A BLACK BOX

Continuing the approach of pH7, A Black Box sees Hammill adopt a sparse, dark sound which sees him playing and programming most of the instruments, but for guest appearances by David Jackson and David Ferguson. Opening with the almost conventional Golden Promises, the album charts (through songs such as Losing Faith In Words and The Jargon King) a course of disintegration into minimalistic experimentalism which recombines to form the New Wave prog of Flight, the twenty minute epic that closes the album. Challenging, and not for everyone - even by prog standards - but perhaps the purest expression of the course Hammill's music had taken in the late 1970s. Things would get more accessible with his next release of the 1980s, so this is about as far out as it gets.