Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

Very few bands willingly identify with the term. Partly that’s because of the above; post-rock still struggles to communicate and identify itself with conviction and clarity. But if we’re to take the term at face value for a moment, it’s also a strange and bold proclamation to make. Post-rock. Is this really the successor to rock music? A lot of post-rock’s key players still see themselves as rock bands.

The two bands in question are Talk Talk from London, England and Slint from Louisville, USA. Both released their most significant records around the turn of the 90s. Both are frequently heralded as either the fathers of post-rock or the two most primary influences, and both employed very different approaches in twisting the framework within which they were founded. But most crucially, each foreshadowed the post-rock movement that would spark up in the UK and US in the wake of their demise. In

The answer was process. The concepts that the band worked with – increased dynamic range, longer song durations, the abolishment of a central melodic focal point, perceiving the studio as a creative tool – all worked to undermine the hallmark qualities of New Romantic music: brevity, direct melodic connection, consistently high levels of energy.

On both Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, the energy of the music was generated through the friction between two contradictory perceptions of time and space. On one level was improvisation, which captured a musician in a sincere, circumstantial dialogue with real space and real time (fortified by Hollis’ insistence of using actual room acoustics over post-applied reverb). Next, there was the studio as a device for displacement and collage; a tool for re-arranging time and space to create new compositional shapes, cutting up recordings and replanting them elsewhere.

setup. I came to understand that the Talk Talk setup – which I thought was a group of people making incredibly emotional music in great harmony – was completely the opposite. It was a battlefield of fractured ideas and relationships, and anything other than calm and pleasant.”

Given the democratic dispersal of creative roles, the subsuming of personal identity, the influence of dub and their meticulous arrangement of space, .O.rang probably had more to do with the imminent incarnation of post-rock than Talk Talk did. Yet their name is seldom mentioned in any post-rock discussion. Perhaps the music was too free-flowing and all-encompassing. Rock was just one tiny piece of their gigantic, pan-genre mosaic.

– there was a collective intention to sink as close to silence as possible without actually getting there, like cheating death for the sheer thrill of it.

modest. For a record that invited the quiet accumulation of intrigue rather than squealing for instant gratification, perhaps it was appropriate that a majority of people had to seek out Spiderland rather than vice versa.

me. “You know – the really soft, quiet and fragile parts that were contrasted with very loud and heavy and really saturated, distorted guitars. With Engine Kid, we were admittedly just using that formula to start with. It was very derivative of Slint and Bastro, and there’s another band from Louisville called Crane that was a huge influence on us as well. They were all guys that grew up in the hardcore scene but then started doing something different with their music: exploring the dynamics of it.”

“We were talking about how influential Slint were, and he named a couple of bands that he considered to be influenced by Slint. He called Engine Kid the ‘Melvins of Slint’, he called Crane the ‘Minor Threat of Slint’ and Rodan the ‘Rites of Spring of Slint’. And there were varying degrees of how derivative some of these bands were, you know? Rodan were another band we were a fan of, and they were taking that whole aesthetic that Slint had started and really doing something really special with

When talking about the codification of post-rock, how key was this misattribution of Bark Psychosis’ Hex as the first album to be labelled as such? For those looking to explain the development of post-rock as a genre – from the Simon Reynolds definition all the way through to Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky – Hex was a logical starting point. Many of the future hallmarks were present.

Several bands and genres were considered key contributors to the development of what he called “spatially-orientated post-rock”. The aforementioned post-punk was one. Another was The Velvet Underground, who smothered their rock songs in the drone music pioneered by US composers like La Monte Young and Terry Riley.

Perhaps the most prevalent influence across the entire history of post-rock (not just within the confines of Reynolds’ definition) was that of krautrock: a term used to describe a cluster of German groups that emerged in the late 1960s, driven to re-invent rock music in a bid to avoid both the tarred brush of German tradition and the emergent spectre of Anglo-American culture. Can centred on drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who pulled

According to Reynolds, it wasn’t uncommon for musicians to emerge from the prog scene and start to pursue a post-rock aesthetic.

Writer David Stubbs also probes space for a suitable poetic image. “My take on this was that the expansive likes of Sonic Youth, Big Black, The Butthole Surfers, and in the UK the likes of AR Kane and (Ireland’s) My Bloody Valentine represented a supernova, or that violent burst of energy you get with a candle just before it goes out,” he says. “To me, they represent the final, flaming moments in the rock narrative. Once that’s done, all that’s left for guitar music is post-rock, which ensued in their wake. For me, there’s a crucial stillness about post-rock – it’s no longer ‘pulsating’. It’s taken to the air, the ambient ether.”

