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ARTIST
TITLE
The HCA
FORMAT
LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
JAKARTA 185LP
JAKARTA 185LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
9/8/2023
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"Jakarta Records & Uno Loop are thrilled to announce Bowes Road Band's LP Back in the HCA. In 1972, four design students at the now defunct Hornsey College of Art (HCA) in London decided to make a record; neither the result of nascent dreams of stardom nor of fastidiously developed musicianship. Bowes Road Band's sole LP was simply the result of an impulse to create. With only fifty copies originally pressed, the LP's Berlin flea market discovery revealed a foray into a delicately balanced world of psycho-trip meltdowns, rich jazz improvisations, and tuneful folk stylings. Hear echoes of Mark Fry's Dreaming With Alice, Donovan's honeyed folk, the Kinks's blistering blues rock & more on Back in the HCA. In 1972, a foursome of design students set out to make a record. This was, in many ways, a strictly creative endeavor. The quartet -- composed of Dave Pescod, Alan Lewis, Phil Rawle, and Ted Rockley -- were all trained, not as musicians, but as creatives. Art school heavyweights, the four were well-versed in the methodology of intentional experimentation, in the delicate balance of pushing the limits without completely unmooring oneself from a guiding creative intention. Emboldened by a high-brow familiarity with thoughtful experimentation and all the non-conviction of non-musicians, Bowes Road Band's stint in the world of popular music yielded a record that is as much mind-melting as it is a direct product of its time. Their sprawling LP Back in the HCA embodies the exigence 'art for art's sake,' but it is for art's sake that this record, however off the deep end it seems to travel (hear: 'Doctor, Doctor'), remains a unified, and stunning, body of work. The LP's do-it-yourself garage rock noisemaking meets highfalutin creative processes. Back in the HCA is warbling psychedelic freakout, Donovan-esque English countryside folk stylings, and avant-garde jazz improvisions in one luminous release. Originally a nine-track LP, Jakarta, Uno Loop, and Bowes Road Band decided to mine the six most cohesive tracks for the reissue, though the extras may be released somewhere down the line. Cohesion efforts aside, Back in the HCA stands alone in its singular conception of a genre-bending continuum -- it evades definition."
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