brahma chop

compulsitance

alan baker

colin reading

richard miles

rick patten

dave bailes

peter pick: alto sax & vocals.

‘Compulsitance’ is a collection of improvisations recorded by the earliest incarnations of Brahma Chop. Vocals, where present, have been overdubbed. These recordings embody the history, method and substance of a highly creative band in its first unconstrained innocence. ‘Rafts’ was the first, the instrumental having been recorded in’ the stinky house’, which was owned by someone I never met, and was caked with indescribable filth. The text is part of a sequence of 186 pieces, other bits of which crop up in various places. We later moved to rehearse and record at All Saints, Lewes.

One appealing characteristic of these recordings is the sense they give of people working together, often in the face of great and self-created difficulties, to make something; a sort of coherence and order being constructed, however  tentatively and intermittently, from general chaos. This seems to me to be both the most human and the most truthful of aesthetic positions, and is a tribute to collective improvisation, something which was for Brahma Chop far more than a means of ‘generating material’.

There is nothing perfect on this disc.

That’s one good thing about it.

rights asserted, aural witness 2004

 link to    words

something more about brahma chop

catalogue