Henry Cow

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

With original innersleeve.

Henry Cow's second album, Unrest (1974), is the most radical thing the band recorded as a quartet. Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves and Chris Cutler (with Lindsay Cooper now in place of departed Geoff Leigh on bassoon and oboe) entered The Manor in February 1974 with a partial set of compositions and emerged a month later with a record that abandons nearly all conventional song-form. Side A is composed; side B is largely improvised. The whole is harsher, denser and more confrontational than Leg End.

"Bittern Storm Over Ulm" opens with a stop-start composition built around Frith's electric violin. "Half Asleep, Half Awake" is twenty-one minutes of pure group improvisation taking up the entire B-side, the band exploring instrumental textures (Frith's prepared guitar, Hodgkinson's clarinet, Cooper's bassoon) with a deliberation that anticipates AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. "Ruins" is the album's centerpiece: an eleven-minute Cutler-composed piece whose interlocking rhythmic patterns the band would identify decades later as one of their most ambitious compositions. The record cover, again Ray Smith's knitted sock, this time in blue.

The pressing on offer is the ReR Megacorp reissue catalogued ReR VHC2, a 180-gram limited-edition vinyl with Cutler's oversight. Not the 1974 Virgin first pressing (V 2011), but the audiophile reissue overseen by the band itself. Unrest is the album where Henry Cow moved decisively into uncategorisable territory, and one of the founding records of European avant-rock.