Robert Hampson - Loop - Main - Music for isolation

A touch of isolation

1985, as far as rock is concerned, is marked by the fallout of an illusion, as Simon Reynolds puts it, in different terminology, in "Post Punk 1978-1984". The illusion that independent culture could compete on equal terms with the mainstream, and even supplant it. A vision fuelled by an ideological baggage warped by impulses that were obviously antagonistic but also fatally utopian, yet envisioned with enthusiasm and conviction, for a period that wasn't even that short, by musicians and journalists of the post-'77 movement. John Peel's line "I don't even like the records I like" sounded like the epitaph for that season, pregnant with ferment but also with attempts - often successful - at a 360-degree reflection on everything pertaining to musical discourse, from genre criticism to the mechanics of the business.

It's in the years of punk and new wave that we witness the explosion of self-production and independent labels, originally conceived as tools of absolute creative freedom (…), and it's in those years that criticism renews its languages and its ways of interacting with the audience.

When Reynolds blames post-1985 music journalism for the semantic shift towards excessive compartmentalisation, he's actually unwittingly (?) acknowledging a situation brought about by the aftermath of any great cultural revolution. Drift on one side, creative tributaries and forward pushes on the other, with various and not always identifiable border zones in between.

It happened in the United States, where hardcore would on one hand (partly) spawn the post-rock of Slint, Tortoise and the like, and on the other inspire hundreds of bands that slavishly copied their codes. And it obviously happened in England too. By the mid-Eighties, post-punk had certainly exhausted its trajectory of innovation, but while rock was seeing a resurgence of the Sixties and Seventies, with the Byrds-like flourishes of the Smiths, the C-86 bands and the Sarah Records roster, and while late-goth bands started aping Killing Joke and Joy Division, underground something was starting - and in some ways continuing - to stir that could be directly linked to that golden period.

In the UK, under the radar, a cluster of intellectuals, bands and musicians began absorbing the legacy of new wave, inaugurating, on different but comparable levels, new seasons of sound. Robert Hampson's story begins in this span of time, precisely in 1986 with Loop, and goes hand in hand with one of those new sonic seasons that took its cue from post-punk: isolationism.

To talk about isolationism means bringing into play a jumble of heterogeneous music, but it also means setting up a meta-reflection on the discourse of music criticism, and on its myth-making drifts. On the not-always-intelligible mechanisms underlying the observation of trends and orientations, but also the launching of scenes and, not infrequently, of papier-mâché phenomena, of storms in a teacup.

The term "isolationism" was used by Kevin Martin (and practically at the same time by Simon Reynolds and Chris Bohn) in the September '93 issue of Wire Magazine, to describe a genre, or perhaps better, an approach that placed traits such as alienation and solipsism at the centre of that musical discourse.

The genre best suited to capturing this new climate was certainly ambient, although the now-historic compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism, released by Virgin with liner notes by Kevin Martin, actually made room for multiform languages and, above all, rather different acts. From Labradford to Aphex Twin, via Techno Animal, Disco Inferno, Paul Schütze, Jim O'Rourke, and Main, obviously. And it's precisely this broad range of situations that shows how isolationism, more than a genre, was a way of feeling, a way of relating to sound, one that defied any unequivocal placement in time.

On the other hand, weren't certain works by Stockhausen, Cage or Xenakis already isolationist? Undoubtedly. As was, just as surely, the ambient music of Brian Eno and part of kraut and German cosmic music. And then there's the improvisations of Amm – who were in fact included on the compilation – the experimental post-punk of Dome, the no wave of early Swans, and certain offshoots of the English and American post-industrial school of the late 70s/early-to-mid 80s: acts like Illusion Of Safety, Coil, Nurse With Wound, Nocturnal Emissions, Hafler Trio, :zoviet*france: (also on the compilation). And rightfully among the forebears were the Broken Flag and Come Org universes, put in direct dialogue with isolationism proper by Matthew Bower, an extraordinary connecting link between the post-industrial scene and the renewed tendencies of post-metal, noise and English psychedelia of the second half of the 80s. Skullflower and Total (yes, them too, on the compilation) were undoubtedly isolationist ante litteram. And what about Talk Talk? Well, they certainly had something to do with it, and got their due recognition when .O.Rang took part in Ambient 4: Isolationism.

By the late Nineties, the isolationist approach had run its course, descending into excess that found its most deplorable expression in an overblown output of ambient, post-rock and more or less minimal electronica, at times glacial, at times merely consoling. At the same time, it served as a backdrop for the music of talented figures like Richard Youngs and Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra), and, if only glancingly, certain expressions of alternative Bristol, especially Flying Saucer Attack, Amp and early Crescent. Obviously the lineage isn't direct, and it's possible those acts simply recontextualized the same influences on their own terms; what is certain, though, is that those sounds, caught between trance and German cosmic music, still carried the solipsistic aftertaste of that era. And then, fine examples of post-isolationism can be found in some offshoots of the Norwegian scene around Rune Grammofon and the N-Collective, Supersilent above all. Not to mention the countless labels focused on minimal electronica that sprang up in the second half of the 90s.

Setting aside any revisionist claims, the reflection on isolationism nonetheless had the merit of giving criticism itself a tool – a common denominator – for decoding a plurality of sounds that were hard to pin down, and above all for capturing a one-off moment in English music.

