A GROUNDING IN NUMBERS

This was one of the harder albums of the VdGG reunion for me to get into. A Grounding In Numbers was the result of an interesting recording process where, aside from a week of studio time together to lay down the basic tracks, the band members worked on their overdubs and editing and banging the compositions into shape remotely.

Whilst such remote working methods are by no means uncommon in the digital age, on initial listens I felt that it'd been mishandled - the mix on the album and the compositions in general felt slightly off, breaking the illusion that all this music is being created in the same room and creating a disjointed feeling which made it difficult for me to get into the album.

What made it click a little better was approaching it less like a VdGG album and more like a late-period Peter Hammill solo album, with the other Van der Graaf members guesting. It doesn't have the "spark" I associate with the Generator's raw and primal glory days, but it does have the sort of experimental intricacy that Hammill increasingly delves into over the progression of his solo career. The main result of the embellishment process here seems to have been to make all of the tracks somewhat over-busy - in its best moments it makes the band sound like a free jazz band playing rock music, but at other points it can tend towards dissonance for dissonance's sake, of the sort heavily featured on the subsequent all-improvisational release Alt. The moments where it comes together are more or less worth it, but it's harder work than any prior VdGG album.