This Is Not This Heat: This is Not, But Isn't It, Even Though It's Not?
As the brush delicately painted the mural advertising the lineup for this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival, "This Is Not This Heat" slowly appeared in black on the wall of The Violet Hour in Chicago.
This Heat was an experimental U.K. group whose avant-garde recordings were the pier foundation for noise, ambient, and post-rock records for the next several decades to come. Forty-some years after their highly influential self-titled debut, the group has come back together as This Is Not This Heat after a long hiatus enlisting artists such as Thurston Moore and Alexis Taylor to fill the void vacated by the loss of founding member, Gareth Williams.
The band's debut self-titled record, sometimes listed as Blue and Yellow, airs out with long, lo-fi tape loop feedbacks and oscillating sonic obscurity that's broken up by unrelenting abrasive chugs of noisey riffs captured using vanguard multi-microphone recording techniques inside an abandoned industrial meat storage facility in 1970s London. Two years later, This Heat released their second record, Deceit, that would become their last. The more palatable album from 1981 would essentially be the starting whistle for a post-punk genre rejecting the newfound commercial success of English punk and new wave of the day.
So, after 40 years and some revitalizing reissues, surviving members Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward resuscitate the insurmountable heftiness of their early works through the same improvisation and bleak sonic incantation cultivated in that airless industrial facility known as Cold Storage. Though it's not This Heat, This Is Not This Heat undoubtedly possess the voltaic avant-garde peculiarity of their former figure with a newfangled, matured sensibility and juncture with the contemporary artists enlightened by the band's innovative records.