This Heat
title:: This Heat
label:: Recommended Records
format:: CD
The debut album from This Heat gets the reissue treatment on This Is label after years of various versions being out of print. Recorded between 1976 and 1978 by Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams, and released on David Cunningham's Piano label in 1979, This Heat's debut album is a classic album that was years in the making and years ahead of its time.
This Heat combine an experimental tape collage sound with a more rocking sound influenced by krautrock, and other worldly sounds for a perfect hybrid of sound and experimental rock.
This album feels like a suite of music meant to be heard in one sitting even though it was recorded over a number of years, and has a variety of textures and sounds.
The album is bookended by two tracks called Testcard that sound like something you would use to test your stereo speakers. The rest of the album is filled with
- the harsh electronics meets guitar noise of Horizontal Hold (with its squalid guitars and fuzzed out bass over top a start and stop rhythm which melds into a guitar freakout you might hear on some lost German record from 1970)
- the drone buzz of Not Waving (which could definitely influenced bands form New Zealand and could be from the soundtrack to Ganja & Hess, the blaxploitation vampire movie directed by Bill Gunn)
- the cling and clang rhythms of Water, the perculating rhythms and plucked guitars of Twilight Furniture
- the industrial rhythms of 24 Track Loop (which bring to mind artists like Asmus Tietchens on the Sky label)
- the high pitched electronics of Diet Of Worms
- the moody, hovering quivering breath of Music Like Escaping Gas
- the rock band falling down the stairs sound of Rainforest
- and the chanting clang of The Fall Of Saigon.
---Patrick
- Testcard
- Horizontal Hold
- Not Waving
- Water
- Twilight Furniture
- 24 Track Loop
- Diet Of Worms
- Music Like Escaping Gas
- Rainforest
- The Fall Of Saigon
- Testcard
