This Heat – Health And Efficiency

Conceived between the release of their debut LP and 'Deceit', the 'Health & Efficiency' EP is a concentrated sample of This Heat's genius and originality.

The EP opens with the magnificent 'Health and Efficency' on side A, which, for 2 minutes, has the appearance of one of these songs of post-punk youth, "Here's a song about the sunshine…" but this suddenly switches into a first drawer-territory all in nagging repetition, as if something in the piece was frozen in a crystalline and chaotic loop. A space is created, literally, in this repetition, sculpturally. A sharp rhythmic inside reflects an outside animated by screams, children's games, bottles rolling on the ground, and listening is carried away with the whole body. Then the piece shifts into a final fold, as if underlying, where everything airs out, moves away, a distant residue of what was the initial energy of the piece transformed into a murky, glassy and blurry reverie, which allows you to leave the magic circle.
There are a few things in the architecture of this piece that refer to the kraut-trance-punk experiments of Swell Maps, with an icy rigor specific to This Heat.

'Graphic / Varispeed' can be disconcerting, if we try to limit This Heat to a "rock group". This Heat was above all a territory of experimentation, as demonstrated by the inaugural first LP.
'Graphic / Varispeed' is quite simply, in my opinion, another strategy of erasing temporal frames, as their monumental '24 Tracks Loop' could have been. With the difference that here (to quote Phill Niblock): “No rhythm, no melody, no bullshit!” The piece is a one block cast, also a warped map that transforms the domestic listening space into an organic and changing room of mirrors. Here we are much closer to the American experimental approaches of La Monte Young in his 'Drift Studies', or Alvin Lucier or even the electronic side of Charlemagne Palestine. An approach which will perhaps disturb but will also open towards other fascinating manners and habits, outside of rock aesthetics.

In the end, 'Health and Efficiency' is a fascinating flash which totalizes all the radicality of the group and which allows us to move from the ferocious experiments of the first LP to the insular singularity of the second.
The fact that it was once again Piano Records which published the thing originaly, label of the flying lizard David Cunningham, is not surprising. It was the outlet, for this crazy composer, of all the madness which was too far from the strangely pop Flying Lizards. There, This Heat rubbed shoulders with Michael Nyman, the visual artist-video maker Tony Sinden, Steve Beresford… In short, a major part of the English experimental scene of this period.

An incredible pressing.
It is also cool how the lyrics are printed on the back of the sleeve in different languages.
"Движение сильнее застоя"