Egg

500 units, deluxe remastered edition. Some records are made in the present tense. The Civil Surface was made in the past perfect - a band returning from its own ending to commit to tape the music it had never quite managed to record. By the time these sessions took place at Worthing's Saturn Studios in the summer of 1974, Egg had already been finished for two years. The trio - organist Dave Stewart, bassist and horn player Mont Campbell, drummer Clive Brooks - had cut two singular albums of organ-driven progressive music for Decca at the turn of the decade before dissolving in 1972, leaving a body of stage pieces unrecorded. It was Stewart who proposed the reunion, solely to capture those orphaned compositions, and the result, issued on the newly minted Caroline imprint, became one of the most quietly distinguished documents of the so-called Canterbury scene - the loose, English confederation of musicians who fused rock instrumentation with the rigour of modern composition and the looseness of jazz.

At its core the album is a study in three voices in conversation. Stewart's organ and piano lines move with a contrapuntal logic closer to chamber music than to rock, Campbell's bass answering rather than merely supporting, Brooks' drums pressed unusually forward in the mix - an insistence, by his own wish, that lends the trio pieces a bright, almost combative immediacy. Around this nucleus the music opens out. The wind quartets Campbell composed, scored for oboe, bassoon and clarinet, sit at angles to everything else, all classical poise and dry English wit, while extended pieces like Germ Patrol and Enneagram thread shifting meters and luminous harmony through long, narrative arcs. Nothing settles where you expect it to. The whole record carries the feeling of musicians delighting in difficulty for its own sake, yet never losing their lightness.

The guest list reads like a map of the scene's connective tissue. Steve Hillage, Stewart's former bandmate from the pre-Egg group Uriel, returns for the playful, near-pop lilt of Wring Out The Ground (Loosely Now). Lindsay Cooper of Henry Cow lends oboe and bassoon, anticipating the chamber-rock severity that band would soon perfect. And the Northettes - the vocal trio of Amanda Parsons, Ann Rosenthal and Barbara Gaskin, familiar from Hatfield and the North - surface briefly on Prelude, a thread that runs forward into National Health and the whole web of projects Stewart would go on to shape. That The Civil Surface was a farewell, recorded by a group that no longer existed, only deepens it. Free of any obligation to a career, the three played purely for the music, and gave the Canterbury idiom one of its finest send-offs.