This Heat

This Heat

Health & Efficiency

Superior Viaduct

"For some fans, Health And Efficiency is This Heat's peak achievement – their most concentrated blast of visceral intensity and wayward experimentalism. Featuring two long pieces, the EP came out in September 1980. It was released on Piano, the imprint founded by David Cunningham of Flying Lizards, and distributed by Rough Trade, home of the burgeoning post-punk movement and fellow travelers like The Raincoats, Scritti Politti, Cabaret Voltaire and The Red Crayola."Lead track 'Health And Efficiency' combines fierce angular rock that fully lives up to Cunningham's belief that This Heat could become a post-punk King Crimson, with a multi-part babble of vocals, clattering percussive timbres and found sounds. In a large outdoor space, one of the group played with sounds 'a bit like children,’ drummer Charles Hayward told one interviewer. 'Milk bottles, melodicas, woodblocks, little shouts. And just outside across the wall was an infant and junior school. So we put a microphone by the wall and recorded the kids at playtime.'"Flipside 'Graphic/Varispeed' is more subdued and hypnotic: a wavering tonescape whose duration depends on whether you play it at 45 RPM or 33 1/3. This reissue reproduces the original release's striking cover image of a human figure painted in blue by Pete Cobb, along with the cryptic flipside of text in many different languages."The EP title Health And Efficiency sounds like it's mocking bureaucratic language or the jargon of self-optimization. Some reckon it's a sly nod to Health & Efficiency, the long-running British magazine about nudism and wholesome living...

This Heat

S/t

Superior Viaduct

“There’s an irony inherent in the term ‘postpunk.’ Many of the groups that define the genre (think Pere Ubu or Cabaret Voltaire) existed for several years before punk. But these outfits had little hope of finding an audience until punk stirred up an appetite for the extreme, while also spawning a new breed of independent labels that could support challenging music.“This Heat are a prime example. Formed in early 1976 by drummer Charles Hayward, guitarist Charles Bullen and ‘non-musician’ Gareth Williams, the group were initially unaware of what was brewing elsewhere in London, yet they were driven by similar impulses: to make noise expressive of the era’s turbulence. Instead of punk’s crude reduction of rock ’n’ roll, This Heat took their bearings from expansive inspirations: free jazz, Captain Beefheart, musique concrète, and reggae’s disorienting dub techniques.“Vital to their evolution was Cold Storage, a disused meat fridge in Brixton where the band rehearsed. Produced by This Heat with David Cunningham and Anthony Moore, their 1979 debut was collaged out of cassette tapes and recordings made during ultra-cheap graveyard shifts at The Workhouse. The jump-cuts in sound quality were deliberately designed to make the album more unsettled and jarring.“The first two principles of This Heat’s mission statement—‘All possible processes. All channels open.’—could have been co-signed by many pre-punk experimentalists. It’s the third part—‘24 hour alert.’—that makes This Heat archetypally post-punk, crystallizing the ‘totally-wired’ mood of paranoid vigilance they shared with peers like Scritti Politti and The Pop Group. Soft power—the mind-control of...