It was within this context that Hampson moved, one of the most fervent intellectual minds of that generation. Let's take the release of Vectors, credited to Robert Hampson, and the reissue of the entire Loop catalogue, as an opportunity to sketch a profile of him and to underline the importance of a figure perhaps "too forgotten."

Noise in "negative feedback"

The first time I listened to Loop, I had a strong rejection, even though their coordinates were clear to me. Listening to them was an experience bordering on suffering. They forced the brain to stop and start again, over and over. That's it: Loop's music (no name was ever more fitting) was as draining as an orgasm interrupted right at the point of arrival, then suddenly cut off. And then stimulated all over again.

The sound of Hampson and co. seemed like a negative feedback system, a closed loop in which the states of the system were directly shaped by its own effects. The constant rhythmic resets created recursive structures in which the perception of sound wasn't simply a function of its linear unfolding, but instead emerged from the gradual accumulation of signs reiterated along the way, whether they were noises or melodies. The structural elements – stratification and obsessive repetition – found their roots, metabolized and recast in a hypnotic, hallucinatory language, in the noise of the Velvet Underground, Neu!, the Stooges, and Suicide, and in the rhythmic irregularities of Can.

The minimal bass lines, Teutonic in their robotic precision and with a vaguely dark flavour, gave the sound a linear backbone, while the guitar reared up acidic, in punishing feedback and bold psychedelic digressions. Hampson also proved to be a decent songwriter, sketching out melodies and catchy choruses whenever needed. So it could feel disorienting at times to hear pop constructions drowning in an abyss of wild noise. Still, the sound was heavy, at times claustrophobic, and seemed like the ideal meeting point between the various currents and the different acts who, in those years in Britain, were grappling with psychedelic music. It bordered, for instance, on the contaminated metal of Godflesh (with whom Hampson collaborated), and on the dark, towering trance of Terminal Cheesecake and other Wiiija Records bands. It also edged close to the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine, but also to the kraut-flavoured ragas of Spacemen 3, and the noise-pop of Jesus And Mary Chain.

Formed in the mid-80s on the initiative of Robert Hampson, Loop belonged to that current of renewal in English psychedelia kicked off precisely by Jesus And Mary Chain, which in various forms touched acts such as My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, A. R. Kane, Breathless, and Pale Saints, among many others.

The initial line-up, besides Hampson himself, consisted of his partner Bex on drums and Glen Ray on bass, later replaced by John Wills in 1987 (drums) and Neil Mackay (bass) in 1988. In 1989 a second guitarist, Scott Dawson, joined the three, and he would go on to accompany Hampson through the Main adventure until 1996.

Loop's earliest releases came out on their own label, Head. Specifically, the first EP 16 Dreams, the single Spinning – both later collected on The World In Your Eyes – and the first album, Heaven's End, from '87.

The band subsequently signed to Chapter 23, who put out the single "Collision" and the second album, Fade Out, while A Gilded Eternity bore the Beggars Banquet imprint. Loop split up in 1991. Posthumously, the live album Dual was released, along with the collection of John Peel Sessions titled Wolf Flow.

Robert Hampson and Scott Dawson, as mentioned, formed Main, while John Wills and Neil Mackay put together the decent Hair And Skin Trading Co. with guitarist Nigel Webb.

Let's say it straight away: unlike Main, Loop never produced any masterpieces, despite championing a genuinely original idea of sound. And it's that idea that deserves to be highlighted, more than the overall consistency of the albums, which were in any case mostly good if not excellent. Although the relative weakness of the full-lengths probably denied them a level of consideration at least equal to that of other similar acts. Hampson was aware he was treading decidedly difficult ground, yet throughout his career as a musician he showed an admirable integrity, as these words reveal, taken from an interview given on the occasion of the release of the 1994 compilation "Ghafran," which can be found in full within it: "…In the aftermath of punk, there were so many interesting things happening, groups like Wire, early Cabs, Skidoo, etc., however, most contemporary music I find incredibly dull and bland, you know the so-called fucking "Indie-scene". I would like to think Main is challenging that without wanting to sound too antagonistic or arrogant. To me, there are too many soundalikes in the music world. With Main and earlier with Loop we always felt removed from all that, existing in our own little world."

Hampson stated on more than one occasion that he disbanded Loop when he realized he had little else to give under that name.

Reissued this year as an expanded triple-CD, The World In Your Eyes originally came out in 1987. The collection originally contained the band's first EP, 16 Dreams, and the single Spinning, early evidence of Loop's dazing pop, built on a sound that was both hypnotic and melodic. The model is the Velvet Underground, updated into the song-length trance of the Jesus And Mary Chain.

Tracks like "16 Dream", "Head On" and "Burning World" clearly reveal the band's potential, though it's still unexpressed compared to the harmonic complexity that would come to define their later work. Nerve-wracking riff upon riff, repetitive rhythmic structures, hums and noisy disturbances in the background trace the outline of a robotic pop minimalism that nonetheless has a human face. The nimble, playful rhythms and pronounced melodic sensibility make the sound enjoyable even within such an alienating context.

The treatment given to "Rocket Usa" by Suicide, waved almost like a declaration of allegiance, is worth the price of admission on its own. Here Hampson works by accumulation. Layers of feedback are stacked and phased against one another, creating the impression of a circular unfolding, like a spiral moving away from and back toward its axis at regular intervals.

