Search - Tim Hodgkinson :: Sang

Hodgkinson's Path

undeletablearchive | Hove, East Sussex United Kingdom | 06/07/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Tim Hodgkinson, now 50, may well have chosen a more varied path through rock and its offshoots than any other artist. He made an enormous compositional contribution to late Henry Cow, who owe him the complex, baroque style pioneered on In Praise Of Learning's `Living In The Heart Of The Beast'. Western Culture's density and colour would also have been impossible without him. Bloody-minded and self-defining to the last, Hodgkinson chucked all that in the 80s, making punky, disaffected, down records with The Work and The Momes, which were shocking in their simplicity and anger. Each In His Own Thoughts, his greatest record, is a return to Cow territory, this time fully in control with both gloves off. Now, Sang finds him in a new land between rock, improv and contemporary composition. Like all his work, it's hard meat. It has a forbidding avant-garde surface that takes time to penetrate. `The Road To Erzin' is like Takemitsu; atonality atoned for with gorgeous colours. `Gushe' has high-frequency clusters reminiscent of Ligeti, with bad-tempered clarinet at the front. Sang makes considerable demands, but right now it sounds fully-formed and durable. Like all Hogkinson's work it has stellar intelligence allied with absolute emotional honesty. Following such a path, he will never be `known'. But who cares. I, for one, am grateful for such single-minded obstinacy."