In the late 1970’s, a mess of punks went to art school. While there, some of them took punk’s central ideas of simplicity and egalitarianism and injected a note of pop hedonism. They became the likes of the Talking Heads and Blondie, and they achieved great renown and had proper Top 40 hits. Others took that same simplicity, but exchanged (or followed the logic of) that egalitarianism for a blowing open of the creative mandate: anything goes. Now this group split in twain (N.B.: I’m obviously generalizing broadly here). One side threw down the gauntlet for more-or-less proper songs, with the deviation from the norm occurring mostly with regards to duration and instrumentation and the quality of sound—Wire, Branca and Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk, and the early New Wave that followed in their wake. After that, it just gets weird: Art Bears, Henry Cow, the many Disciples of Beefheart, and—God help us—noise grew almost nihilistic about prosaic things like “songs” and “music.” This Heat may not have seemed like the weirdest of that bunch—anyone into avant-classicism at the time knew about tape manipulation and phase music and all that, uh, jazz. So what made them so different, so influential?

Well, This Heat were a rock band. There was a guitarist and a bassist and a drummer and a singer, and they created what could loosely be called songs. Kind of. It isn’t just the use of tape loops—recording themselves, then looping—that sets them apart, but what those machines did, the act of recording and reintroducing and repeating, became the cornerstone of their sound in a way that even subsequent bands who used the technique never quite captured. In utero, as in here, from an early recording with percussionist Mario Boyer Diekuuroh, that deviation was particularly obvious, as they scroll of parts, one at a time, combining and recombining them into new shapes with an eye toward the rhythmic possibilities of such recombinations. It was about that interesting as well. It wasn’t until their first self-titled album that their aesthetic began to really gel, to harden into something that manages to be both visceral and intellectual at once (rare enough in any case). For my money (and it ain’t much) “Horizontal Hold” plays out the rock/avant dichotomy much more strongly, pairing off a spiky bass lick with stutter-drums that slowly being eating themselves; but it’s “24 Track Loop” that really stuns, a piece of live/layered proto-jungle that so belies its age that it still finds its way into some adventurous DJ sets. Their only other album, Deceit, gets labeled a departure from the first, but it’s really more a refinement, in which the band pushes the endorphin of the beat back just a bit in favor of a more complex melodic interplay, but still firmly on the same ground. “Paper Hats” keeps more of that beat then the rest, while throwing in serpentine guitars and a moan-to-scream wail that a young Nick Cave would be proud of, while “S.P.Q.R.” leans on tick-tick-tick cymbal cracks and a surf guitar riff that keeps doubling, and doubling back, until it too is cannibalized for parts. Throughlines can be drawn forward to many of the most art-damaged freaks rock has had to offer since, from the subtle, bubbling electronics of Mission of Burma to Fugazi’s airtight mid-air criss-crossing to Liars’ most shrieking drum circles.

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