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Peter Hammill: ...all that might have been...

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Fie! Records
Released: 2014.12.31
Time:
 47:33 / 48:55 / 30:55
Category: Progressive Rock
Producer(s): Peter Hammill
Rating:
Media type: CD triple
Web address: www.sofasound.com
Appears with: Van der Graaf Generator, David Jackson
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 3,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


Disc 1

[1] In overview (P.Hammill) - 2:49
[2] The last time (P.Hammill) - 1:42
[3] Never wanted (P.Hammill) - 2:17
[4] As for him (P.Hammill) - 1:53
[5] Nowhere special (P.Hammill) - 1:38
[6] Piper Smile (P.Hammill) - 1:13
[7] Wanted to belong (P.Hammill) - 1:53
[8] This might... (P.Hammill) - 1:51
[9] Inklings, darling (P.Hammill) - 3:31
[10] Be careful (P.Hammill) - 1:39
[11] Alien Clock (P.Hammill) - 5:53
[12] Drifting through (P.Hammill) - 2:16
[13] Washed up (P.Hammill) - 2:08
[14] Rumpled sheets (P.Hammill) - 3:02
[15] Fool-proof (P.Hammill) - 1:50
[16] Can’t get home (P.Hammill) - 1:48
[17] Washed away (P.Hammill) - 1:41
[18] Back road (P.Hammill) - 2:13
[19] The line goes dead (P.Hammill) - 2:02
[20] He turns away (P.Hammill) - 1:59
[21] Hooks (P.Hammill) - 2:15


Disc 2

[1] Upon a Sixpence (P.Hammill) - 4:58
[2] Someday (the Piper Smile) (P.Hammill) - 5:02
[3] Vai Lentissimo (P.Hammill) - 5:11
[4] Disrespect (in Kabuki-cho) (P.Hammill) - 6:16
[5] An Outlier (P.Hammill) - 5:43
[6] The Whole Thing Through (P.Hammill) - 3:50
[7] Best Wishes (P.Hammill) - 4:16
[8] Passing Clouds (P.Hammill) - 4:37
[9] Not Going Anywhere (P.Hammill) - 4:34
[10] Until (P.Hammill) - 4:28


Disc 3

[1] SixSlowOut (P.Hammill) - 9:11
[2] KabukiCloudSome (P.Hammill) - 7:19
[3] TenorElseAny (P.Hammill) - 6:39
[4] 57WishesUntil (P.Hammill) - 7:46

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Peter Hammill - All Instruments, Vocals, Producer

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2014 CD Fie! Records FIE 9137

"The main release is a single CD, in the same form of packaging as was used for "Consequences". The music is presented here in continuous form and is cinematic by design. As in a film, scenes move backward and forward in time and space and characters appear and disappear without much by way of explanation. The scenes have been formed by slashing apart the forms of the original songs with which I started the project and reassembling them into this new form. It's *not* music looking for an imaginary film, but more like a combination of screenplay and music at the same time. To the best of my knowledge no-one has attempted such a project before."

According to Peter Hammill's website, "A vinyl release presents the songs in a different order and in a slightly edited form". But an LP contains tracks with different titles.

3CD contains the main CD as well as one in which the individual songs are presented in more conventional fashion. The third CD is a stripped down instrumental collage.




If you know of Van der Graaf Generator, then the name Peter Hammill is not a strange, unknown one to you. Van der Graaf Generator is a UK progressive band best known for their output during the time-frame of the ’70s. Although they did not gain the notoriety  that Genesis, Can, or other progressive bands of the time, they still had compelling material for those that discovered them, and stayed loyal fans.

From that band came Peter Hammill, who had more success as a solo performer than he did with the band. There were multiple iterations of Van der Graaf Generator, but when they decided to split, when they did, he kept up with his prolific solo efforts. Over time, Peter Hammill produced more than thirty solo albums. And so, it’s no surprise that there is a new Peter Hammill album in the wings.

On November 24, …All That Might Have Been…, the latest Peter Hammill album, will be released in several formats that will include a single CD, a special edition 3CD Box, and a vinyl LP set, as well as digital downloads of the tunes. The twenty-track set is actually one continuous stream of music with shifting scenes, hence the song titles. This will be in its intended state on the single CD edition. The vinyl LP will contain the songs in slightly edited form, and with a different running order. The 3CD Box will contain the standalone CD, and will add in a conventional style, with each song presented as songs found on the second disc. The third CD will include stripped down instrumental presentations of the songs.