The most fully realized product of the hybridization between Velvet Underground jams and the Jesus And Mary Chain's pop sensibility is, however, "Deep Hit", a kraut-shoegaze track that contains much of what would later become the sound of Flying Saucer Attack and Amp, who would expand its cosmic component enormously.

If I had to recommend one record to approach Loop with, it would be exactly The World In Your Eyes, with its mix of noise and melody, especially for those who already know and appreciate that kind of sound, perhaps through the mediation of the first Jesus And Mary Chain album.

The circular drone, the heaviness of the rhythms and the distinctly melodic aftertaste make "Fix To Fall" an interesting landing point for the ideas begun with "Deep Hit". But above all, it's one of the tracks that best shows the Loop sound's potential for hybridization with the neighboring styles of music we mentioned earlier.

And that's exactly the feeling you get listening to Heaven's End, the band's debut full-length, which had the merit of bringing them to the attention of critics at the time. Here Loop begin a process of toughening up their sound, moving through less frantic, almost martial rhythms, as in the already mentioned "Fix To Fall" or in "Too Real To Feel", and through guitar feedback that's denser and more enveloping. Its most extreme expression can be found in "Forever", a funereal march wrapped in a creeping drone, which in its dissonance and impact recalls the metallic traumas of early Swans. The circular, repetitive riffs and the percussive, metronomic patterns of "Heaven's End" best define the sound that would make Loop 'famous', while the kraut-radiation-soaked mantra of "Straight To Your Heart" brings out a resemblance to a contemporary band moving in adjacent territory, namely Spacemen 3.

The rivalry between Loop and Spacemen 3 received a fair amount of attention in the English press in the late '80s. In an interview given to Lime Lizard Magazine in 1989, Peter "Sonic Boom" Kember forcefully underlined Spacemen 3's precedence in time and quality. Sonic Boom: "⟦Q1⟧"

In an interview with the New Musical Express, a journalist, warned by several people to avoid bringing up Spacemen 3, unwisely decides to ask the fateful question, to which Hampson replies testily: "⟦Q2⟧"; in the same interview, however, bassist Neil MacKay would admit to the similarities. A delicate matter, not without a certain historical interest, the question of who came first, as often happens in these cases, remains difficult to settle. What's certain is that Spacemen 3 were treated more favorably by critics of the time, partly due to the overall superior quality of their music.

A year after Heaven's End, preceded by the EPs Collision and Black Sun, came Fade Out, which reached number fifty-one on the UK charts, and which is without a doubt the London band's best album. What sets Fade Out apart from the records before and after it is the heavy presence of a second guitar which, underpinned by the inevitable spiraling drone, wanders off into acid solos reminiscent of Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. The sound becomes more maximalist, recalling, in the more frenetic tracks ("Got To Get It Over", "There Is Where You End", "Torched" above all) the punk drive of the Stooges, underscored by that creeping urban paranoia typical of Suicide.

Another strength of Fade Out is the songwriting. The already mentioned "Got To Get It Over", along with "Fever Knife" and "Black Sun", rank among Loop's finest songs, finding here the right balance for their pop instincts. With just a little more polish, they could easily have competed with those of the trendiest shoegazers of the era.

Released in 1990 on Beggars Banquet, right in the middle of the psychedelic revival and the shoegaze explosion, A Gilded Eternity is Loop's final album, and their best according to Julian Cope. And in some ways we can agree with "Flawed Genius". A Gilded Eternity departs from everything Loop had produced up to that point, yet it also represents a summation of it. The sound is drier (less droning) and monotone, the guitars become rough and angular, almost mathematic, but above all the concept of repetition is pushed to the point of paroxysm. The bass pulses with monotonous circular lines reminiscent of the best moments of British post-punk, while the drums pound obsessively. The overall blend has a texture that's both "metallic" and psychedelic at once. Compare A Gilded Eternity with "Organ Fan" by Silverfish, for instance, and you'll notice how Loop's sound tends toward that same kind of impact and heaviness. Tracks like "Vapour", "Afterglow" and "The Nail Will Burn" are runaway trains constantly derailing, aborted suites that fold back in on themselves without even attempting a linear development. Here more than elsewhere, the influence of Can and their fragmented, hypnotic textures comes to the fore.

The "main thing"

With the Loop chapter closed, and after a brief stint as guitarist in Godflesh — on a UK tour in the early '90s, on the 1991 12" "Cold World" and on the 1992 full-length "Pure" — Robert Hampson launched the Main project together with his trusty collaborator Scott Dawson.

With Main, Hampson decisively changes his approach to the compositional process – or rather, talking about "compositional processes" at all starts to feel out of place. The structuralist approach of Loop is abandoned. Hampson embraces and reinterprets methods very close to pure improvisation, starting out from recorded guitar and drum machine parts, later transferred to tape and subjected to post-production.

In this phase Hampson works by subtraction, paring away the excess matter until he arrives at a minimal, recursive sound.

At least initially, Main rely exclusively on guitars and drum machine. Hampson's real goal is guitar sound itself, the search for original rhythmic and timbral solutions. Thumbs down, on the other hand, for the use of samples, which he considered a lazy shortcut: "I find the use of samplers to be very lazy." In other words, Hampson wanted to move away from Loop's psychedelic noise-pop, while at the same time experimenting with the guitar as if it were an electronic workstation.

