The Art Bears Box by The Art Bears
by Ian Simmons
[ cdreviews ]
The Art Bears are an awful lot less well known than they ought to be. Emerging from the collapse of Henry Cow (their first album, Hopes and fears started out as a Cow record), they had the misfortune to arrive at the time when punk drove Virgin Records' Tubular bells gravy train off the rails and forced the label to take a more commercial stance, dropping almost all their mid-Seventies avant-garde roster. You could get Henry Cow albums in WH Smiths; pretty much the only way you could get the Art Bears' was by mail order.
Consisting of Chris Cutler, Fred Frith and Dagmar Krause, the Art Bears were both of their time and completely out of tune with it. While on the one hand they paralleled punk and post-punk in the adoption of the short song form and politically focused content, they also sounded like a weird hybrid of Berthold Brecht and the Incredible String Band and framed their politics in songs based on French medieval cathedral quatrefoils and Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the millennium. Now if this suggests the worst excesses of Seventies pretension to you, you could be forgiven, given the Hobbit-fuelled abuses of culture and mythology that were heaped upon us during that decade, but you would also be wrong. The texts are literate, restrained, evocative and intelligent, and the music shaped to fit them perfectly, with every song a well-crafted gem. This is all the more surprising when you find out the speed with which they were put together. For their final album, The world as it is today, writing started on a Friday, and by Monday the songs were complete and being recorded, something which was also completed in a stunningly short time. Also fairly extraordinary is the sense of deep Englishness that pervades these discs, particularly their second, Winter songs, despite the singer being German and the Medieval carvings inspiring it being French. There are also overtones of magic and alchemy which had begun to surface on Hopes and fears, an album inspired by labyrinths and mazes, and which reach their peak here.
By the time 1981's The world as it is today arrived, Britain was beginning to wake up to the true horror of Thatcherism, and the rising grimness of the 80s is colouring the music. The rural idyll is gone, the sleeve depicts a bleak landscape with tanks, gibbets and mushroom clouds, and the songs have titles like 'The Song of Investment Capital Overseas' and are distinctly dark and bereft. They manage a focused intensity rarely heard on record, and Krause manages to bring forth one of the truly great screams in recorded history. After hearing this, Diamanda Galas' career is just a footnote.
This beautifully packaged box contains remastered CDs of all three albums in their original artwork, all of which is sumptuous and an integral part of the whole of each album, plus extensive notes on the origins of the music and the working methods that produced it, and three further CDs - a double, Art Bears revisited, featuring remixes of Art Bears songs, and a live CD of one of their few gigs, plus a few limited edition or unreleased tracks that did not make it to any of the albums. While the live album is interesting, it does not add a significant amount to the perception of the Art Bears and I found the remix album more than a little disappointing. Given that each part of the songs was recorded separately, and that any effects were applied in post-production, remixers had unusually clean source material to work with, but I can't say that they have made the most of it. The results are certainly entertaining, but the impression is of trivial fooling about with the material rather than any dramatic reinvention. This is partly because the original material is so strong and unique that it is quite difficult to make something else of it. Once the piece is even slightly recognisable, its presence tends to dominate the remix, whatever is done. But it is also the choice of remixers... In selecting them, Chris Cutler has stayed close to home at ReR, so you get the usual suspects such as The Residents and Otomo Yoshihide. What would have been really interesting would have been to see what might have happened if tracks had been farmed out to Boards of Canada, Kid 606, DJ Olive, Aphex Twin or cLOUDEAD, radically different people with no automatic respect for the source. The surprises that would have resulted would have perhaps been more in keeping with the original Art Bears ethos. Mind you, it's not that the remixes are dreadful - far from it. They're just not essential. This box is still a vital purchase, but for the three original albums and all the documentation that goes with them. The live and remix discs are nice but minor additions to the stunning canon of work that the Art Bears produced between '78 and '81. If you prefer you music to be informed by Fulcanelli rather than Nelly Furtado, this is one for you.