Yay! New Peter Hammill. It always puts a smile on my face.

MARowe on 4 November, 2014
www.musictap.net
 


Reviewing a new Peter Hammill album is never easy, but it’s always fun. Never more so than now.  Hammill’s had something of a late-career renaissance, producing some of the most intellectually dense (Incoherence) and emotionally moving (Thin Air) albums in the mid to late 2000s, plus the outstanding Otherworld with Gary Lucas, released earlier this year.

But here’s the fun part: none of those albums, or indeed anything in Hammill’s expansive oeuvre, could prepare one for the sprawling …all that might have been… Welcome to a musical film, where, as Hammill says, the music is both film and soundtrack. Welcome to the world of Alien Clocks and Piper Smiles, to vocals as wild as anything since Hammill’s guest stint on Robert Fripp’s Exposure. And while you’re walking around this sonic wonderland, you won’t be able to ignore guitar riffs lifted straight out of Hammill’s pre-punk Nadir’s Big Chance album, and overall the most sonically dense and widest palette of sounds Hammill’s thrown together to date.

…all that might have been… comes in two formats. The main presentation of the work is meant to be a 70-odd minute audio version of a film. To that end, snippets of songs are woven together to form a kind of anti-narrative that nonetheless gives clues as to situations and predicaments. The film that Hammill’s making, of course, isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster. It isn’t even new. Instead, it plays out like an homage to the French New Wave films, film noir, and perhaps a certain Japanese film called Audition. Hammill’s character comes off as an amalgam of all the tough-guy romantic gangster types with, if not hearts of gold, a sense of existential dread – think Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless or Pierrot le Fou.  The unsettling time jumps in Hammill’s work are also a nod to Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

The Japanese theme of the last film mentioned isn’t an accident. A good portion of the action in this album takes place in a metropolitan area of Japan. (Perhaps Hammill was doing research during his extended residencies in Japan over the past several years.) What happens in Japan stays between the 0s and 1s of the disc, but we get enough of a sense to know that our character has brought a heap of trouble on himself.

And then there’s the Piper Smile. In a sense, this story, such as it is, draws heavily from several of the faerie myths of the Piper, who gave a gift to a poor soul with instructions to never disrespect the gift. As these tales go, the gift’s recipient inevitably messes up, and is left bereft once more. The woman Hammill’s character is romantically involved with is the Piper. Her gift was narrative.

An unsettling but wholly satisfying piece of work for sure, but there’s more. Hammill is releasing this cine-album as a single disc, but he’s also releasing It as one of a three-disc set. Disc two of this set comprises the full songs from which the snippets that weave in and out of disc one are taken. A curious move, for sure, to release the album of actual songs as an “extra.” But Hammill’s confidence in the cine-album as having enough strength to be the leading card is well-placed. The songs, probably because in some sense Hammill knew that they were going to be spliced up, are themselves full of changes. Almost all the songs go through several dramatic changes and rarely end up where they started. It’s as if one of the epic and lengthy songs by his band, Van der Graaf Generator, was compressed into a five-minute frame, with all the abrupt changes left intact. Disc two, consists of ten excellent new songs by Hammill, which provide a hell of a musical ride of another kind. The third disc is simply four long tracks with improvisations on the main themes presented in the first two discs. A nice listen, but without the punch of the “cine” disc or the “songs” disc.

Hyperbole is its own worst enemy in the genre of music reviewing, so believe me when I say I’m taking the leap anyway and putting my money on this one being the most ambitious and successful album of Hammill’s career.

November 17, 2014 by dpcoffey
AMN Reviews



For over 40 years, Peter Hammill has been a cult figure in British music. Both solo and with Van der Graaf Generator, he has pursued a highly distinctive career around a seemingly endless series of albums and an unswerving commitment to live performance. Although Hammill's work over the years has adopted a wide variety of styles – from baroque prog rock to snotty proto-punk, from new wave riffage to elegant chamber music – it's always been characterised by its originality, its lyrical intelligence and by his magnificent singing voice. A serious heart attack in 2003, far from slowing Hammill down as one might have expected, galvanised him into a late surge of creativity, resulting in a run of albums that include some of his finest music since his acclaimed 1970s work.

