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.