CD - Date Records, DACD 9.00564 O (Germany, 88)	Peter Hammill & Guy Evans: Spur of the Moment 1. Sweating It Out [6:34] 2. Surprise / Little Did He Know [9:31] 3. Without a Glitch [3:29] 4. Anatol's Proposal [4:01] 5. You Think Not? [4:03] 6. Multiman [8:07] 7. Deprogramming Archie [1:46] 8. Always So Polite [5:24] 9. An Imagined Brother [5:21] 10. Bounced [5:11] 11. Roger and Out [1:37] All tracks by Hammill / Evans except * by     Hammill / Evans / Ridout
Musicians:	Guy Evans - all kind of percussion Peter Hammill - guitars, keyboards
Other credits:	Produced by Peter Hammill Recorded and mixed at Sofa Sound, Freshford, Bath Remastered at Crescent Studios, Bath Engineered by Peter Hammill and Paul Ridout Sleeve by Ridout All compositions published by Static Music, Ltd

R e l e a s e   N o t e s

This is the first collaborative venture by Peter Hammill and Guy Evans since their days as members of Van der Graaf Generator. This music is instrumental and entirely improvised.         Peter Haammill plays grand piano, semi-acoustic guitar and, principally, a mother keyboard driving various rock-mounted samplers and synthesizers.         Guy Evans performs on a percussion 'kit' consisting of a number of acoustic instruments and an Octapad with which he triggers a variety of sampled and synthesized sounds. Some of these belong to the traditional percussion family, included sampled versions of intruments of his own design; others are pianos, strings, woodwind and other customised voices..         Additionally, both players use samples taken from various field recordings, and often play 'mirror images' of each others' sounds. In much of this music the straight edges of the conventional instrument/instrumentalist picture become blurred; often the overall effect is some strange modern variant on the traditional piano duet.         Each piece of improvisation was preceded by a process of 'instrument selection' in which the sounds which each player could control were chosen, and fundamental note-patterns for the ensuing performances were decided upon. Beyound this, no structure for the music was arranged ind advance, and complete performances were then recorded both on tape and sequencers; in the course of this, sounds and scales could be changed both by the performers themselves and by paul Ridout, who was in charge of the live and computer recordings as well as being librarion and editor of the voices employed. Selections were then taken from the resulting improvisations and were mixed and treated, without overdubbing, to produce the music contained herein. In places, the use of cross-fades moves the action from one moment's landscape to another; in some cases, loops were taken from performances, either in computer sequence or analogue tape form, from which 'new' pieces emerged. In genereal, though, this music is in real time, and the discovery and development of the themes and patterns are heard exactly as they happened.         Although these pieces are incapable of being placed in any normal musical classification they draw on the spirits, sounds and styles of all. "Spur of the Moment" is an effort - by a pair of musicians with two decades of shared playing experience - to pull together the tradition and excitement of improvisation with the challenges and technical opportunities offered by modern instruments and recording techniques... something new.