News from Babel

condition (record/cover): VG (surface noise throughout) / EX

One-sided disc on clear vinyl with screened flip side in PVC sleeve with insert.

A single-sided, clear-vinyl 7" issued by Rē Records in 1984, originally distributed only to subscribers of News from Babel's debut LP Sirens & Silences / Work Resumed On The Tower (Rē 6116). "Contraries" is the one News from Babel piece not composed by Lindsay Cooper (the band's principal composer): the music is by Zeena Parkins (harp, accordion), with Chris Cutler's text and Dagmar Krause's lead vocal. Cooper plays bassoon, piano, horns and marimba; Cutler adds marimba. Bill Gilonis of The Work engineers.

The piece itself is three and a half minutes of tightly arranged Babel-style song. Krause's voice carries the melody across a chamber-pop texture: harp arpeggios, low bassoon, marimba pulse. Cutler's text reads as a Blake-derived dialectic. The B-side carries only an image silk-screened onto blank vinyl, in keeping with Rē Records' practice of treating singles as small art-objects rather than commercial commodities. The catalog "number" itself is not a number but an inked drawing of a small ladder. Some subscription copies arrived with a hand-numbered personalised insert.

The original vintage Rē Records pressing in its silk-screened sleeve. A scarce object originally limited to subscribers (the record was later included in the 1985 16 Dance Party Smash Hits! box set commemorating Rē and Recommended's seventh anniversary, but the standalone original pressing remains the most desirable). One of the most distinctive small-run artefacts in the post-Henry Cow constellation and the only commercially issued piece of music with Parkins as sole composer in the Babel discography.