Amazing to think that this CD was released twenty years ago (Faulnis is actually from 1984, Oben Im Eck from 1986): it sounds like it could be from last year.
I thought I remembered hearing Holger Hiller on John Peel's show while we were living in Cosin Court, but Holger Hiller's Peel Session wasn't broadcast until March 1987, so I would have been living in Conduit Road by then.
I'd absorbed the whole William Burroughs cut-up philosophy from the NME, who seemed to feature Burroughs every week in the mid-1980s (nothing much wrong with that), and Holger Hiller seemed to fit right in with that. These were the very early days of sampling when the people doing it seemed like real pioneers — Steinski and maybe Mantronix — intent on making something genuinely new, exciting and subversive out of cut-up old stuff.
I probably haven't listened to this for at least ten years. I'm shocked by how good it is. Lucy came in and asked, "Was ist das?" She liked it too. There are masses of artists featured in The Wire who sound a bit like this, but Holger Hiller beat them all to it. In places he sounds a bit like The Residents and John Zorn (possibly just because of the common Japanese influence).
MusicBrainz entry for this album |
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