It’s so much more difficult to describe a music that ignores the concepts on which we found our reality and, by extension, the way we comprehend it and articulate it. More problematically still, post-rock is a reference to a temporary state. It denotes the point of abandoning rock, while still making reference to rock as the place of origin. I think of it as the little dash between the two words ‘post’ and ‘rock’, not quite one and yet not quite the other, abstract and levitating, hovering between rock and the beyond as both fastener and separator. Because of this, an artist could only be fleetingly linked with this concept of post-rock. The music was post-rock for as long as it glanced backward at rock. Is it any surprise that the term post-rock would eventually shift to somewhere more stable where it could develop as a tangible musical idea, instead of remaining as a mysterious label for a transitional phase?

Reynolds tells me that post-rock was coined to describe the “open-ended space of possibility”, where artists were spilling beyond the boundaries of rock in many different directions. There was an excitement around this 90s post-rock because it did not erect barricades around how instruments should be utilised. There were no checkboxes for post-rock to tick. When Reynolds referred to using guitar, bass and drums for “non-rock purposes”, he wasn’t being deliberately vague. Post-rock defined itself by what it wasn’t, and there were no other restrictions over what it could be. Was it possible to coherently channel this idea into the context of a 200-word album review? Even then, was it possible for listeners and other writers to understand post-rock enough to re-apply to term correctly?

Yet the record was so much more than just a patchwork of inspirations and listening preferences; while the band were paying tribute to the annals of underground music, Bark Psychosis’ overall flavour remained unique and distinct.

I mention to Joshi that, in spite of their crucial presence in shaping the post-rock to come, there hasn’t been another band quite like Bark Psychosis. “There really hasn’t. They influenced so many bands but they just didn’t sell. So many people have Bark Psychosis in their all-time favourite albums. You just think, ‘is it just because people haven’t heard it and don’t know it?’” It’s the Spiderland situation all over again. The impact of Hex was a slow burn, pushing out toward more and more listeners through word-of-mouth. And despite the widespread belief that it was one of the very first post-rock records, it seems that the full impact of Hex has yet to really click. For how long will it be a secret to which only a small percentage of listeners are truly savvy?

Would these bands have continued to push their music upon a bewildered public were it not for people like Joshi to reaffirm the value of their output and take care of them when the money ran dry?

Speaking of which, it’s worth taking a moment to note that so many of these early post-rock bands – Bark Psychosis, Slint, Disco Inferno, Engine Kid – all seemed to thrive on the erratic, exploratory energy of puberty. They were predominantly teenagers at the time, and the music captures this reaction between the onset of social anxiety, and the fiery, newfound desire to project opinions or vent volatile, emotional responses. The explosion is inevitable, as a simmering introspective pressure is blocked by the emergent self-awareness of adulthood. And then there’s the budding sense of identity, during which bands snap out of hero emulation – following in the footsteps of post-hardcore and post-punk – and start to seek their own place within music, pulling in all other facets of themselves to do so. Is it any surprise that teenagers, sizzlingly self-conscious and technologically savvy, were largely responsible for these sparks of change?

Ian knew Disco Inferno were good but he would never tell anyone. He must have believed in himself to go up on stage and put himself out there. I mean, people did take notice, but it was more in the later years when bands like MGMT would say, ‘oh yeah, we’re totally influenced by Disco Inferno’. You can be a band like The Velvet Underground that never sells records at the time and goes on to influence so many people. I think Disco Inferno were very much one of those bands.”

Pram were, and still are, an interesting case. Where so many post-rock groups founded themselves on the philosophy of post-punk and post-hardcore, Pram’s roots were fuzzier: a thin patch of intersection between jazz, krautrock, pop, 80s horror soundtracks and the playful post-punk of The Raincoats and The Slits. Personally, I also heard whiffs of old Wurlitzer carousel waltzes and VHS tapes of kids’ birthday parties in the 50s. Nothing was played straight. There isn’t a single track in the Pram discography that doesn’t carry a glint of the perverse, be it a drumbeat played with the flinching staccato of a mechanical puppet, the repetitive woops of electronic toys or the babbling of instruments lost to the folds of time (such as the omnichord: a keyless electro-harp played via a touch-sensitive strip, made by motorbike manufacturer Suzuki). The closest Pram had to a contemporary was probably fellow Birmingham band Broadcast, whose lo-fi electronics burped out of dangerously exposed wiring, while the late Trish Keenan sent her smoky jazz orations billowing over the top.

