HIMMEL
Himmel
at the MIMI Festival, Marseille
Richard
came to work for ReR (part time, like everybody here) in
1991. At the time he and Andy Saunders were Towering
Inferno who were shortly to release the
extraordinary Kaddish
– which was later reissued at Brian Eno’s recommendation
by Island Records. In the 14 years Richard worked with
us, there was a string of Towering Inferno concerts from Vienna to Moscow, Melbourbe to
Biudapest; and I joined them
for some at the Edinburgh Festival, in 1996 - and they were working, very slowly,
toward a second CD. One morning, Richard said he felt strange, strange enough to go to the local A&E, where they
looked him over and sent him home. Later that evening he
died, very suddenly, of a ruptured aorta. Unknown to
anyone, he’d inherited a congenital heart weakness. The
following year, Andy organized a concert dedicated to
Richard at the Arts Lab in Lewes - a long, immersive,
composition for massed fuzz organs (about 16 of them),
bass and drums – and somehow, in the following years, we
always managed to gather at least once do one or two
concerts. The repertoire grew and we became Himmel.
Of course such a large ensemble can’t travel far
so, in 2014, five of us took the compositions to the
MIMI festival in Marseilles, where we rehearsed for 3
days with a local musicians, a rewarding experience
reprieved in 2018 at the Nodutgang festival in northern
Norway. So, for now at least, there are two versions:
home and away.
ON
RECORD
Massed
Fuzz Organs on CC100, 2015
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