His refusal to use samplers stemmed from a broader stance in which Hampson positioned himself against the excessive use of machines, compounded by a marked distrust of club culture and dance music. "…That's what I hate about samplers. I sort of like the DIY aspect of it, but it annoys me that someone with no musical talent or ideas can make a record. But Dance music, House music, I absolutely fucking hate…" And again: "Why thousands of people would want to cram into a small building and take a lot of drugs I simply can't understand. I mean I have taken drugs, but never in that context. I think I would get intensely claustrophobic."

Hampson's experimental aims were driven by the declared goal of creating music that was as original as possible, while also pursuing a vertical evolution in terms of sound quality. The London musician has stated on more than one occasion that he deliberately ignored solutions he found interesting if, in his view, they sounded already-heard.

The first phase – lasting up until Motion Pool – defines Main as an advanced avant-rock outfit, able to absorb and recast, in an isolationist key, the krautrock noise and derailing energy of acts like Faust, Can and Cluster, along with the electronic turbulence of post-industrial music. In short, a rock band trying to measure itself against decades of experimental music.

Hampson describes himself as a great admirer of Wire – and of Dome perhaps even more so – and makes no secret of having been influenced by them.

Looking back on it now, not without a touch of regret, one can't help but conclude that Main's records, while ultimately important, were perhaps not entirely successful. They stand as a fundamental piece in defining a well-characterized approach to sound, trance and psychedelia, yet perhaps lacking the variety that Hampson himself always claimed as his goal. The problem with Main's music lies precisely in its harmonic limitations and the scant timbral exploration of the guitar parts.

After Hz, Hampson would get bogged down in the drift of the sound he had helped define, releasing albums of music bordering on silence, steeped in micro-events, sidereal improvisations and minimal solutions, but truly too repetitive (in the worst sense of the word). The increasingly heavy reliance on improvisational techniques would perhaps become more a necessity than a resource. Running short on ideas, Main would let themselves be seduced by the random abstractions of people like Keith Rowe – and I'm even reminded of Voice Crack – without, however, possessing the same ability to play with dissonance, to establish an effective interplay between noise and silence, between sound and spatiality – something they nonetheless seem to attempt on more than one record in the phase following Hz.

Main would overuse silence in a rather conventional way, as a cushion between one event and the next, never managing to inhabit/penetrate it with sound, to shape it osmotically so as to sublimate its explosive force, its contraction, or the perceptual erasure of temporal coordinates.

Main's isolationism would become more a concept than actual music, almost an essay in sound theory.

Originally released as separate 12"s, Hydra and Calm were collected on a single album in 1992 by Situation Two. In support of Main's debut release, Hampson stated he wanted to deliberately distance himself from rock. The choice of a drum machine instead of a steady drummer points toward music with squared-off, robotically regular rhythms. The sound moves through minimal, static structures, repetitive to the point of exhaustion. Yet rock is still present in the background, like a statue of ice that, as it melts, gradually loses its original shape. This comes through in the disappearance of a focal point – the song-form of Loop – in its decomposition and dissolution into equally minimal structures, but stripped down to the bone of what Hampson considered redundant: melody, the pop element.

The hallucinated feedback of Loop melts and recombines into expanses of liquid, dilated sound, yet endowed with an overflowing physicality. It transfigures into noise-events bordering on silence, which coil and unfold over constant, obsessive rhythmic structures. The hybridization between the remnants of Loop's trance-pop and the kraut turbulence of Neu! and especially Can is rendered here at its very best. The resulting perception is something close to the hallucination and exhaustion of minimalist music. Tracks like "There Is Only Light" and "Flametracer", bearing witness to these contaminations, serve as a litmus test for the path of experimentation Hampson had undertaken.

The following album, the EP Dry Stone Feed, doesn't bring any significant novelty, yet it shows Hampson's absolute mastery in "playing" with repetition and psychedelic trance, even within a tightly delimited set of codes and references.

Underpinned by a pulsing, dark bass, Main's sound grows even heavier and more desolate, genuinely close to certain things by their contemporaries Godflesh. In the closing track that gives the collection its title, one begins to glimpse signs of a more advanced disintegration, one that would pave the way for the sharp break of Firmament I and II and of Motion Pool.

Here's the thing: despite boasting a certain originality, Hampson considered Hydra & Calm and Dry Stone Feed not so much preparatory steps toward the definitive Main sound, but rather the concrete realization of ideas he would have liked to develop with Loop.

Starting with the EP Firmament II the London musician begins putting his own visions into practice, focusing on the complexity of textures rather than the obsessive repetition of guitar and percussion patterns. Background noise is brought to the foreground and subjected to processes that reveal its stratifications. Hampson works on sound trying to bring out its synesthetic potential. The sequential, linear development of events in close succession is abandoned in favor of concentric, enveloping structures, bringing this music closer to pure sound art.

The sound becomes even more abstract on Firmament II, one of Main's finest albums as well as one of the sancta sanctorum of isolationist music.

Firmament II consists of two tracks of around 25 minutes each, where the break with the early Main is sharp, and where instead rather explicit references to the Darmstadt school of experimental electronics and the post-industrial isolationism of the Newcastle scene seem to emerge. At the same time, the array of improvisational micro-events – noisy disturbances, hints of guitar distortion, electronic crackles – point toward, and in some ways open the door to, the nascent glitch "scene" of acts like Oval, Disc, Matmos, and labels like Mille Plateaux.