I ask Hampson how Beggars Banquet reacted to his declaration that he was abandoning rock for good. “I’ve always said this, and I’ll say it ‘til the day I die. Beggars were so incredibly brave in losing one of their biggest bands, which was Loop. They stuck by me through thick and thin. I can’t ever complain about my relationship with them. There came a time where they had to be sensible, and say ‘listen – we can’t carry on doing this.’ But there was a lot of love there, and for that, I will eternally be grateful.”

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, this is a huge problem with post-rock. It makes sense to talk about post-rock as Loop moves into Main – the guitar is fading away, immaterialising. Post-rock is the process by which the whole is teased apart, splintering under those forces pushing irresistibly outward in numerous directions at once. After this point, though, the term becomes redundant. The more one fixates on Main’s point of origin, the less one really listens to Hampson’s sculptural handling of frequencies as its own distinct premise. On “XV” from 1996’s Firmament III, the noises resembled imagery as far flung as a motorised circular saw running out of juice, the looped lo-fi capture of helicopter blades, sunlight bleeding in bright amber across the entire horizon line at dawn, the oppressive beat of stifling desert heat. Volume bloomed and reduced with the elegance of spiralling sea creatures, gracefully and unconsciously controlled, forever deconstructing headspaces and erecting new ones. The guitar had no place here. Post-rock was no longer a relevant term.

Destroying the pre-sets is a wonderful analogy. So many of these artists discovered their creative method through rigorous self-critique, questioning the existing etiquette that embedded itself, quietly, in the relationship between the player and their instrument. Their music founded itself on questions such as: “Why is it this way? Does it have to be this way?” The process of Main was like dismantling a sports car, examining the individual components that had made Loop such a thrill ride: reducing the ecstasy of riffs, distortion and choruses to their core form as compounds of frequency and rhythm, demolishing assumption and rituals in the process. Hampson’s appreciation for sound comes through so clearly in conversation, and when the topic turns to the undervaluing of sound – whether it’s people unconditionally touting the superiority of vinyl over digital, or the “fucking shitheads” that torrent remastered Loop records as low-quality mp3s – Hampson’s emotions are ablaze. It’s invigorating to hear someone care so much about the sculpture and appreciation of sound.

I want to ask Hampson what happened in the mid-90s to cause this particular wave of post-rock to fizzle out. Disco Inferno broke up because of mounting commercial pressures and insufficient record sales. Pram and Main both had to part ways with labels because they weren’t shifting enough units. Hampson broaches the topic before I do. “What was basically the death knell of independent music was all of this Sub Pop shit,” he says, making no effort to conceal his vitriol. “There were all of these bar bands doing this sub-Black Sabbath bluesy shit. That exploded across the world and took away any kind of experimental nature. Suddenly rock was rock again. No one’s ever going to be able to tell me that Nirvana and Soundgarden were experimental. Sorry, but no. Again, they had their place but it’s another fucking scene. Record companies were falling over themselves to sign anything that came two yards from the Seattle border. It was just boring. I really hope there were people going ‘I don’t like this – I want to buy a Disco Inferno record.’”

Yet the records most pertinent to post-rock were the two that followed Popular Mechanics: 1999’s Low Birth Weight and 2000’s Artists’ Rifles, both of which were released on Joshi’s new Rocket Girl label. Johnson mentions that these are the only two albums for which post-rock feels like a remotely appropriate tag, for the way that they “used the rock armoury of drums, bass and guitars but eschewed conventional song structure”, as he puts it. Not to mention the fact that Low Birth Weight is Johnson’s personal favourite Piano Magic record. “If you played someone that record now and didn’t tell them when it was made, I think it’d be interesting to see them hazard a guess at when it came out. It’s stood the test of time, because it’s sonically a lot more interesting than a lot of our other records. I’m not entirely embarrassed by the words either.”

Bands such as Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis still carried the residual echoes of British bands like Cocteau Twins, Joy Division and The Jesus and Mary Chain, all obfuscating echoes and semi-consciousness. The roots of US post-rock often went back – via the Slint axis – into the tougher, more resilient roots of hardcore, maintaining a relationship with impact and muscle. The majority undoubtedly leant more toward ‘rock’ than ‘post’.

