News From Babel

Letters Home (1986) ...

Second album from group based around Lindsay Cooper, Chris Cutler, and Zeena Parkins, a 'song cycle' in chamber rock style.  Unusual orchestrations, with vocals from Dagmar Krause and Robert Wyatt, Sally Potter and Phil Minton ...

Who Will Accuse ...

Moss ... 

With just one exception - A Dragon At The Core, sung by Phil Minton, which closed Side One and offered a (quite appropriate) sense of interruption in the course of the narrative - all songs on Letters Home participate of a sense of directness (also from an emotive point of view) which makes their "first person" approach quite involving for the listener. It could be said that the fact that it is Robert Wyatt who sings a lot of the songs here that accounts for a large part of its success, and it well could be: as we all know so well, Wyatt's vocals can turn a colloquial-sounding approach into fine art. But the fact that this is due in the first place to the compositional process is proved by the fact that those positive qualities are also shared by those tracks sung by Sally Potter and Dagmar Krause ... cloudsandclocks.net ...

A Dragon At The Core ... 

  The nine tracks on the album add up to a "song cycle" of sorts, where every listener will find his/her favourite moment. After confessing my predilection for those tracks where Robert Wyatt is the featured singer, I'll mention the first track of the album, Who Will I Accuse?; the aforementioned Moss; the closing track, Late Evening; and the bizarre Dark Matter, with its dark instrumental interlude that never fails to remind me of Pink Floyd and The Who... cloudsandclocks.net ...

 A Dragon At the Core - tribute to composer Lindsay Cooper, November 2014 ...

rermegacorp.com ...

Late Evening ...
(This is Late Evening, the other album tracks in this Youtube Topic are mis-titled somewhat, but all very fine)...