This Heat
Health And Efficiency

Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams are evil geniuses, sinister and joyfully harmful.

The only brave and skilled ones capable of distorting, falsifying, and altering Henry Cow, the Residents, and other imaginative minds of the seventies are them. Loop, overdub, darkly tinted chamber lied, android voice, and horrifying Tibetan mantras. This is what their first self-titled work offers us.

We're in 1980. It’s a period of: "the more, the merrier." There's everything.

Neurosis and fear of life fused with calm and intellectual foresight. The classic unique reality, unmatched, incomparable.

Before arriving at the witty "Deceit" of 1981, in the same year we come across the EP "Health And Efficiency." It's composed of 2 songs, the title track and "Graphic / Varispeed." We are drawn by an initial suspicion that we might encounter an uplifting and reassuring square structure. The guitar, with those style elements too seminal for noise and beyond, outlines the developments of the aseptic voice to then twist and fragment. It borders on an industrial, noisy mantra. Without knowing it, those grey geometric fits of the third minute will anticipate something that will be called "Math Rock," but this is just to frame such overflowing expertise.

Soon after, the brain is submerged into the electronic games of "Graphic / Varispeed." Cage is manipulated and the Dadaist conception in a single track. They had already shocked us with all this with "Not Waving" and "Twilight Furniture," but the surrealism of this static drone manages to explain an infinite chameleonic puzzle.

It’s like observing a Rothko painting. Everything so still and immovably in motion.