The band started utilising keyboards in their live shows, and while that hardly seems like a maverick move today, it raised a few eyebrows at the time. “It was really weird. Bands didn’t usually do that. It was always just bass, drums and guitar … Nirvana, Pearl Jam, grunge. That new wave stuff from the 80s was really out of fashion when were starting out. The complaints mostly came from disgruntled soundmen, not from audience members. We had these Casio’s blasting through amps, which just sounded insane.” Trans Am had flipped post-rock on its head: instead of using rock instruments for non-rock purposes, these guys were using non-rock instruments for rock purposes.

As our interview ends and Manley heads inside to soundcheck, I mention that Trans Am are a particularly interesting story in the narrative of post-rock. They’re funny and fearless, unashamedly catchy and overt. Their songs are bright blocks of automation and machine-varnished rock, providing a blunt and monosyllabic response to post-rock’s tendency toward obfuscation, ambiguity and instrumental complexity. Out of all the bands associated with the label ‘post-rock’, I tell him, Trans Am are often particularly difficult for me to fit into the picture. “Well, Simon Reynolds called us that,” Manley replies. “You can’t take that away from us!”

Central to Millions Now Living… was “Djed”, the album’s 21-minute opening track. It was an astonishing piece of compositional craft. Undoubtedly there was an element of fluke to it. The amalgamation of styles and reference points was too perfect to have been consciously planned. It pulled together almost everything Simon Reynolds was talking about, without becoming a faceless patchwork of the post-rock zeitgeist. I ask Pajo about it, and I mention how the track seemed to be a thorough exploration of listener headspace. Instruments were constantly disappearing, drifting and morphing, sucked into black holes and spurted out at different speeds. “I think we were just entertaining ourselves,” he offers modestly. If you haven’t heard this track already, perhaps now would make a good time to put it on. We can travel through it together in real time.

“The thing we always struggle with – and I mean that in the broadest sense – is avoiding the situation where we’re mining the same territory we have before,” McEntire says. “That’s the thing about not having a singer. You’re constantly trying to create interest through all of these other means, whereas you can very easily write a three-chord song if the singer and lyrics are good. We don’t have that luxury.”

Primarily, it was Tortoise and Bark Psychosis that would bridge the ‘post-rock’ coined by Simon Reynolds and ‘post-rock’ the musical genre. People couldn’t get their head around post-rock as a limitless plain of possibility. Besides, if music reviewers were charged with capturing the abstraction of sound in a box of comprehensible descriptors and reference points, what use was a term that alluded to the vast unknown beyond rock’s borders? Quickly enough, the plain started to shrink; the common musical traits of post-rock were identified and a genre started to materialise, loading the term with a set of static and unambiguous connotations. To be ruthlessly dilutive, post-rock would initially come to denote the collision between Tortoise and Bark Psychosis: a largely instrumental music with vast dynamic and spatial breadth, flecked with the democratic virtuosity of jazz. Funnily enough, the visceral energy of rock was also an essential component. Perhaps because audiences could comprehend the meaning of ‘rock’ more readily than ‘post’, the former was a much stronger presence than the latter. Post-rock was starting to crank into reverse, returning to the very genre from which it was supposed to escape.

“Because this music can put a human being in a trance-like state and deprive them of the sneaking feeling of existing. Because music is bigger than words and wider than pictures. If someone said that Mogwai are the stars, I would not object. If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this. The punishment for these solemn words can be hard. Can blood boil like this at the sound of a noisy tape that I’ve heard? I know one thing: on Saturday, the skies will crumble together with a huge bang to fit into the tape.”

The fact is that Mogwai were, and still are, epic. Three bands they namedropped back in the day were My Bloody Valentine, Slint and The God Machine, and the band’s early work landed somewhere between the three. Their sound had a real affinity with the loud / quiet model put forward by Slint (in fact, the working title of “Like Herod” was simply “Slint”), but looked to stretch it further and make the dynamic contrast more severe. What better way than to intensify the climaxes through the white noise guitars of MBV, which burst forward so violently that they bent out of tune? And then there was the influence of The God Machine, whose desperate, melodic melodrama – heavy and tense, like Children of God-era Swans – gifted Mogwai their gentle cinematic hue. Another analogy would be Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation dragged out on a lonely hike through the countryside, trudging triumphantly to the tops of hills, all strobe-lit distortion and feral punk energy, before tumbling gently down the other side, slackened and spent.

