Whenever asked about reissuing his old material, the standard line from Robert Haigh has always been that because the original masters had been lost there was no chance of a reissue. So it came as a bit of a shock when Vinyl On Demand announced that they were releasing a box set of Haigh’s work as Sema this year. Although there is no unreleased material included, the scarcity of all this music means that there is nothing to complain about. This is complete collection of some of the best and criminally unheard music of the 1980s.
 
The lost masters have not mysteriously resurfaced, instead an almost forensic digital remastering of the material was performed using multiple copies of the original LPs, removing pressing errors and allowing the full detail of the music to remain. The result is a stunning reproduction of all the Sema albums but with the addition of bonus tracks to fully flesh out each album. They sound beautiful (though that is not hard compared to the MP3 rips I have had to make do with) and it is hard to tell that these had been mastered from other records. Granted there is a little muffling to some of the mid-range piano notes but it is slight and barely noticeable even when it does happen.
Beginning, naturally, with Notes from Underground, this box set offers me a chance to experience Haigh’s early works again as if they were brand new. While Haigh has always been a deft hand at the piano, his work as Sema incorporated a lot more than just ivory tinkling. Tape loops, synthesizer, and unusual percussion are as much a part of Sema as the instrument for which Haigh is now best known. "Song of Solomon" incorporates a steady but discordant synth drone into the sparse but elegant piano lines; the two elements coming together to create a strange new space within the music. The sound of wordless breathing at the end of the piece remind me that this is not some alien transmission but the work of a fellow human.
"Concrete and the Klee" wears its influences on its sleeve with Haigh combining found sounds, electronic tones and piano to form a strange, surreal landscape much like some of Paul Klee’s paintings where easily identifiable figures are incorporated into colorful, blocks of abstraction (incidentally, Sema was the name of an artistic union formed by Klee in the early 1910s). This link with an artist indebted to Cubism and Expressionism makes total sense when Haigh’s own style is so heavily inspired by analogous composers like Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. The addition of musique concrète into such a mix, along with the angular guitar (?) of "Air Cage" prevents these recordings from being mere throwbacks to a bygone era as Haigh brings such "easy" music into a new era.
The set continues with Theme from Hunger, a brooding work which saw Haigh push his piano playing away from the previously mentioned influences and take on more of a distinct style of his own. Using the piano to punctuate the tense electronics of the title track, he creates a fascinating piece which stands out even amongst the many great pieces included throughout Time Will Say Nothing. Seguing into "S.S. Minor Ghosts," the electronic hum becomes stronger and stranger and dramatic percussion widens the scope of the music further. Hints of John Cage can be detected on the second side of Theme from Hunger, especially on "Song of Praise," which sounds like a prepared piano piece being played on an unprepared piano (though I imagine most pianos are unprepared for Cage!).
The ominous subterranean bass and chanting at the start of "Extract from Rosa Silber" demonstrate another side to Haigh’s work as Sema. This falls more in line with some of Current 93 or Coil’s experiments with loops and atmosphere than the rest of the Sema material. Haigh’s arabesque piano motif acts as an anchor for the unsettling dirge, an unlikely pairing much the situations described in the previous LPs described above. The surprise guitar arpeggio that jumps out suddenly sounds like Mike Oldfield walked into the wrong recording studio, played a lick before realising his error and leaving. I can see how this disjointed and illogical approach to composition would appeal to Steven Stapleton and Extract from Rosa Silber definitely fits with Nurse With Wound’s Spiral Insana, which Haigh would later contribute to.
"Anatomy of Aphrodite" on side B of Extract from Rosa Silber continues this unpredictable style with some fantastic piano melodies, church bells and is-it-human-or-is-it-a-ghost vocalisations. The chopping and changing is much more frequent here compared to the title track; Haigh seems to have been having a great time with putting together this piece. Extract from Rosa Silber has been bulked out with three short pieces from various compilations also included (though they come outside the time frame indicated by the box set’s title). These pieces are more varied than the rest of the Sema collection with pretty much all bases covered by these pieces. "Untitled" from Three Minute Sympony lies somewhere between Haigh’s modern piano works and the murder scene from Psycho whereas "The Pleasure of the Text" from Devastate to Liberate is warbly, gossamer ambience that spreads out of the speakers like a vapour. The metallic percussion and piano "The Over Yellow" from Ohrensausen threatens to turn into an Omni Trio-esque groove, occupying some strange middle ground between Sema and Haigh’s later electronic dance music phase.
Co-credited to both Haigh and Sema, the final LP to use the Sema name finished off Time Will Say Nothing. Three Seasons Only is the point where Haigh left the experimentation and avant garde nature of Sema behind and embraced the piano as the dominant (and usually only) instrument in his music, saving the electronics for his later work as Omni Trio. "Empire of Signs" largely revolves around the keys of his piano but Haigh also employs gorgeous acoustic guitar and glockenspiel that sound so warm and happy compared to the cooler electronics and percussion of his earlier works (though this happiness is shattered by the stabbing strings used in "Untitled" described in the last paragraph).
The title track could have come off one of Haigh’s recent albums; the three movements recalling Satie’s Gymnopédies though Haigh’s work is livelier to say the least. "Two Feats of Klee" continues in this vein but is embellished with strings (or possibly bowed guitar, it is hard to say). It astonishes me how he seems to be able to just throw these fabulous piano works into the world like the rest of us make a cup of tea or coffee. The album (and indeed the box set) is capped off with the addition of "Found Improvisation" which was originally issued on the Best of Robert Haigh tape on United Dairies. By its nature it is looser and more harmonically adventurous than the other pieces on Three Seasons Only and I am not sure it really fits in with them but it is nice to have it included for completeness sake.
With such a brilliant job being done on Time Will Say Nothing, I can only hope that other Haigh projects get similar treatment. The Truth Club and Fote material is quite hard to find, as are the four records under Haigh’s own name from the late 1980s; to see these remastered and reissued in a similar way would be incredible though maybe not as incredible as these Sema LPs. Short of a box set of complete La Monte Young recordings, nothing would have amazed me more than Time Will Say Nothing!
 
Read More
