An evening charting the abyss between noise rock and outer-limit free-jazz rampaging with London's Temperatures and Southend-via-Oxford's Red Square.

RED SQUARE

Red Square were a remarkable, pioneering British group that originally formed in 1972 and broke up in 1978, before re-forming in 2009 as a result of renewed interest in their extraordinary history and the release of 'Thirty Three' on FMR - a disc documenting their early years.

Though largely forgotten for 30 years, Red Square were a key link bridging the worlds of psychedelic rock and avant-jazz. The group also had a fierce, ideological commitment to total improvisation delivered through very big speakers. There was an almost proto-punk quixotism about their railing aural assaults on the mainstream: very few people thanked them for it, and the music on ‘Thirty Three’ was considered far too extreme for release at the time.

The groundwork for what became the Red Square sound was laid when Jon Seagroatt & Ian Staples began a musical collaboration in Southend-on-Sea, Essex in 1972, following encounters at a number of experimental music workshops.

Staples, fresh from the London underground scene, had been gigging regularly at the legendary Middle Earth Club in London with Ginger Johnson's African Drummers, alongside, amongst others, Pink Floyd and Mark Bolan. He was working with tape multi-tracking, noise, psychedelia and action painting. Staples’ electric guitar playing was a revolutionary blend of Hendrix and Beefheart, with the sonic palettes of Derek Bailey and Stockhausen.

Seagroatt, galvanized by the explorations of Johns Coltrane and Tchcai, Evan Parker, Steve Lacy, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, also drew freely on groups such as Can, Faust, Weather Report, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Soft Machine.

Both were also heavily influenced by developments in contemporary 'straight' music.

From the beginning of their collaboration they determined to improvise all of their music. Within a year they found a kindred spirit in drummer Roger Telford, a committed exponent of the free-jazz style of kit playing being pioneered at the time by Milford Graves and Sunny Murray.

The combination of electric guitar, amplified bass clarinet and drum kit gave Red Square a unique sound palette to explore, as well an instantly recognisable group sound.

The line up of Seagroatt, Staples and Telford remained constant throughout the band's six year history, as did the original commitment to total improvisation, but, given the group's wide range of influences, their improvisations drew as much on avant-rock as they did on jazz or contemporary improvised music.

Staples became adept at unleashing cunningly atonal guitar riffs, which referenced metal without ever becoming metal. These onslaughts were critiqued and counterposed by Telford's coruscating, densely-textured polyrhythms. Seagroatt moved between the two, weaving sinuous cats-cradles of fractured melody in the liminal space where metal met jazz.

RedSquare Blogspot



TEMPERATURES

“Given that Noise as a movement was predicated on a desire to break free of straightjacket musical structures, it’s ironic that some of the more stimulating groups working in that zone have retained elements of rock. Units such as Mathew Bower’s Skullflower, the transatlantic trio PeeEssEye and Edinburgh’s Muscletusk have blended guitars and drums into the hum and roar of Noise to create a visceral, hybrid free rock. Temperatures are a London based duo of bassist/vocalist Peter Blundell and drummer James Dunn, who strip the form back to the bone, relying on the natural properties of their instruments, a handful of pedals and a synth wired up to the drums to create unruly, improvised Noise rock.” - Daniel Spicer, Wire Magazine.

“Favorite New Band - That’s like reaching into a grab-bag because there’s so many at every given time or day that I’m hearing. There’s always bands popping up that are doing something I really like. There’s this duo from the UK that I really like: Temperatures. I don’t know too much about them but I think they’re just two guys from the UK. I sort of, well it’s one of those things where you get your information through this underground network of noise and avant-garde, weird music that’s happening all the time now. And I saw their name a couple of times, and then I saw the Temperatures album, the one on Heat Retention, at Hospital Records in New York. On the wall, it’s like, Temperatures LP, limited edition, 100 copies, and the cover is kind of this rough paper and really homemade with silkscreen on it. Very little information. Just "Temperatures". It’s the kind of thing that makes me buy records-- all of those aspects. Like, an intriguing name, only making enough records that they know that they can sell in a couple of months and not having any lying around in their basement in boxes, and the most minimal of information-- just play the fucking record and that’s all the information you need. They did two 7"s themselves, where the sleeves where very homemade. I knew it would be something really extreme, noise-duo kind of stuff. We were playing it the other day and it was pretty cool. It’s really this dark-hole of noise-playing. It’s actually really distinctive in a way amongst that genre, because there’s a lot of standardized tropes in the noise genre that people fall into-- which I don’t mind, I like the idea that this is traditional way of playing in that world, but it’s always cool to hear something like this where you can’t really slot it into those things.” - Thurston Moore, Pitchfork.

Temperatures on Myspace