When I watched the band play at The Dome in Brighton in 2014, they were still using a re-hashed version of this track as a set climax. About halfway through, the group collectively lowered in volume over the course of about three minutes. I could hear the nasal breathing of the person next to me. Someone coughed at the back of the room. It was like watching a sundown in real-time, with tremolo guitars dipping like fading beams of light, and drumsticks kissing toms just faintly enough to make them wobble. Then all of a sudden – BAM! The group erupted in a maelstrom of distortion and pulsating lights, and I realised that they’d spent the entire night at 80% volume just to give “Mogwai Fear Satan” adequate headroom to burst into. It was absolutely euphoric.

On “R U Still in 2 It?”, Aidan Moffat of Arab Strap delivered a heartbroken spoken verse about trying to salvage a waning relationship. Guitars and pianos dripped like tears all around him, tipping between two simple chords as though trapped in indecision, while a half-absent drum beat held the track together as though postponing the emotional breakdown.

Two years later, 2003’s Happy Songs for Happy People yielded one of Mogwai’s most famous songs: a 4-minute, verse-chorus number under the name “Hunted by a Freak”. There was a slight strangeness to how the chord progression slunk round every five or 10 bars, sometimes extending to hang open for an extra four beats, waiting for a belated chorus to crash in. Otherwise it was a straight-up pop song, swooping and mysterious in a “We’re Walking in the Air” kind of way, flecked with the eerie melodic flavour of a band like Radiohead. It was catchy and instantly replayable. Yet Mogwai was a multi-headed beast, and this more accessible face co-existed alongside the band’s hardest track since the Young Team days, “Ratts of the Capitol”: a classic ascension to a summit of wah guitar and criss-crossing riffs, reducing toward silence with the same persevering patience that took it to the top.

Mr Beast was a Mogwai the listener could sing along to.

Could I confidently identify the points at which Mogwai cease to be post-rock and become just rock instead? Absolutely not.

A crucial transition in post-rock was starting to take place. When Simon Reynolds stopped reaffirming the definition of post-rock and bringing new bands into the fold, the term started to drift away from his jurisdiction, becoming the property of music journalism as a whole. What was previously an academic observation of a sudden happening within British and American music started to pull in a new wave of bands, many of whom took the loud / quiet model of Slint and splayed it across the landscapes of minimalist classical, shoegaze and drone. What did the ‘post’ in ‘post-rock’ mean by this point? Sometimes I think that ‘post’ could have denoted the sheer girth of the music’s stereo spread, as if it were transcending some strict dimensional limits imposed upon the soundscape of rock. In fact, the semantics of the term were becoming less important. Just as no post-rock listener relates the word “Mogwai” back to the strange furry creature in Spielberg’s Gremlins anymore, post-rock itself was starting to gut its conceptual origins. Essentially, the energy flow was reversed: the music was now loading post-rock with meaning, rather than post-rock imposing academic significance upon the music. We enter a stage where post-rock truly becomes a vessel upon the tides of music history, shunted forward by its re-application by journalists and listeners (seldom the bands themselves), gathering new connotations and offloading those that grow stale and redundant.

Ilavsky points out that Constellation didn’t start out with the intention of depicting this upsurge in instrumental rock at the time. The label certainly didn’t see itself as affiliated with post-rock. In fact, his objections to adopting post-rock as a descriptor are assertive and acutely deliberated. I’ve heard one of his reasons cited by many others: that ‘post-rock’ is a lazy journalistic substitute for a thorough and meaningful engagement with the music itself. In the late 90s, reviews of Constellation releases consisted of unnecessary prefaces about the label’s place within post-rock, with little room spared to talk about the record in question (which, quite frequently, would have little to do with post-rock whatsoever). However, Ilavsky had another concern over the term’s political utility. “This process of trying to find the space between genres – and importantly for us, in a non-academic and non-virtuosic context – was absolutely what we understood to be the promise of punk rock; not as a genre, but as a spirit and as an approach. So what’s at stake in displacing the term ‘punk’ with the term ‘post-’? This was pre-9/11, during the alter-globalisation movement and an engaged political perspective on globalisation and its discontents. That was the air we were breathing in Montreal, and we were all fellow travellers with much more committed full-time activists. We saw what we were doing, economically and culturally, as being very much in common cause with those sorts ...