The first track, "IX", unfolds according to a progressive, spatial conception of ambient music. The first 5 minutes are saturated with noise that overwhelms a subtle guitar loop. After a brief ethereal interlude, the second part collapses into a black hole of metallic clangs and menacing ambient swathes. The suite closes in a state of relative calm, with a loop of bells with an almost angelic timbre.

Despite the shifts in register, the second suite maintains a fairly linear trajectory, to the point that, albeit understated, one can appreciate a pleasantly melodic aspect to it, even within a context of sonic events aimed at alienation.

Firmament II marks not only the beginning of Main's best phase, but also the convergence of the various references that, in different ways, go on to define the isolationist sound, within a season in which several musicians (O'Rourke, Total, Labradford, Techno Animal) sought to give it a personal interpretation, sometimes tilted more toward one component than another.

Motion Pool comes out roughly at the same time as Firmament II, and more than Firmament II it documents the gradual transition from the first, rock-related phase to the second phase characterized by an ambient sound. The first four or five tracks in particular harken back to the avant-rock of Dry Stone Feed, keeping its structural elements intact, namely the obsessive repetition of guitar and percussion patterns.

The subsequent pieces – "Liquid Reflective", "Heat Realm", "VIII" – are instead noisy ectoplasms gutted of any semblance of structure, cacophonous and disordered involutions emerging from who knows what hidden recess of post-industrial civilization. At times it sounds like an even more autistic Faust.

Hampson doesn't deny sniffing out what was in the air at the time and deliberately letting himself be influenced by it. He says he wanted to engage with certain situations that appealed to him at that moment, in particular Jim O'Rourke, Table Of Elements, and a few post-rock acts from the Chicago scene. Attentive listeners won't miss the similarity between the second half of Motion Pool and some of isolationist-era O'Rourke's records, namely Tamper and Disengage.

 

Released in 1996 by Beggars Banquet, Hz collects 6 limited-edition EPs issued over a span of 6 months.

Hz is a monster, the Pandora's box of isolationist sound, without a shadow of a doubt one of the cornerstone records of 90s English music. Above all, it's the album that closes out the golden age of isolationism, which from that point on would deliver few other significant innovations.

Not without a touch of presumption, evidently encouraged by the positive critical reception, Hampson raises the stakes of his ambitions, further reworking the structures and compositional processes, altering the balance between silence and noise. The guitar sound in particular becomes stretched out, faint, so impalpable as to become unrecognizable. A kind of post-industrial counterpart, hazy and heavy, to the transcendent synths of the cosmic couriers. The atmospheres remain dark and menacing. The developments follow variable trajectories, sometimes linear, understated, other times instead geared toward the recovery of obsessive repetition. In the latter case, the sound develops and often coils around microtonal events fired off at rather high frequencies.

In the most rarefied compositions, the long ambient expanses are pierced at random intervals by hammering metallic clangs. As if these nebulae, evolving at an extremely slow pace, were straining to rise toward the stars while instead remaining leaden, grounded. More than ambient music, it's almost a kind of sound art, buried for a journey to the center of the earth.

In truth, Hz turns out to be fairly heterogeneous, and succeeds in representing the different souls of Main. The two-movement suite of "Corona" indeed recovers the oppressive guitar reiterations of Dry Stone Feed, albeit with a more layered timbral rendering. In the first part of the suite, a transparent ambient filigree, cosmic and understated, prepares the entrance of violent, obsessive metallic blasts, eventually fading into dissolves reminiscent of Indian mantras. The bass regains a certain centrality, lending dynamism to the estranging rock-ambient morphing that, in "Corona", evidently serves as the litmus test for Hampson's new direction.

A dark, booming bass is once again the protagonist in the first and last sections of "Maser", while the central part sees metallic screeches coexisting with impalpable ambient swells. In "Haloform", "Kaon" and "Neper" the sound creates antinomies between silences and extremely subtle dissonances, in a play of refractions between elements interpenetrating at different frequencies. With meticulous attention to interlocking parts, and making the best use of the overdubbing technique, Hampson manages to create, within a layered and "heavy" music, an enduring monument to incommunicability.

Within the grooves of Hz, both the possibilities and the age-old weaknesses of ambient music are celebrated at once — on one hand suited to becoming liquid, basic matter, malleable and potentially adaptable to any situation, but on the other prone to aphonia (and banality) in its excessively mannered interpretations.

The excessive emphasis on dilation, on the sublimation of silence — which will often become so dominant as to cancel out any sign or event within itself — will render these sounds stereotypical, models that are fairly simple to reproduce, provided you have the right software. Many, Main included, will fall into this trap.

After Hz, Scott Dawson leaves. The change evidently starts to bear fruit in the later chapters of the Firmament series. On the other hand, while remaining the sole credited name behind the moniker, Hampson leaves some room for Paul Schütze, who on Firmament III provides the samples for two of the five movements. Here Hampson reduces the "played" parts to a minimum, although over the more than forty minutes of runtime, very little actually happens. The sound becomes deficient in events, overall accentuating its descriptive traits, bordering on entropy in the final tracks. It's not a pleasant listen, in the sense that it gets rather boring.

