Unrest is Henry Cow’s strangest and most inventive record — half meticulous composition, half improvisation rebuilt on tape, and the first to feature Lindsay Cooper’s bassoon and oboe. Released in 1974, it contains ‘Ruins,’ built on Fibonacci numbers, and a gleeful demolition of a Yardbirds song.

The short version

Unrest (1974) is the second album by Henry Cow, recorded at The Manor and released on Virgin. Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves and Chris Cutler are joined for the first time by Lindsay Cooper on bassoon and oboe, replacing saxophonist Geoff Leigh. Its first side gathers three formidable compositions; its second is assembled from improvisation, tape loops and overdubs. It is dedicated to Robert Wyatt and Uli Trepte.

Composition by accident

When Henry Cow arrived at the studio, they made an awkward discovery: they had nowhere near enough written material to fill an album, and the time was booked. So they improvised. From necessity came a method they christened studio composition — improvising to tape, then reshaping the results through loops, layering and overdubbing until pieces emerged. Four of the second side’s tracks were built this way, and on parts of the record the bassoon, saxophone, drums and voice were recorded at half or double speed. Meanwhile the arrival of Lindsay Cooper, a Royal Academy graduate fresh from a spell with the folk band Comus, pulled the group decisively away from American jazz and toward European art music.

The sound

Unrest is knotty, labyrinthine and often extremely noisy, yet its lasting quality is a strange grace. Fred Frith’s guitar and violin range from scorching distortion to birdsong delicacy; Lindsay Cooper’s reeds bring an autumnal, chamber-music colour that nothing else in rock possessed; Chris Cutler drums with astonishing lightness, and John Greaves’s bass roams everywhere. Tim Hodgkinson presides on organ, saxophone and clarinet. The composed pieces are exact to the last half-beat, and the improvised ones walk a fine line between bracing atonality and pure noise — a line the band almost always finds.

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The songs

‘Bittern Storm over Ulm’ opens the album with what Fred Frith cheerfully called a perversion of a Yardbirds favourite, into which he smuggled extra bars, beats and half-beats. John Greaves’s ‘Half Asleep; Half Awake’ drifts on dreaming pianos and dancing oboes. Then comes ‘Ruins,’ the album’s gem: a long, funereal instrumental for which Frith used Fibonacci numbers to determine beat and harmony, having read about Bela Bartok doing the same. Side two brings ‘Solemn Music,’ the sole survivor of the band’s score for a production of The Tempest, the tape-built ‘Linguaphonie’ and ‘Arcades,’ and the closing ‘Deluge.’

Reception and legacy

Melody Maker greeted it warmly, judging it more unified and coherent than the debut, and later critics have generally agreed that the first side contains some of the most full-bodied music Henry Cow ever recorded. Opinion divides over the second: some hear a fascinating first venture into musique concrete, others find the improvised material patchy beside the compositions. Both readings are fair. What is not in doubt is the importance of Lindsay Cooper’s arrival, or of ‘Ruins,’ which Tim Hodgkinson says is the only Frith composition the band ever recorded exactly as written. It stayed in the live set until the end.

The verdict

Unrest is superb, and probably the best place to meet Henry Cow, being less forbidding than In Praise of Learning and more assured than their debut. It rewards patience enormously: the melodies are insidious, the textures beautiful, and the wit is real even when the music is fierce. Come for the audacious ‘Bittern Storm over Ulm,’ stay for the sombre magnificence of ‘Ruins,’ and hear five musicians turning a shortage of finished pieces into one of avant-garde rock’s finest albums.

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