HIMMEL

Himmel at the MIMI Festival, Marseille

Richard came to work for ReR (part time, like everybody here) in 1991. At the time he and Andy Saunders were Towering Inferno who were shortly to release the extraordinary Kaddish – which was later reissued at Brian Eno’s recommendation by Island Records. In the 14 years Richard worked with us, there was a string of Towering Inferno concerts from Vienna to Moscow, Melbourbe to Biudapest; and I joined them for some at the Edinburgh Festival, in 1996 - and they were working, very slowly, toward a second CD. One morning, Richard said he felt strange, strange enough to go to the local A&E, where they looked him over and sent him home. Later that evening he died, very suddenly, of a ruptured aorta. Unknown to anyone, he’d inherited a congenital heart weakness. The following year, Andy organized a concert dedicated to Richard at the Arts Lab in Lewes - a long, immersive, composition for massed fuzz organs (about 16 of them), bass and drums – and somehow, in the following years, we always managed to gather at least once do one or two concerts. The repertoire grew and we became Himmel. Of course such a large ensemble can’t travel far so, in 2014, five of us took the compositions to the MIMI festival in Marseilles, where we rehearsed for 3 days with a local musicians, a rewarding experience reprieved in 2018 at the Nodutgang festival in northern Norway. So, for now at least, there are two versions: home and away.

ON RECORD

Massed Fuzz Organs on CC100, 2015