Some of the guitar parts on Firmament III had been recorded during the same sessions as Hydra and Calm, then manipulated for the occasion, testifying to the extreme ease of that kind of compositional process, and how very little is really needed to produce simulacra of ambient music. Hampson reveals: "With Firmament III the funny thing was that nearly all the guitars that are on that record, and there aren't many because we went completely against everything and hardly used any guitars on that piece of music, all the guitar sounds had been generated from pretty much our first recording sessions at the same time we were recording the Hydra and Calm EP's. We went right back to the start and used all the bits we never used in the first place and completely changed the context".

Things get even worse in the closing chapter of the series. Firmament IV represents the extreme endpoint of the fascination with sound sculptures, with interior landscapes, with the potential of guitar sound as a tool for sound painting.

Indeed, here the guitar, though unrecognisable, functions as an actual synthesizer, aided by pedals, filters and little else.

Main's sound loses complexity, overindulges in silences, becomes heavy-handed yet poorly layered. Hampson seeks new directions by integrating aleatory components, but juxtaposes them in an overly simplistic way. The ambient expanses become inscrutable, excessively diluted. Fragmented micro-events like crackles, sudden blades of noise, and kosmische nebulae aren't enough to redeem their monolithic nature.

The pulsing bass and clattering guitars of "Outer Corona" — which indeed revisits the themes of the "Corona" found on Hz — testify to a Hampson evidently aware of the excessive rarefaction of the Firmament series, especially its last two chapters.

Recorded live at the 3eme Festival Musiques Ultimes in Nevers, France, Deliquescence is a very good record, the last one on which Main actually have something to say. It seems that for the performance Hampson used pre-recorded parts, readapting them to the new context. The result is a powerful, dark, reasonably varied sound. The rhythms and guitar feedback are brought back, and even the shards of random noise seem to make sense.

Besides being one of Main's finest pieces, the gorgeous "Valency" attests to Hampson's renewed inclination toward "fullness", layering, and the alternation of different timbres.

However, it's an isolated episode. Having set aside the discourse on isolationism, and lost among a multitude of clones who made minimal sound a banner more than a possibility, Hampson's music comes to occupy a marginal role.

The two suites broken into segments on Tau seethe with absence. The rarefaction of Firmament IV thins out until it becomes an extremely thin filigree, barely-living reminiscences of a lost musicality. Silences are dominant. Yet these are gratuitous silences, extended and above all isolated stretches of suite that the context fails to transform into textures potentially open to welcoming thematic nuances or shifts in register. Indeed, after the intervals of silence, this (non-)music returns exactly identical to itself, that is, substantially stripped of that expressiveness that had characterized Main's work even on their most minimalist records.

The mannerism reaches its peak on the EP Transiency and on Exosphere (Mort Aux Vaches), where, despite a greater density of sound, Hampson appears rather confused, continuing to pile up sonic events without a shred of fluidity.

If these last few efforts confirm a dip in creativity, the final album released under the Main name is instead a swan song that's more than worthy. The two long suites on Surcease lean toward the "high" electronics of a Morton Subotnick, viewed through the warped, dark lenses of Nurse With Wound's "Thunder Perfect Mind" period. The 24 minutes of "Parallax" are dense, intense, at times even raw, if not outright violent. After 16 minutes the suite reaches its emotional peak amid a forest of dark-ambient nebulae, before fading into a coda of granular rarefactions. Placid, more diluted but just as dark, "Moraine" retraces its arc and shifts in rhythm. Here the ambient rarefactions conjure unhealthy, spectral scenarios, while the occasional bursts of noise launched at extremely high frequencies reveal Hampson's familiarity with something very close to power electronics. Given the premises and the results, daring further in that direction would presumably have benefited the longevity and variety of the material.

Seven years later, Hampson sharpens his tools again and resurrects the Main name, enlisting for the third incarnation of the act none other than Stephan Mathieu, another giant of electronic minimalism who had recently and successfully converted to the world of ambient music. On Ablation, together with this lineup, what shifts once again is the soundworld: after the post-psychedelic isolationism alongside Dowson and the subsequent avant-garde drift, here we're faced with a record of pure electro-acoustic ambient, one that keeps the coordinates so dear to the act but frames them from a new perspective. Contact with the post-Hz sonic universe is present and tangible in the use of microstructures, now however decidedly more colorful, woven into a constantly evolving tangle and bound together by a backdrop of flows and expansions. Four suites make up the record: "I" is certainly the least successful, amid noises in the void, GRM samples and distant echoes. In "II", Mathieu enters the picture, contributing his microsound, while Hampson recovers the sample textures of his finest solo work: here the new Main is born, at first staying cold and desolate, before introducing a distant droning warmth.

In "III" a genuine festival of rarefied nebulae proceeds in a trance, drawing near, brushing against and pulling away from delicate rustlings, melodic spirals and field recordings, absorbing with each fleeting contact an infinitesimal part of them. This process is the signature recipe of their sound, reaching its ultimate fulfillment in the manifesto-masterpiece "IV", where Mathieu also lays bare his most atmospheric soul across 10 minutes of intense ambient desolation. Thanks to the extremely high quality of three tracks out of four, as well as the strength of a new formula that proves decidedly more effective, Ablation turns out to be the best Main record since the days of Hz.

