Tim Hodgkinson

Henry Cow's keyboardist Tim Hodgkinson formed the Work with guitarist Bill Gilonis, bassist Mick Hobbs, drummer Rick Wilson. The combo debuted with Slow Crimes (january 1982 - Woof, 1982), a cycle of 16 brief songs featuring emphatic vocalist Catherine Jauniaux, sloppy polyrhythms, guitar cacophony, with peaks of grotesque bacchanal in Balance, State Room and Knives, fits of pseudo-punk schizophrenia in Pop and Like This, nightmares of pseudo-disco edonism in Cain & Abel.

Live In Japan (Woof, 1982) was performed by a different quartet with Chris Cutler on drums. Hodgkinson's psychotic/emphatic vocals and jagged guitar lines erupted with the energy of hard rock, supported by intense drumming and assorted instrumental convolutions. But none of the twelve brief pieces was worthy of the classic Art Bears sound, and certainly the inferior vocals were part of the problem.

He then helped Catherine Jauniaux record Fluvial (1984), a more eclectic and original album of stylistic contaminations. Work's guitarist Bill Gilonis and vocalist Catherine Jauniaux also formed the Hat Shoes, a quartet with Charles Hayward of This Heat and cellist Tom Cora. They released Differently Desperate (1991) and Home (2001).

Splutter (1986), solo clarinet improvisations, and Shams (1988), experimental duets with percussionist Ken Hyder, displayed Hodgkinson's avantgarde ambitions. Gilonis also released Zurich Bamberg (ReR, 2009), a long-distance collaboration with Chantale Laplante that consists in "concrete" collages of found sounds, recorded between 2002 and 2006.

Tim Hodgkinson then formed a new group, Momes, that released Spiralling (Woof, 1989).

Work's original line-up reunited for Rubber Cage (december 1990 - Woof, 1991), boasting a vastly more professional and structured sound and little of the raw punkish hysteria of Slow Crimes, and See (Discmedi, 1992 - ReR, 2010), that contained intricate industrial-blues songs such as Rim and Warehouse and especially the Charles Ives-ian mini-symphony Shine. Their last album, The 4th World (ReR, 2010), recorded in 1994, was only released 16 years later: 20 pieces (mostly very short) that ran the gamut from blues to electroacoustic music, with theusual doses of the usual brainy songs.

Each In Our Own Thoughts (Woof, 1995) collects unreleased compositions that date back to the early Henry Cow years (Hold To The Zero Burn) and that display Hodgkinson's ambitions in classical music (String Quartet 1, Numunous Pools for Mental Orchestra).

The idea was further developed on Pragma (Rift, 1997), a set of pieces that mix improvisation and composition, conceived for a combination of computers, samples and live instruments.

Sang (ReR, 2000) continued the exploration of new techniques: The Crackle Of Forests (possibly his most significant orchestral composition), The Road To Erzin and Gushe each employs a different set of elements and heads in a different direction, revisiting ideas that hark back to Edgar Varese and Arnold Schoenberg while assimilating sampling, world-music and free-jazz.

Hodgkinson's project Konk Pact, on the other hand, released the live album The Big Deep and especially Warp Out (Grob, 2002), whose three lengthy compositions straddle the border between psychedelia and free-jazz, and therefore mark a return to the Work.

K-Space was a collaboration between Hodgkinson, drummer Ken Hyder and Siberian shaman Gendos Chamzyryn. The music on Going Up (Ad Hoc, 2005) resulted from the studio manipulation of their playing, singing, chatting and field recordings. Wolf takes almost eight minutes to come out of a diluted cacophonic fog. The shaman sounds like Captain Beefheart and the British duo tunes in by playing skewed lines and improbable bluesy rhythms like the Magic Band used to. Yellow Canal hides the shaman's cries in a dense magma of distortions, and K-Kosmos smothers them into a loose galaxy of noise, and Ocheeshenia transforms them into a mantric "om". The subtlety of these tracks disappears in the percussive orgy of Three Dungurs and the 16-minute bacchanal Black Sky, the one piece where the duo unleashes its prog-rock credentials.

K-Space's brief Infinity (ReR, 2008) was an experiment in delivering music to the public: the music, equipped with custom software, plays only on a computer, and every time it plays differently (according to some internal logic) and no part of it can be paused or skipped. In other words, the piece is an indivisible whole, that can only be rearranged (according to its own laws not to the listener's desires). Aside from the technicalities, the piece is one lengthy and chaotic excursion into primitive percussive music, a tribal-shamanic-psychedelic mayhem with atonal instruments.

K-Space's Black Sky (2013) is a live album.

Tim Hodgkinson's Konk Pack returned with Doing The Splash (Megaphone, 2013), featuring Thomas Lehn (analog synthesizer) and Roger Turner (drumset & percussion).

Under The Void (2020) contains three compositions: the Under the Void (composed between 2016 and 2018) for flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, horn, trombone, 2 violins, 2 violas, cello, bass, piano and percussion, electronic simulated; Then (2019) for virtual strings, brass, woodwinds, accordion and piano, combined with real Siberian frame drums, gongs, viola, electronics, bowed cymbals, lap steel guitar and keyboards; and Ortemchei (2019), assembled from parts of a live performance by Chris Cutler (percussion), Angharad Davies (violin), Edward Lucas (trombone), Mayah Kadish (violin), Alex Paxton (trombone), Lucy Railton (cello), Gwen Reed (bass), Mark Sanders (percussion), Yoni Silver (bass clarinet) and Otto Willberg (bass).