It’s difficult to talk about post-rock as a genre without mentioning the piece by writer Simon Reynolds in which he first brought it to our attention; in first coining the term it’s soon to become passé shorthand, as with ‘intelligent’ dance music or its short form IDM – both labeled and damned a group of pioneers who’d consciously sought to avoid such conformist labeling in the first place.
Published in The Wire’s May 1994 edition, Reynolds’ musings contain scraps of insight into what we now recognise as an established approach to sound, structure and the recording process, then he drew a direct line backwards to Brian Eno as an unlikely scene daddy, a totem for those artists precariously inhabiting a place he contended was then a musical ‘hinterland-without-a-name’.
The fruits of something this nebulous are hard to give any true sense of equivalence to, but since its original release in the same year as Reynolds coined the phrase, Bark Psychosis‘ Hex has been critically regarded as one of the movement’s definitive works.
Founded in east London in 1986 by Graham Sutton and John Ling, initially the duo used noise as a weapon, covering grindcore staples such as Napalm Death at school concerts, but their influences were dazzlingly juxtaposed, running the gamut between Miles Davis, krautrock, hip-hop, dub and beyond.
It was however the recruitment of drummer John Simmnet – a prog-rock fan ten years their senior – which would cast a huge shadow over Hex; Simmnet introduced the band to a dingy room in the basement of the church of St. John The Evangelist in Stratford, the immersive environment from which the record’s multiple-layered ambiences were painstakingly engineered from.
Even with almost twenty-five years of hindsight, it remains a body of work rooted in challenging audiences but not harassing them; whilst a confounding reputation has almost certainly scared off many since, re-listening now it’s far less angular than Slint’s Spiderland, nor as caustically introvert as Mogwai’s Young Team. Opener The Loom dispels any notion of attack, a series of rifled piano notes and ambient drones over cascading percussion, the slightly decayed audio quality merely these days a software setting, then a crafted swipe at convention.
This subterfuge, these sleights of hand, are what make Hex so breathtaking. Sutton’s voice, rarely above a whisper when it appears, sits largely mid-mix, but on the likes of A Street Scene it picks a delicate way through the undulating soundscapes, every new corner turned less obviously signposted than the previous one. His obsessiveness became a red line for his bandmates (Bark Psychosis as a group would cease to exist before the album was released) but the deftly sprung surprises, such as the nods to lounge music on Big Shot or the aching, ten-minute fragility of closer Pendulum, reveal a sense of maverick compositional ideals being realised.
Only once is there discordance (even then only episodically); on Eyes And Smiles, but even then the passages are logical adjuncts, the means to an end of the expressionist painter dripping tone and meaning onto a muddied canvas. These cadences mean Hex’s influence is still widely felt, not just in the work of dozens of artists who’ve survived from one of the 20th century’s most robust movements, but also in new interpretations by Sigur Rós and Efterklang, or composers such as Nils Frahm. In possibly one of the most extreme cases of bad timing, its original release came only a few weeks prior to that of Oasis’ Supersonic, a landmark from which the trajectory of British music was altered for nearly a decade; Sutton mused that they ‘couldn’t get arrested’ in the rush to the traditional which followed.
In every sense, Hex has ever since been native to Reynolds’ limbo, a citizen of nowhere. Stateless, its strength lies in empowering listeners to think creatively for themselves, any interpretation a vibrant, existentialist labour of love.
It’s a complicated record, made in vastly simpler times.