Robert Hampson + collaborations + other projects

Indicate (Jim O'Rourke + Robert Hampson) – Whelm

Indicate is the collaboration between Jim O'Rourke and Robert Hampson, two of the leading theorists of isolationist sound, during its period of peak exposure.

Conceived at Thirst Studios in London, Whelm sees the pair interact through a methodology that leads to the combination of analog samples and field recordings. More than a Hampson or O'Rourke record, Whelm seems to have sprung from the mind of Dan Burke of Illusion Of Safety (with whom O'Rourke collaborated). Three tracks of extremely heavy ambient crossed by radio waves and alien frequencies, by the subtlest tonal variations, by dark crevasses that seem to suck in every semblance of musicality. More than isolationism, this is pure autism, an absolute absence of any communicative intent.

Gilbert/Hampson/Kendall – Orr

Far more digestible is the collaboration between Robert Hampson, Bruce Gilbert of Wire and sound engineer Paul Kendall, known for having worked on several records by Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb, among others. Hampson had described himself as a fan of Wire and Dome, and on Orr he gets to put into practice those deconstruction processes that characterized the sound of Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert's band.

Recorded in just a few days, Orr is an almost collage-like assembly of tape loops, guitar feedback, obsessive beats and vocal samples, an ideal continuation of the experimental sound of "Dome 3" and "4". Paul Kendall's work proves crucial to the overall sound, as he manages to effectively mix Hampson's menacing landscapes with Gilbert's noise shards into a coherent blend. Orr is a dark, prickly monolith, abrasive at times, comparable in its ability to evoke paranoia to the best of Godflesh. At the same time, though, it manages to keep boredom at bay, thanks to the alternation of ambient pieces, (almost) noise-industrial moments and driving rhythms.

Chasm/Bannlust – Split Series #5

On split number 5 in FatCat's series devoted to experimental electronics and related sounds, Robert Hampson appears under the moniker Chasm, sharing the record with Marco Fisher, aka Bannlust. A certainly minor release, yet an interesting one for understanding how much more multifaceted Hampson's sonic signature could potentially have been compared to what he actually managed to realize. The three tracks on the split are experiments, not entirely successful attempts to grapple with minimal rhythms, almost like a slowed-down, bloated Plastikman. Sure, he could have worked more on these sonorities and kept them as a further ace up his sleeve, but that's how it is.

Antenna Farm/Main – AF_M

This split is part of Staalplaat's "Brombron Series", in which musicians were invited to spend a week together working in close contact at the Extrapool studio in Nijmegen. Hampson and Antenna Farm (David Howell and Alastair Leslie) use a fair amount of instruments – from guitars to contact microphones, as well as field recordings captured near the studio – recording sounds directly to DAT, editing them once, without subjecting them to any further manipulation afterward. The result of this methodology is a thorny, almost entirely non-ambient brand of electronics, full of creaks, alien short wave transmissions, and modulations at variable frequencies within tight time windows. In the end, though, nothing to lose sleep over.

Comae (Robert Hampson + Janek Schaefer) – Comae

The monicker Comae designates the collaboration between Robert Hampson and sound designer Janek Schaefer, known for his experiments on the relationship between sound and spatiality. Released on the Viennese label Rhiz, the record unfolds across eight movements that pick up the internment-style ambient of the Indicate project and the Firmament series, broadening its expressive palette into a sound that's certainly heavy but airier. The focus shifts from guitar to laptop, and, probably thanks to Schaefer, the duo manages to integrate silences into the sound structures fluidly.

Fennesz/Main – Split Series #15

The split between Main and Fennesz came out in 2002, right around the time of Tau and the Austrian composer's masterpiece, "Endless Summer". It goes without saying that the record bears the mark of the two musicians' very different moments. While Hampson was heading into decline, Fennesz was at his peak of creativity and exposure. So the Austrian musician's three tracks are a marvel, ethereal and dreamlike epiphanies, moment bienheureux of enchanted beaches. Truth be told, despite a Hampson in freefall, his three tracks aren't half bad either. "Rive Pt. 2" especially, in its airy search for a sliver of light, seems to echo Fennesz's own elegiac suites.

Robert Hampson + Steven Hess – St

Steven Hess is a percussionist who has handled rhythms and textures for many important acts, suffice it to mention Pan American, Fessenden and On. The fruit of this collaboration is a record in which percussive microbeats lend unexpected dynamism to Hampson's static structures. Beyond that, there's little else to point out, apart from the usual array of hums, short wave radio, granular textures and ambient chasms. In short, nothing we haven't heard before, many times over.

Robert Hampson – Maps

Released for free on his Myspace, Maps is an entirely forgettable record. The thirty tracks were published one at a time, sequentially, though according to Hampson they're meant to be listened to randomly…

Robert Hampson – Vectors

The natural home for Hampson's music is Touch, which has built much of its identity around experimental electronics. Commissioned by the prestigious Grm (Groupe De Recherches Musicales), founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer, whose studio Hampson had the chance to work in, Vectors (2009) is a full, 360-degree immersion in electroacoustic music.

But above all it's the record you wouldn't expect from a figure whose stock had clearly fallen. Specifically, Hampson managed to fruitfully combine his avant-rock background with the rigor of electroacoustic music and early tape music, producing sounds of great evocative power and, above all, great variety. The concept behind Vectors is astronomy, a passion of the English musician's dating back to his days with Main.

