Infinite Expanse

When the late Lol Coxhill first appeared with 46,000 Fibres on their third album, he told them he wanted to play at any gig they had. The band were set on establishing their own identity, so the great soprano saxophonist stayed a guest, and he played with them eleven times in all. Best Kept Secret catches two of those meetings, with Coxhill playing on The Crying Hair and C25 S1 (edit). Alongside them sit five more pieces from the group's first decade, recorded at various places across London between 1993 and 2003.

The name came from a book. Reading Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music, Tonal D learned that 23,000 nerve fibres in the inner ear carry sound to the brain. Two ears make 46,000 fibres: organic stereo. The group itself grew out of Koven-oe, a collective that once included Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner. When Rimbaud left, the remaining trio set aside structured material for electro-acoustic free improvisation. From then on, the music was never arranged or discussed in advance. The players relied on the telepathy between them, refused cliché, and chased something unique.

Their first release was a soundtrack to a translation of Hölderlin's Hyperion into an invented language. It came out as a cassette of 46 copies, sold at early concerts in 1994 and then deleted. A studio album recorded live followed, and then a run of live records on which the Fibres came into their own. The venues mattered: art happenings, record shops, and some rough public houses. The band reacted to everything around them, and the room and the audience became part of the music. In 1997 they played the opening night of the Kosmische club, whose organisers heard "pre-industrial Faust" in them. The band rejected the label, but they came back three more times. Two years later they marked their fifth anniversary with concerts alongside Scanner, Nik Turner and Coxhill.

Through those years the music ranged from ethereal delicacy to hard industrial noise. It took in gamelan textures, space rock, radical jazz, dark funk and, above all, sonic soundscapes. The line-up changed and changed again around the constant core of Tonal D and Leon Maurice-Jones. By 2003 the decade was closing with a cinematic, fully structured record and then a blast of free-jazz noise. After that came ten years of silence before the Fibres returned.

Best Kept Secret draws on that first chapter. Everything here is improvised, except one piece the players assembled in the studio and another that grew from a single idea. The writer Paul Drummond once called 46,000 Fibres "one of the best kept secrets in music". Audiences at the time called it everything from the most beautiful music they had ever heard to not music at all. Three decades on, one of London's most elusive groups finally gets a proper airing, and it was worth the wait.