Gentle Fire

Huge Tip! Further Explorations follows on from Gentle Fire’s 3CD retrospective box set Explorations, released in 2020. These new archive recordings came to light in the process of unearthing the tapes for the 4CD box set by their fellow Stockhausen collaborators Intermodulation. The pieces used on this CD are taken from two sessions recorded for German radio in 1973 and 74, one for Sender Freies Berlin and the other for Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. These beautifully recorded and preserved pieces are finally rescued from the depths.

Gentle Fire were a quintessentially British group and these recordings have about them a similar atmosphere to much of the music on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records series and would not have been out of place on this predominantly Anglophilic label. Slow, eccentric and experimental are terms that come to mind. Of the five pieces they play on this CD three are devised by members of the group and one piece each by the Berlin composer Erhard Grosskopf (a text based piece with instruments, live electronics and tape) and Edges (a different version to the original 1974 LP by Gentle Fire), by the legendary Christian Wolff, the last remaining member of the New York avant garde school that included Cage and Feldman. 79 mins of music by a group that failed to get much attention in the history books. I can’t think why. Comes in a 6 panel card cover with 8 page booklet.