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GOD interviewed in Vienna, 1994
Originally on Spex magazine, November 1994 by Mark Sikora. Photo by Manfred Mahs.
Olympus has been cleansed. The one true God has survived. "Was it loud?" Lars Brinkmann asks first. It was. Loud and massive. While on the first day of Vienna's Torture Garden festival, you had to search for the duos on stage amidst gaps of empty space, but with God, the stage is completely packed. God as an artists' union. God as a 12-member, towering swarm of locusts, pouring forth with luggage and instruments like a deluge over cozy hotel lobbies, unsuspecting taxi stands, and remote airports. God, the organization.
Martin: "If we were to do all the interviews together, we'd have to rent a large conference room. Each of us would then get a card and a pennant with our nationality."
At lunchtime, the multifaceted God trickles into the breakfast room. Saxophonists, bassists, guitarists, percussionists, electrically charged viola players. No sign yet of the guest drummers from Africa. Between cheese rolls and coffee, information flows freely about the networks and complexities of the newer noise cosmos, with its capital London, mothership God. Broadrick couldn't make it to Vienna. Terminal Cheesecake aren't making Painkiller dub anymore. What was that all about with the remixes of the Head of David EP? Are Zeni Geva playing at Popkomm? Good morning, Mr. Brötzmann. Where's the butter? Let's meet up in the early evening after the soundcheck.
When I arrive, they're still fine-tuning things. The acoustics are eating up the bass. Martin is bringing order to the chaos. God's rehearsals can last for hours; after all, the world wasn't created in a day. And intricate, apocalyptic jazz shouldn't be measured by the means of mortal dust motes anyway. A sentence later, Martin, bassist Cochrane, and I are sitting on a bench in Vienna’s Karlsplatz. Soon the sun will set and beer will be poured in plastic cups. God is in good spirits.
Martin: "Since we tore down the wall in our rehearsal space, rehearsals have been going much better." Cochrane: "There used to be an East God and a West God, since the fall of the wall, however, there have been some socio-economic problems. <laughter>"
But seriously. Martin's gentle eyes glow fiercely.
Martin: "The biggest problem with a band like God is that you're working with non-commercial music."
4 years ago, roughly before the recording of "Loco," Martin considered calling it quits with the band altogether. Even God can't live on air alone. But ultimately, Martin is an idealist, with the electric Miles Davis noise consensus in the background.
Martin: "For me, God is the realization of a dream. It's very personal music with a dream lineup. I like the idea that God resists the industry and commercialization. I suppose it's somewhat masochistic, but I like this struggle with God. Even now, with the new label that wants to support us, there's this struggle. They say it's impossible to bring us to America. They say it's impossible to put together a tour and negotiate reasonably good fees. You find yourself in a situation where you're fighting with your own label to survive."
Martin stares blankly at the asphalt.
Martin: "It seems telling to me that most decisions in the music business, and in life in general, are increasingly driven by pure profit calculations."
See also Virgin's decision to drop the band from their roster, and God's path to Pavement and Blumfeld:
Cochrane: "We knew that Big Cat were open to progress, they were interested in us and could easily come up with the necessary cash at the time. Other labels were also interested, but didn't want to risk any money. <slight shrug> People generally perceive God as a very chaotic, indefinable thing. They can't imagine what an album will ultimately sound like based on our live sound.”
The Anatomy of Addiction, the result of the latest wrestling match with God, is a particularly compelling plea for bringing forward Judgment Day to Saturday in eight days. Tighter, better, bassier, smoother. Nothing here is done without superlatives. Only the cover, with its tasteful silver bone bend, doesn't devastate as many optic nerves this time as Martin's other Armageddon images. Just recall the powerful sperm cell artwork of ICE's free-flowing banger last year, Under the Skin on Pathological Records. Incidentally, the album from the God camp with the most menacing twilight factor.
But back to the Viennese Götterdämmerung—no long hello, just a broadside of threatening, apocalyptic lava. Soft ceiling light hollows out God's cheeks. The saxophones swirl, the basses grind, the percussion clatters, everything dissolves into hypnotic swirls of sound and cheeky metaphors. Sawtooth pumps, pulsating currents. Please insert the appropriate Bosch imagery here. "Too much! Too far! Too strong!" Martin's screams waver through the reverberating speakers. Sometime after half an eternity or the 2nd song, reality has shifted a few centimeters. White fire foams from the amplifiers. There are no explanations, only feelings. A fine ringing lingers in the ears. "How did you like it?" Hodgkinson asks me afterward. Good. But a little too loud. "Too loud?!" he looks playfully thoughtful through his glasses: "I'll write a letter to your editorial staff."
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.
Konk Pack, Shams, K-Space
Henry Cow // Slapp Happy. Photo by Alain Dister
Living in the Heart of the Beast
Situation that rules your world (despite all you've said) I would strike against it but the rule displaces…
There I burn in my own lights fuelled with flags torn out Of books, and histories of marching together… United with heroes, we were the rage, the fire But I was given a different destiny - knotted in closer despair
Calling to heroes do you have to speak that way all the time ? Tales told by idiots in paperbacks; a play of forms To spite my fabulous need to fight and live We exchange words, coins, movements - paralysed in loops Of care that we hoped could knot a world still Sere words, toothless, ruined now, bulldozed into brimming pits -who has used them how? Grammar book that lies wasted : Conflux of voices rising to meet, and fall Empty, divided, other…
Clutching at sleeves the wordless man exposes his failure : Smiling, he hurls a wine glass, describing his sadness twisted Into mere form: shattered in a glass, he's changed… Now dare he seize the life before him and discompound it in Sulphurous confusion and give it to the air? He's rushing to find where there's a word of liquid syntax - signs let slip in a flash : "clothes of chaos are my rage !" He shrieks in tatters, hunting the eye of his own storm
We were born to serve you all our bloody lives Labouring tongues we give rise to soft lies : Disguised metaphors that keep us in a vast inverted stillness Twice edged with fear
Twilight signs decompose us
High in offices we stared into the turning wheel of cities Dense and ravelled close yet separate: planned to kill all encounter Intricate we saw your state at work its shapes Abstracted from all human intent. With our history's fire We shall harrow your signs Now is the time to begin to go forward - advance from despair The darkness of solitary men - who are chained in a market they Cannot control - in the name of a freedom that hangs like a pall On our cities. And their towers of silence we shall destroy
Now is the time to begin to determine directions, refuse to admit The existence of destiny's rule. We shall seize from all heroes and Merchants our labour, our lives, and our practice of history : this Our choice, defines the truth of all that we do
Seize on the words that oppose us with alien force; they're enslaved By the power of capital's kings who reduce them to coinage and Hollow exchange in the struggle to hold us, they're bitterly Outlasting… Time to sweep them down from power - deeds renew words
Dare to take sides in the fight for freedom that is common cause Let us all be as strong and as resolute. We're in the midst of A universe turning in turmoil; of classes and armies of thought Making war - their contradictions clash and echo through time
leg end unrest
in praise of learning western culture
Catherine JAUNIAUX & Tim HODGKINSON
"Fluvial"
(LP. Woof rcds. 1983) [FR/GB]