The second track, "Ahed – Only The Stars", dedicated to astronaut Chuck Yeager of the Mercury space program (from the 1960s), is a fascinating immersion into deep space, amid alien frequencies, sudden noises of colliding asteroids, radioactive nebulae. The final part of the suite is unsettling, sinking into an ambient void cracked open by the digital laments of countless Hal 9000s scattered across the heliosphere. The closing "Dans Le Lointain" is also closely tied to sci-fi themes. Built from short wave radio recordings dating back to the early 80s — manipulated and "fattened up" with digital effects — the suite shines for its textural richness and for its fluid shifts in register between sections. Not to mention "Umbra", which, through granular sounds, metallic rarefactions, and distant bell loops, tells of hostile worlds and deformed creatures.

Truly, Vectors is a magnetic record, capable of pulling you away from the outside world, especially when listened to at night with headphones.

Robert Hampson – Répercussions

Hampson's third record falls within the (by now familiar) pattern of cross-pollination between Touch and Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego. The backstory is already significant in framing this Répercussions: from the cosmic paths of Vectors, largely focused on the pursuit of an aesthetic, we move to pure avant-garde improvisation, both trademarks of their respective labels.

The album essentially collects a summary of Hampson's avant-garde work, tracks he had already used, even before recording them, in numerous live performances between 2008 and 2012.

The title track is a gripping, concrete odyssey – composed, not by chance, on commission from the GRM for a live sound-diffusion experiment – that moves between Stockhausen-style sonic waves, twelve-tone piano, sinister metallophones and occasional bursts of atmosphere, all of it altered (but not too much) and remixed through analog hardware (synth modules, tone generators, tape loops). “De la Terre à la Lune” is an assemblage of old sound samples, some dating all the way back to the “Vectors” sessions, mixed, compressed and “digitized” into twenty minutes of cosmic nightmares – noise outbursts, hums, sonic voids, dark drones – designed to serve as the soundtrack for a multimedia show at the Poitiers Planetarium. The closing “Antartica Ends Here” – already released on a split with Cindytalk – is the record's one genuine flash of brilliance: a single piano note is stretched out via a field recording of a bamboo leaf rustling in the wind, until it comes to resemble the sound of a violin, edging forcefully close to the chamber-music textures of Soliman Gamil.

Répercussions isn't a new Robert Hampson album, but a hard-to-digest documentary on the lesser-known side of his recent work.

Robert Hampson – Signaux/Suspended Cadences

Two separate LPs (albeit musically adjoining), each with its own serial number and its own artwork, both containing two roughly twenty-minute suites apiece, make up the new project Signaux/Suspended Cadences (2012).

The first of the two records, Signaux, lays out Hampson's current avant-garde approach across a scant three quarters of an hour, sticking to coordinates close to those of Répercussions, though here the organized chaos steps aside in favor of more classic (and utterly predictable) odysseys of bleeps, samples and sine waves. A case in point is the eighteen minutes of “Signaux 1,” a minimal, whispered excursion between echoes of the GRM and jagged loops, originally composed for the Poitiers Planetarium (and thus born of the same sessions as “De La Terre A La Lune”). The same mood is revisited in “Signaux 2,” softened here and there by occasional recourse to floating, suspended drones, in a formula that seems to be reaching for the Mika Vainio of “Fe3O4” without ever possessing the same pull.

Far more interesting and distinctive are the two sprawling, shape-shifting tracks of Suspended Cadences, genuine fusions of ambient and avant-garde, both entirely improvised and recorded live with no audio software involved. The first half is marked by a cold, dark atmosphere that blends Philip Jeck and Seirom across quiet passages, alienated drones and treated guitar. In the second, which offers a variation on the same theme, Hampson focuses exclusively on guitar-processing, setting aside modulation and sampling for twenty minutes of reverb and distortion à-la–Ben Frost.

Even though the format of the release dictates this pairing, it's almost impossible to consider Signaux and Suspended Cadences as works born of the same creative spirit, given the considerable gap in style and, above all, quality – entirely in the latter's favor. It's almost as though Hampson wanted to gather the two faces of the same coin under one roof, but they turn out too unbalanced and too different to coexist as the project intended. Setting that issue aside, what we're left with is one anonymous work and one remarkable one, respectively busy recycling long-stale clichés and delivering yet another ode to avant-garde improvisation – together, at least, enough to satisfy the bare minimum even for the most demanding tastes.

As commendable as it is questionable.

So, just a couple of closing words. Hampson's music is an important part of a precisely defined period, one that can be placed within clearly delineated tendencies. And it remains inextricably bound to them. Lacking the encyclopedic culture of a figure like Jim O'Rourke or the versatility of a Kevin Martin, the English musician never managed to "reinvent" himself in other guises. If anything, even his most recent, less significant works (Vectors excluded) show the stubbornness of a man doggedly clinging to one fixed, unchanging idea of sound. What's certain, though, is that no one can ever take away from him either the masterpiece records or, above all, the coherent and in some ways exemplary path he has followed.

Contributions by Matteo Meda (“Ablation,” “Répercussions,” “Signaux/Suspended Cadences”) and Paolo Ciro (“Array 1,” “Sonancy”)

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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