With …All That Might Have Been…, Hammill presents another autumnal masterpiece, one of the most sprawling and ambitious albums of his career.  The album had a complex gestation that is reflected in its multifaceted presentation – it's available as a standard CD, a vinyl LP and a 3CD set, all of which offer different perspectives on the same material. As recounted by Hammill in a sleeve essay, the story goes that the music was originally worked up as ten individual songs, self-contained but with a submerged narrative thread running through them, a series of cinematic takes on a relationship. To mark the occasion of a 2013 tour of Japan, Hammill produced a 40-minute "work in progress" CD that presented a continuous mix of the songs as they then stood. Having absorbed the material in this form, Hammill hit upon the idea of cutting the completed songs up into pieces, reordering them and presenting the rearranged fragments as a continuous whole. It's this so-called ciné version that Hammill regards as the main release of …All That Might Have Been…, and which is presented on the standard CD edition of the album and disc 1 of the 3CD set. The individual songs are presented on the vinyl LP and on disc 2 of the 3CD set, while disc 3 consists of a revised version of the "work in progress" CD.

Although the ciné version is certainly the most rewarding way into this material, it's also a rather demanding listen, best experienced in a single sitting. Newcomers might prefer to start with the songs CD, which tells the story, murky as it is, in some kind of chronological order. The soundworld is sombre and nocturnal, with looming analogue synths pierced by shards of electric guitar and augmented by spare, restrained percussion. Occasional nervy grooves and bursts of angry riffing disrupt the mostly glacial and dreamlike tempo, and through it all runs Hammill's unique voice – an instrument of turbulent beauty, richly expressive and filled with existential sorrow. On key tracks like 'Someday (The Piper Smile)' and 'Disrespect (In Kabuki-cho)' multitracked backing vocals comment on the action in a higher register, adding to the sense of a tale being told from multiple, fractured perspectives.

Hammill's characters are a man and woman caught up in a stormy love affair. Their relationship is recounted in a series of glancing, allusive scenes, told mostly from the male point of view. By turns lyrical, reflective and conversational, Hammill's text casts the protagonists into a netherworld of shadowy, neon-lit zones. As the first lines of the first song run, "In overview the light expired, and with it went the narrative he'd always craved." Those craving narrative will indeed find little of solace here, save for a final scene in which "even though he knew this was goodbye for good, he couldn't tell her, just couldn't find the words to say."

Drifting fuzzily in time and space, the ciné version takes lyrical and musical elements from all ten songs and stitches them into a single fifty-minute piece. The impact of this technique is striking, cutting the listener further adrift from narrative coherence and lending the enterprise even more of a filmic (albeit European arthouse, not Hollywood blockbuster) quality. Sounds, images and half-buried melodies coalesce, mutate and burn out. We've come to expect music of such acute, restless brilliance from Peter Hammill, but this is like nothing he (or anyone else, for that matter) has ever done before. …All That Might Have Been… is a worthy addition to a remarkable body of work.

Richard Rees Jones , January 8th, 2015
TheQuietus.com



The last conversation I had on the subject of Peter Hammill, several years ago, was with the novelist Nick Hornby, who upbraided me for having cost him the price of an album when he decided to act upon my warm recommendation, in the pages of the Melody Maker, for an album by Hammill’s band, Van Der Graaf Generator. This was 1970, and Hornby was 13 years old. When he got the record home and listened to it, he wasn’t happy. The resentment seemed to have lingered, although I wouldn’t suggest that this is necessarily why we haven’t spoken since.

Now, almost four and a half decades since that ill-fated recommendation, I have another one for him, also involving Hammill. The singer has filled the intervening years with activity, most of it as a solo artist and songwriter. I can’t claim to have kept a close watch on his progress, meaning that his new record, …all that might have been…, arrives as all the more of a revelation.

The album came about while Hammill was trying to assemble lyrics to go with music that he’d been putting together himself, using notes that he’d made over a period of years. He realised that he could use these fragments of observed behaviour, sidelong glimpses collected during his time as a travelling musician, to create something he’d long wanted to achieve: a series of songs that could then be fractured and reassembled in an order that would make the narrative more elusive and suggestive — more “filmic”, to use his word.

…all that might have been… comes in three different CD forms. The first, titled the RETRO, contains the original instrumental sound beds: mostly synths, guitars, bass and a bit of percussion. The second, the SONGS, consists of the 10 basic compositions. The third, the CINÉ, is the finished 40-minute tapestry of 21 linked pieces, cut up and rearranged, most of them no more than two minutes long. You can buy the latter separately, or all three together in a box.