If there’s one band that manages to achieve both simultaneously – looking inward and outward at the same time, escapist and engaged in our external reality – it’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Arguably, the band’s sense of sonic scale is unrivalled by any other band termed post-rock. The listener is stranded within sound, swept up in a tide of guitars, percussion, strings, voices and landscapes. Bobbing upon the waves are vibrant and urgent images of the world we inhabit, devoid of a particular political agenda but too massive to ignore. Like photographers, Godspeed present startling sensations as a means to instigate conversation, juddering through the listener’s body and inflaming the desire to respond. They are an energy, a life force, a fuel – an alarm call to awaken the masses to times of crisis, galvanising the notion that nothing is immune to the congregative voice of revolution.

Perhaps for the first time, post-rock could incorporate the influence of classical music without feeling like a mere miniature, pocket-sized counterpart. Godspeed were big enough to hold every drop of hope and grandeur that streamed through Górecki’s work.

“BBF3” centred on an audio interview with a man by the name of Blaise Bailey Finnegan III, who recited an ‘original’ poem that turned out to be a re-hash of the lyrics to Iron Maiden’s “Virus” (written by then-vocalist Blaze Bayley). It’s almost certainly the same guy that appeared on “Providence” from the CD release of F# A# ∞, as both samples have the same motor running in the left of the stereo field. Musically, it went from glistening (gentle pinch harmonics, vibraphones, cymbal wash) to thoroughly ablaze. Guitars rose up through the middle like a flame, sending the surrounding strings into a state of alarm. As with “Moya”, Godspeed were powerless to bring harmonious resolution, even at their most grandiose. The earth and its problems were always far bigger.

At this point, the band’s sound (or at least, one facet of it) was starting to further the rock / chamber music crossover championed by the likes of Rachel’s, using the rich dialect of classical music to fortify the melodies of the guitars. Yet if Rachel’s were like the small chamber orchestra on board the Titanic – swinging gently back and forth, prophetically solemn – then Godspeed were the Titanic, gigantic yet fallible, still dwindled by the mass of water. We return to this idea of ‘humbleness’, as employed by Do Say Make Think’s Charles Spearin to describe Tortoise. Godspeed were a powerhouse, yet never too big to be self-aware.

In a sense, we return to Stuart Braithwaite’s thoughts on communicating ‘epicness’. Everything essential to the music – scale, emotional connection – could be deduced by simply listening to it. Why should anyone willingly have their creations twisted and misshapen to fit the boxes of a journalist’s questions? And when the premise of Godspeed was a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts, what good could it do to charge one voice with representing the views of the entire group, or to shower magazines with band photographs that reduce the singular sonic unit to a collection of human individuals? The band didn’t seem averse to interviews in principle. The problem was that they regularly involved breaking the planet Godspeed into smaller chunks of rock, reducing the sound to a palette of adjectives and influences. Instead, I get the impression that the band wanted to engage in a conversation about how planet Godspeed embarked on its orbit, and the political and societal context in which the group existed. Not the music itself, but about making music – music as a channel for sentiments of despair and optimism, music as a counteractive device that could, just maybe, stimulate a mass reflection on the status quo. I ask Ilavsky about this. “I think that if journalists were in the habit of asking more interesting questions, they’d get more interesting answers. Musicians whose perspective is ‘I don’t mix art and politics’ will say so. But I think plenty of musicians would welcome th...

I heard a single guitar enter my headphones like a dripping tap, tiny and inconsequential. Then a couple of humble trumpets in whispered harmony. Then another guitar and some mallet percussion, then a wave of rising strings. The music was snowballing, gathering mass. Gradually it went from a single tumbling flake to a rumbling white sphere, powered uphill by the sudden introduction of military drums and trumpets that babbled joyously over the three chord melody, rising, always rising, optimistic and unstoppable. It remains one of my favourite album introductions of all time.

There was a fantastic quote from a review by Simon Reynolds in Artbyte, in which he said that their music enacts the “optimism of the will versus pessimism of the intellect” – again, this irrepressible passion for change in the face of monstrous adversity, dancing furiously within the monolithic concrete fortress of the status quo. The artwork for the album came with a graphic representation of the entire album as rectangular segments – each representing a different movement – arranged into a horizontal strip, each sized and slanted according to the undulations of dynamic intensity.