Van der Graaf Tribute Site - Discography: The Appointed Hour

CD - Fie! Records, FIE 9120
(UK, 1999)
Peter Hammill / Roger Eno:
The Appointed Hour

Up [2:33]
Are They [2:01]
Your Heart [5:57]
And Let This [2:25]
Wise Men [4:00]
So How [1:43]
To Know [1:40]
Fools [3:32]
In [1:14]
Where [2:59]
To Tread [2:01]
Fool Rush [2:56]
Fear [3:22]
Open [1:34]
Never [3:36]
Rush In [0:57]
But [3:11]
In Love [5:12]
Angels [5:02]
Fall [4:09]
All pieces by R. Eno and P. Hammill,
published by Notting Hill Music & Static Music Ltd.

Musicians: Peter Hammill - guitars, keyboards
Roger Eno - keyboards

Other credits: Recorded at The Clerestory, Bungay,
and Terra Incognita, Bath
Assembled and mixed at Terra Incognita
Artwork & design by RidArt
Photos by Booth
© 1999 Eno/Hammill
Sound Samples

R e l e a s e N o t e s

The music that you hear on this disc is the result of a distant meeting; it is also the fruit of chance, a lucky accident, a fluke.
Peter and I have met but once, on a coach... ...we first bumped into each other on the way to a cave on Lanzarote where we were both performing.
...by the long distance communication of Christmas Cards, which one or the other can ignore if not reciprocated. We stayed in touch...
Years passed and, perhaps drunk, I phoned Peter mentioning that little would be lost if we were to consider a collaboration. He agreed and so we did not put our minds to it... ...it seemed a good and potentially fruitful idea, as long as we could find some "Art Glue" to give the project focus. Eventually...
...Peter had the unnervingly fine idea of recording for one hour between one and two in the afternoon of April 1st 1999. Encouragingly, Roger jumped at the idea with a wholehearted laugh.
We recorded in our own studios far away from each other, but how close!
A strange thing happened: as the hour approached: I became nervous, as though playing to an audience. A quite peculiar phenomenon, normally I'm all too relaxed in my studio. This preciousness of time...
..."here is my hour of unsilence. I now know little about it. All is open."
I had spent a frantic half hour beforehand preparing various. delay lines and patches so that I would be able to "overdub" myself in real time and move from keyboard to guitar and back without interruping the flow. Once the hour began I became competely focused, both on what I was playing and on the imagined other happening in Suffolk. The hour passed in the frantic/slow motion blur which I normally only associate with live performance...
A thing built of chance, of different elements tied together, with no artifice and little plan, with no concrete idea, two people figuring it out... The hour up, I sent off a tape of my performance and waited with some trepidation for Roger's to arrive. Imagined that, if we were lucky, we might come up with i) individual passages of (solo) worth; ii) some moments of synchronocity which could stand in their own right; iii) several germs-of-ideas which we could develop, adapt, overdub and treat. With a combination of these strands I hoped that we would arrive at "an album" of mixed parts.
I imediatelly put the two performances in synch and was amazed to find that our mutual, time-locked but distanced concentration had in fact produced not two separate, occasionally coincident performances but the one whole event which is the content of this CD.
...wondering what could become of this unbaked idea and then, for my part at least, thinking it was so easy, so very, very easy. Between the two of us,, this most particular hour has been embedded in this music.
I suppose that we made our own luck.
Roger Eno Peter Hammill

The music that you hear on this disc is the result of a distant meeting; it is also the fruit of chance, a lucky accident, a fluke. Peter and I have met but once, on a coach...	...we first bumped into each other on the way to a cave on Lanzarote where we were both performing.
...by the long distance communication of Christmas Cards, which one or the other can ignore if not reciprocated.	We stayed in touch...
Years passed and, perhaps drunk, I phoned Peter mentioning that little would be lost if we were to consider a collaboration. He agreed and so we did not put our minds to it...	...it seemed a good and potentially fruitful idea, as long as we could find some "Art Glue" to give the project focus. Eventually...
...Peter had the unnervingly fine idea of recording for one hour between one and two in the afternoon of April 1st 1999.	Encouragingly, Roger jumped at the idea with a wholehearted laugh.
We recorded in our own studios far away from each other, but how close! A strange thing happened: as the hour approached: I became nervous, as though playing to an audience. A quite peculiar phenomenon, normally I'm all too relaxed in my studio. This preciousness of time... ..."here is my hour of unsilence. I now know little about it. All is open."	I had spent a frantic half hour beforehand preparing various. delay lines and patches so that I would be able to "overdub" myself in real time and move from keyboard to guitar and back without interruping the flow. Once the hour began I became competely focused, both on what I was playing and on the imagined other happening in Suffolk. The hour passed in the frantic/slow motion blur which I normally only associate with live performance...
A thing built of chance, of different elements tied together, with no artifice and little plan, with no concrete idea, two people figuring it out...	The hour up, I sent off a tape of my performance and waited with some trepidation for Roger's to arrive. Imagined that, if we were lucky, we might come up with i) individual passages of (solo) worth; ii) some moments of synchronocity which could stand in their own right; iii) several germs-of-ideas which we could develop, adapt, overdub and treat. With a combination of these strands I hoped that we would arrive at "an album" of mixed parts. I imediatelly put the two performances in synch and was amazed to find that our mutual, time-locked but distanced concentration had in fact produced not two separate, occasionally coincident performances but the one whole event which is the content of this CD.
...wondering what could become of this unbaked idea and then, for my part at least, thinking it was so easy, so very, very easy.	Between the two of us,, this most particular hour has been embedded in this music. I suppose that we made our own luck.
*Roger Eno*	*Peter Hammill*