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LP
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MCR 921LP
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"Camberwell, in South London, pops up infrequently in pop culture. Perhaps you know it from the Camberwell Carrot, the heroically sized joint smoked in cult movie Withnail & I, or perhaps -- if you're attuned to experimental music -- you know of Camberwell Now. The group formed from the ashes of This Heat, the art-noise group whose catalog was reissued on Modern Classics Recordings in early 2016. Not so much a supersession as a continuation of that group, Camberwell Now featured This Heat's vocalist / drummer Charles Hayward, who assembled an unusual line-up comprising Stephen Rickard, a former BBC sound engineer, on field recordings and tape manipulation and Trefor Goronwy on bass, vocals and ukulele. 'We had a very specific set of skills,' says Hayward, in new liner notes compiled for this long overdue reissue, 'and it wasn't immediately clear to us how best to bring them together so that we could play live.' Arriving in 1986, The Ghost Trade, the group's sole full-length LP, was what existed at the confluence of live performance and studio experimentation. Similar to This Heat's process, the group spent two years in Cold Storage experimenting with the studio and assembling finished songs from vast quantities of tapes. Their two EPs, re-issued as The EP Collection, were borne of a similar process but each with unique yields. The tracks that eventually formed The Ghost Trade were songs forged in the bleak beauty of Thatcher's London. 'To me, the sounds invoked humanity trapped behind and inside a world constructed of glass, steel, and concrete, frozen inside the textures like prisoners of the twilight zone, humanity haunting a landscape it had made for itself,' says Hayward. First vinyl re-issue, includes bonus track 'Daddy Needs A Throne'. Official re-issue in collaboration with original members. 24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes. Restored art, expanded to a gatefold tip-on jacket. Includes download card, 8 page booklet with track notes by the artists, lyrics and archival photos."
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CD
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DUP 022CD
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2021 restock. The complete works of this post-This Heat band featuring Charles Hayward, recorded 1982-1986. Featuring these original releases: Meridian, The Ghost Trade & Greenfingers LP/EPs. "This definitive edition collects the entire released output of Camberwell Now (two EPs and an LP), newly re-mastered by the band and repackaged with full notes, lyrics, additional photographs and artwork. Chronologically, Camberwell Now immediately succeeded This Heat, Charles Hayward continuing to work with This Heat's last bassist Trefor Goronwy, and the two of them joining forces with Stephen Rickard who, for the new band, designed his unique 'cassette switchboard,' a kind of proto-sampler -- though that's not the half of it (Steve's article fully explaining the device is reprinted in the new, expanded booklet that comes with the CD). Musically, Camberwell both followed and departed from the style of This Heat. Formally and gesturally there are common elements, but there is far greater transparency and the sound palette is quite different: the music is more placed than grown, as the slow accumulation and evolution of material in This Heat gives way to a more immediate and orderly development of the material in Camberwell Now. The songs -- nostalgic, scary, and quietly desperate -- peer into the future to find harbour but confront only fragments of ruin. Debris and disturbance eat away at the root and corrode each shiny surface (mostly the musical work of the cassette switchboard). The juxtaposition of powerful, virtuosic playing and the eerie, often unidentifiable keenings, chords and constant motion of the cassettes is one of the things that make Camberwell Now so expressive of its time -- when the whole social and political fabric of a no-longer-great Britain was unravelling. Camberwell Now worked and recorded in Cold Storage, and toured intermittently through Europe between 1983 and 1986, when they disbanded."
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