Not that I ever actually do get all High Fidelity & make lists of my desert-island-discs, but if I were to do so, I’d have to have Health & Efficiency on it. A single by This Heat from 1980, it’s a giddy hymn to the sheer tao joy of the lockgroove. Towards the end, working itself into a lathery Gordian knot, it fades off into what sounds like an early rehearsal take, a skeletal stumble wherein you can hear them pick up on the rhythm of the piece as if freshly discovering it, a neat back-glancing reversal. Extending the metaphor leads you un-naturally back to their debut LP from two years previously, an album that at times really does sound like a reverse-echo, a snakily cyclic thing, future transmissions received early & from across storms.

It’s not an album I could listen to every day, has its desolate moments, but sometimes it just hits the spot (it’s particularly good for those times in your life when everything’s gone a bit Nic Roeg), & there’s something about it that leads me to dig it out fairly regularly. Not one of those albums you forget all about for years at a time, more the sort that waits until you’re busy thinking about something else & bothers away at you until you can get home to play it; something enigmatic but insistent. It’s all peripheral flashes & uncertain textures; like an incomplete pointillist painting, there’s hints & clues but no concrete scenario being depicted. As one of the songtitles has it, Music Like Escaping Gas, emissions rather than performances. (& yeah, I wonder if that title’s not a sneaky pisstake, too).

The sleeve notes the provenance of the tracks as “mono/stereo cassette 2 and 24 track recordings Feb 1976-Sept 1978”, & I’ve sometimes wandered how much (if any) influence the Faust Tapes had on this LP; it’s not got the levity & anarchy of Faust, but the jumpcuts & fillips, the severity of the collage are close in spirit. (Also, if you’re partial to a bit of Tortoise, then the opening ten mins or so of this LP should sound comfortingly familiar.) 

The first thing you notice is that the run-in groove isn’t empty, but filled with a distant signal, distressed morse or something, as if the record’s been going on without you. Fall of Saigon, the final track, coalesces from a sly folk-dirge into a guitar solo that sounds like a varispeeded recording of Hendrix burning his axe, ultimately whirling up & back into that very same distress signal, with a lockgroove just to reinforce the point. Within this recursive cycle, the album drops away into a brittle, sparse shadowplay. It’s not without a mordant humour (on Horizontal Hold there’s a quasi-Corman vibe of rumbling Hammondy tones, like Greg Lake on Mogadon, or someone playing Nantucket Sleighride v‑e-r‑y slowly; & Twilight Furniture utilises a percussive landscape I can only describe as “domestic tribal”, & which always reminds me of nursery-school music lessons), but there are moments of almost Residents-ial eeriness in there: when the first vocal cuts in sharply on Not Waving, it’s genuinely startling, the track itself truly haunting, an ague in choirboy-Lydon backed by dim tocsins; & the aforementioned …Gas is a study in claustrophobia, all rotor hum & gremlin chatter, sounding like it was recorded inside a diver’s helmet as he surfaces.

Elsewhere, there’s a distinctly forlorn atmosphere to things: Rainforest belies its title, sounds like the tattoo of distant conflagration, fading away as if to suggest something monstrous passing by; Water is an inner-ear tonepoem of queasy tintinnabula; & the splendidly-named Diet of Worms seems to consist only of the hum & spit of drizzle on pylons.

Everyone’s heard those urban myths about people picking up radio stations with the fillings in their teeth; this album’s what they might have had buzzing in their head. In fact, the notion of “private radio” is probably a good metaphor for the LP as a whole (that is, the sort of radio as in “Dance, dance, dance to the radio” — subsonix & reverberations, troubling interior stations). Like someone scanning the wavebands & finding a channel of premonitions rather than news, there’s a queer sense of loop & meander about the album. If you’re the sort who enjoys being lost in a maze, you’ll probably find this to your taste (…but I recommend having Health & Efficiency to hand to get you back out again).

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(Currently available as This Heat aka Blue & Yellow on These Records)