MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - This Heat by This Heat - 1979

 

This Heat, now where on earth do you start explaining them? Pretty much unknown by the wider public, then and now. Too idiosyncratic in their output to leave an inspirational legacy for future bands. You could say, in terms of marking out the basic musical territory - they make experimental, semi-improvised pieces of music. But that tells you very little about its quality, nor what effect it has upon you. Even I Tunes defines this album as Unclassifiable, which seems very apt. 

The album briefly opens with forty seven seconds of the bleeping tumble of Test Card 1, that slips seamlessly into the chaotic guitar rattles and aggressive banging of a flat toned drum rhythm on Horizontal Hold. This has it interludes of gentler introspection, almost pausing for thought, before exploding back into a dramatic widening out of its vistas via a raspy jangling guitar and the moaning undulations of a synth. Its as though you've been travelling underground in a sulphurous dimly lit subway and suddenly you emerge into the glaring light of day, and are swept out onto a manic freeway. It's quite a hair raising out of control musical motorway drive that this track is taking you on.

Having made the jump from Progressive Rock to Punk, by the latter years of the seventies, I was now willing to steer myself towards any music that seemed like an invitation to enter adventurous territory. Seeking out bands aiming for new unheard of places. This shift in my musical horizons and aesthetic expectations, was encouraged by being at Art College in Leeds when punk initially erupted onto the scene. My musical tastes were hence highly unlikely to become frozen in 1972 and never thaw out. In fact it was quite the opposite, I was constantly moving on to my next musical embrace, with a passionate enthusiasm.

I began seeking out the contrary, the strange and the resolutely AWOL. My musical tastes increasingly eclectic and broad ranging. For which I now feel truly grateful, because via this experience I enriched and broadened my world view beyond parochial or tradition bound ones. I saw music as liberating, and hence the world as being altogether a freer and happier place, when not held within rigidly held traditions or fixed xenophobic borders. I think this desire for a wilder exploratory music, free of perceived boundaries, somewhat mirrored my internal world. Where I was having a parallel exploration of awareness and acceptance of my own sexual orientation. A feeling of wanting to reciprocally liberate myself too from my many inhibitions. Though I was not yet ready to be fully publicly open about any of that.

I started encountering reviews of This Heat's live performances in the music press. I never saw them live, but they were represented as intense one off events, highly improvised, yet also very controlled sound-scaping, that unexpectedly could dramatically metamorphose into totally different astonishing vistas. Their approach to live performance appears similar to the early live work of Cluster, with its mixture of prerecorded and freely improvised electronic and traditional instrumentation. They were also within barely a few years of the peak quirky anarchic musical world of Faust. The avant guarde influence of German groups from the early seventies does seem present in This Heat. So they do have some antecedents, their idiosyncratic music did not come completely out of nowhere. 

Where I actually heard them first was in a session for John Peel's radio show. I was instantly taken by their atmospheric provocations. It's a music that can unexpectedly capture you, be edge of the seat stuff, vocals sometimes weirdly muffled, phased to a whisper, or in high falsetto, to ominous background groans. Crashing hissing synth sounds, clanging guitars, out of which a clicking rhythm emerges and a doomy drum beat. hearing one music sections metamorphosis into the next. This can make the whole experience of the album feel like this is one long piece of abstract sound collage. This approach is utilised only on this debut album, abandoned on subsequent ones. To my ears, whilst remaining adventurous, This Heat's subsequent work was never quite as captivating or as exhilarating an experience as this debut album is. 

The best example of this musical collage technique means pieces entitled Music Like Escaping Gas morph into Rainforest that then slips into The Fall of Saigon. I tried, and failed to find this musical progression on You Tube, so you'll just have to seamlessly re-form it in your imaginations. 

The actual Fall of Saigon happened four years previous to this albums release. 1979 was the year Apocalypse Now was in the cinemas. The apparent coincidence of this to the albums release, tells you all you need to know about the zeitgeist of this era, where a doomed dour fatalism hung over the world. One This Heat may subliminally be attempting to convey. The apocalyptic descent of one small countries civilisation into political anarchy. And the failure of a assertively minded US, Post War to effectively carry out the role of guardian and purveyor of Western Democracy, a pose it had self-adopted. Similar to Kurtz,in Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, the US travelled up a very murky moral river and go quietly mad in the dank and fever infested depths of a Vietnamese tropical jungle. This Heat on The Fall of Saigon captures the decadent decay and malignant hubris of when a righteously minded political conflict turns out terribly wrong.