Very few artists get to make a thirtieth studio album, but then very few artists are as militantly committed to the creative process as Peter Hammill. Incoherence was originally released in 2004, on the Van der Graaf Generator man’s own Fie! Imprint, and was swiftly recognised as one of the most adventurous and absorbing records he had ever made.
A concept album about the ambiguities and inadequacies of language, it was an enthusiastic nosedive into the long-form experiments that Hammill had dabbled in with early classics like A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers (from Van der Graaf Generator’s Pawn Hearts) and Flight (from aggressively experimental solo album A Black Box). A 42-minute suite of songs, some fully realised but mostly presented as a collage of conjoined fragments, it remains one of the great man’s most powerful creations and the beginning of a meandering run of strong albums that continues to this day.
Almost entirely performed by Hammill himself, with former colleague David Jackson and the late, great Stuart Gordon contributing saxophone and violin respectively, drum-less songwriting shards like Babel and Cretans Always Lie combine to form a single, blearily poetic epic.
This expanded revamp features a new “continuous” mix of the original record, and a disc of Hammill’s mixes of the individual songs that were plundered and chopped up for Incoherence’s patchwork approach. A much-anticipated vinyl edition features a second, LP-specific mix and a gatefold lyric insert. Much like its 29 predecessors, Incoherence offers a unique glimpse into the febrile mind of a restless genius.
