Hz by Main (1995)

PHIL FREEMAN

Main arose out of the ashes of the late ’80s British psychedelic band Loop — well, that’s not really accurate, given the decidedly un-phoenix-like nature of their music. Main was the next thing to come from guitarists Robert Hampson and Scott Dowson, and was in many ways also the “next thing” in electric guitar music. They released a lot of material quickly: between 1991 and 1994 we got the Hydra and Calm EPs (later paired on a single CD), the Dry Stone Feed EP, the first two EPs in the Firmament series (which ultimately ran to four volumes), the full-length CD Motion Pool, and Ligature, a collection of remixes. It was clear that their ideas were evolving; there was rhythm at first, and sometimes vocals, too, but before long drums and voice were abandoned in favor of a kind of pulsing ambient structure built of sampled guitar sounds, field recordings, drones and dubby production techniques, creating dreamlike sonic collages that almost demanded to be heard on headphones.

Then, in 1995, they undertook an experiment. Robert Hampson told me in a long-ago email interview, “It was an idea to evoke something quickly… I take a very long time to work on things. But at some point, I wanted to explore much more of an improvised way of working, stripping it back in places to the bare essentials and as always, using space as a tool. But this time, space became its own instrument. It actually helped the compositional process. Instead of always trying to evoke or create space, we let space work itself into the process with a more natural angle. So, with this in mind, I asked Beggars Banquet if we could release a series of EPs that were recorded and mixed within a very specific time frame. All had to be finished and be released within one month. So for six months, we released an EP a month.”

 

 

Those EPs — Corona, Terminus, Maser, Haloform, Kaon, and Neper — were given the collective title Hz (“hertz”). They arrived in simple paper sleeves, with close-up photos of rock faces as cover art. Each was about 20 minutes long, adding up to two hours of music in all. In the UK and Europe, the full set of EPs was collected in a box. In the US, they were released as a two-CD set in a double digipak, which Hampson said “kind of spoilt the point, but that side of things was beyond our control.”

 

 

 

 

Indeed, Hz was never meant to be a two-CD set. As Hampson explains, “it was not conceived as an album at all. It was an umbrella project of what would become a collection of recordings. Only linked by the fact they had a very specific working structure and timeframe in the process of being made. Most of that was made by simply recording direct to two-track and then edited afterwards.” Because of that methodology and the speed of creation, the tracks have an immediacy that sets them apart from all other Main music. The first EP, Corona, even has a saxophonist — Joe Gardiner of O Yuki Conjugate — or so the credits claim. (It also has vocals, though they’re indecipherable.)

Main was never a band. It was a vehicle for Robert Hampson to explore a fascination with sound (the Corona EP is dedicated to Alan Splet, sound designer on David Lynch’s film Eraserhead), and their catalog contains some of the most beautifully psychedelic — in the mind-altering/perception-warping sense — music you’ll ever hear. And for some of us, the six Hz EPs were a peak of low-key, hypnotic grandeur they never achieved again.

 

 

Phil Freeman is the co-founder of arts website/record label Burning Ambulance and the author of New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz; Running The Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis; Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century; and In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor. He lives in Montana.
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