*** Tim Hodgkinson - Musiche n.18 Spring 1997 (Improvised Music and Siberian Shamanism; article translated from Musicworks n.66 Fall 1996);
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