from Peter Hammill - Loops and Reels (1983)

With the cosmos closed for renovations during the 1980's, Hammill turned to his bedroom experiments, with variable success, until one day, bereft of any specific skills to play it, he picked up a gifted kora, and decided to go tribal on "A Ritual Mask", which, for all its primitive crudeness (nobody gets to be a kora master on the fly, nor was that the intent obviously; it doesn't even sound like one), is not only quite the shamanistic must, but a precocious self-reflexive damnation of the predatory appropriation of artifacts from their cultural bedrocks (someone pre-aced his practical post-colonial studies dissertation).

It is also another example of how his adaptive strategies to face different musical times and modes of production could render such surprising and unique results every so often (would anyone have seen something like this coming from the most visionary proghead of his time? Hardly). In fact, considering he has been somewhat grasping at straws ever since his 2004 masterwork Incoherence (his recent association with dull proggers Isildur's Bane was quite the giveaway), and since, by that time, that was not something I was expecting he could still deliver either (his 90's production standards, while considered, could on occasion be a bit of a snooze), maybe a return to this abandoned aesthetic path could be just the thing for him to wake from his relative artistic slumber (though he has certainly more than earned it). Someone offer the man a mbira, is all I'm saying. 

Other than that, the entangled circularity of "The Moebius Loop" also reflects Hammill's willingness and capacity to draw his subject matters literally from the musical materials he was working with, in this case, tape loops, taken as a sort of operative metaphor for that flipping uncertainty we can get when pondering (too little, too late) on whether we might be on the right or wrong track at a given point in our lives, suggesting that the static certainties that can entrap us over changing circumstances might be more the result of cognitive laziness or emotional stuntedness than moral clarity. 

That conceptual and methodological focus is, in fact, what gives some coherence to this release, which is highlighted by Hammill's short but illuminating liner notes. However, these also end up exposing how the rest of this material (not taking into account the barely tweaked version of "In Slow Time", which is great, but should be heard in the context of the masterpiece with which he opened the 80's, A Black Box) wasn't worked by itself to the same self-sufficient clarity as those two pieces, somehow becoming dependent on that meta-discourse to shine some light on it, making it like pieces of modern art relying on statements of intent to guide our interpretation and persuade us to appreciate them. Maybe that can get the dilettante in me to find them a bit more interesting, but that's also the very thing that can run further against them ever being able to spark an unprompted emotion, and for all the tangents he took (for some reason he himself deemed this "abnormal work"), that is surely not the Hammill way.

from Locanda delle Fate - Forse le lucciole non si amano più (1977)

The first track from this album, "A volte un istante di quiete" (thankfully, an instrumental), stands at the edge of classic Italian prog, looking at the neo-prog that's to come (particularly in the duller midsection), but still holds its own. Unfortunately, by the second track they go for the jump, and the results are as glossy as that cover. 

Ironically, the title of the record ("maybe fireflies don't love each other anymore") always made me wonder if it could be a reference to Pasolini's famous article that expounded on the disappearance of fireflies as a symptom of the destructive modernization of Italian society (more specifically, of the socionature of its traditional ways of life); but if it were, it would seem to end up suggesting how classic prog had become an ever more escapist genre, resolving all social, political, even civilizational contradictions facing contemporary societies through a retreat into fantasy land (to where, clearly, multiple and renewed forms of denial continue to push us, expecting everything will simply work out, with no idea how); a land where the coming extinction of Lampyridae was more likely to be poetically framed as a newfound inclination for asexuality (maybe they just wanted to work on their inner insect selves) than as one more neglectful side-effect of catastrophically short-sighted anthropocentric planetary engineering. 

As such, conceivable good intentions aside, with all its professionalism at the service of a nostalgic aesthetic (which can in itself feel redolent of a conflicting mix of artistic naivete and commercial savviness), this, like so many "prog" records of its time, showed that, for those who took an actually progressive view of musical creation (and maybe of its dialectical entanglement with social organization itself, while we're at it), punk or no punk, it was definitely time for a change.

(One of the very few fireflies I ever saw in the woods near me; always isolated females, advertising their loneliness like a neon sign. Who could look at that horny little face and say that she's to blame for not hooking up?)

from Helium - The Magic City (1997)

While more idiosyncratic than their debut, Helium's second and final album, promising to usher us into an indie fantasy world, also came short of amazing me with its sleight of hands. Nonetheless, having still managed, in the midst of it, to materialize out of thin air some thoroughly unexpected 8 minutes of Mary Timony just happily rummaging through her bag of guitar tricks, I can't very well say I've closed the book on her either; even if I doubt that, like most people trying to have a successful career in music, she ever dared giving in wholly to her innermost geeky musical inclinations, which is what "The Revolution of Hearts Pts. I & II" made me wish she felt she could.