Anthony Moore - Mare's Tail

The last five years or so have seen a renewed interest in the solo work of Slapp Happy founding member and sometime Henry Cow affiliate, Anthony Moore, with several of his long unavailable works from the early 70s back in print courtesy of a few different sources. Paradigm Discs have gone one step further-in with this first time release of 1969's Mare's Tail, an audio visual collage collaboration with filmmaker David Larcher built from various found sound sources, field recordings, samples and such like. Whether made 55 years ago or tomorrow, the results are staggering, a time-dilated, palimpsestic spiral through land both pastoral and alien that plays like a proto-imagining of The Caretaker's reflections on memory and experience. Better still, the only sound source is that of a 16mm audio track, which has clearly degraded over time, immediately calling to mind Basinki's Disintegration Loops and entirely appropriate for capturing the eerie sense of loss and confusion that Mare's Tail conjures, a fever dream where the clocks run backwards and sound comes from everywhere. It's truly astonishing this is as old as it is, since it feels entirely relevant to contemporary interests ala Retromania, hauntology and psychogeography. When older heads say it's all been done, I imagine this is the kind of thing they have in mind. Foundational doesn't even cover the half of it.