There’s a story of sorts to the full CINÉ version, although Hammill intentionally leaves it ambiguous. We know that a man and a woman are involved, and that the viewpoint is mostly male. We can work out that, after a certain amount of ecstasy and rather more anguish, nothing ends happily.

“I’ve never been one to like dogma or absolute linearity to be at the core of songs, and I’ve always been keen on the idea of ‘show not tell’,” he writes in a sleeve essay. He describes the result as “the flickering light of things half-seen and often only half-understood.”

I’ll buy that. It’s how, inside ourselves, some of us perceive our life in the world: as a barely coherent series of events, internal and external, on which we fail to impose order and whose meaning changes according to the light, with an inevitable existential loneliness at its core. Hammill’s voice finds the right tone, or series of tones: he’s often compared to Bowie, but although he can certainly declaim his range also encompasses the sort of sensitivity associated with the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. His overdubbed backing vocals function as a Greek chorus: commenting, interrupting, supporting, contradicting.

The  musical settings — mostly synths, occasional guitar, prowling bass, a sprinkling of percussion — ensure that the work never lapses into melodrama. There’s a lot of rubato but occasionally, as with “Inklings, Darling”, one of the two longer tracks, a light groove is allowed to settle. Hammill has been spending time in Japan recently, and perhaps you can hear the influence of kotos and shamisens from time to time, although never explicitly. The result is very spare, almost ambient, understated but nevertheless full of relevant incident: a partner rather than a soundtrack to the narrative. “He Turns Away”, the penultimate piece in the cycle (appearing in full as “Until” on the SONGS disc), is a thing of haunting beauty.

This feels like one of the big achievements of a long career. His devoted admirers will adore it, but it deserves a much wider audience. And if you don’t like this one, Nick, you can have your money back.

…all that might have been… is available from Hammill’s website, sofasound.com, as a single disc or a 3CD box. My only reservation is that I wish the singer or his designer had made the lyrics more easily legible, rather than reversing them out of the photographs in the booklets that accompany the box set.

Richard Williams - November 17, 2014
thebluemoment.com



Brandneues Soloalbum der Van Der Graaf Generator-Galionsfigur Peter Hammill!

Das neue Soloalbum von Peter Hammill besteht nicht aus konventionellen Songs. Diese Stücke wurden zwar auf reguläre Art komponiert, aber anders bearbeitet, produziert, geschnitten und umgeordnet, um ein zusammenhängendes Ganzes zu bilden. Wie in einem Film fließen verschiedene Szenen ineinander, rückwärts und vorwärts, bewegt in Zeit und Raum. Verschiedene Charaktere erscheinen und verschwinden, warten im Schatten oder sind plötzlich vorne auf der Bühne und im Rampenlicht. Es ist ein Helldunkel, die Welt verwandelt sich hier in Treibsand, in dem die Musik sowohl ihr eigener Soundtrack und Drehbuch ist. Peter Hammill hat ungewöhlich lange daran gearbeitet, ganze 18 Monate, die längste Zeit in seiner Solokariere. Das Album hat viele unerwartete Wendungen und Verwandlungen, bevor die Songs in ihrer engültigen Form als Ganzes ankommen. Dabei handelt es sich keinesfalls um ein Konzeptalbum – Hammill verwendet diverse bruchstückhafte Texturen der Soundscapes, die näher an einen Soundtrack einer filmischen Komposition als an einen narrativen Song erinnern. Die Klangpalette der Instrumente reicht von Gitarren, Synths, zerstückelten Beats bis zum eindringlichen Gesang von Hammill. »...All That Might Have Been...« ist definitiv ein komplett anderes Werk als alles andere, was Hammill in seinen 45 Jahren als Musiker veröffentlicht hat.

Amazon.de



Diese beinhaltet die normale Standard-CD, 2. CD feat. »Songs Version« und ist ähnlich wie die LP, nur länger und in anderer Anordnung und führt zu einer anderen »Erzählung«.
Und die 3. CD bildet »Retro«-Version ab: eine 1 / 2 Stunde von einem Instrumentalstück, das Work-In-Progress wiederspiegelt und von Peter Hammill während seiner Japan-Tour 2013 erarbeitet hat. Diese 3.CD beinhaltet auch einige musikalische Fragmente, die das nicht aufs reguläre Album geschafft haben. Dazu kommen noch zwei 16-seitige Booklets mit Lyrics und Notizen, die das Werk ein wenig näher erklären.

JPC.de
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


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