All of Main's records - from the bass-heavy, mantric Dry Stone Feed to the shadowy, free-falling Firmament - have been "experiments in the way that you can play with psycho-acoustics". By filtering frequencies and using extremes of sustain and distortion, Main have conjured wholly new noises from their instruments - these are guitars which don't sound like guitars, which don't sound like anything you could name. Theirs is an organic process, one which shies away from the simple repetition and flattened frequencies offered by sampling and synthesiser technology, and relies instead on an intuitive, physical exploration of sound. These are hand-crafted soundscapes. Main's music demands engagement from its listeners - something else which distinguishes it from the rock / pop mainstream. But those willing to give that engagement can find rich rewards. Patterns, whorls and motifs drift anchorless through the music, reappearing in different contexts to provide an tentative structure -like a series of clues - which unites the endless variations in tone and texture. As they reoccur there's a sudden, half-buried familiarity, a mental backflip, a tiny revelation before the moment passes, and the music moves on. Main also try to capture the ambient clatter of life, embracing the fact that we can never hear total silence, and celebrating the cumulative effect of tiny noises - their music is literally environmental. Most importantly, though, the Main project is about dynamics, about capturing the leap from dense walls of sound into pools of silence, about constant evolution. As Robert says : "One of Main's goals is not to keep making the same record over and over again - we've never been afraid to jump ship and explore something else." This questing approach was demonstrated perhaps most markedly by last year's Hz project, which brought Main's restlessly unconventional approach to bear on packaging and presentation as well as music. Hz was initially released as six EPs - which appeared once a month between June and December 1995 - but when those limited edition originals sold out, the music was gathered together onto a double CD and a triple vinyl collection. Both the titles and the enigmatic sleeve designs hinted at the music's subterranean coherence - in a sense, Hz was one continuous track, stretching over almost geological timespans, and taking root in the imagination by glacial degrees. The six installments were released in the following order : Corona, Terminus, Maser, Haloform, Kaon, Neper. Since the departure of Scott Dawson in the summer of 1996, Robert Hampson has continued to work on Main alone. Recently, he has devoted time to exploring new methods of performance, abandoning guitars on stage altogether in favour of a mixing desk which allows him to blend the sounds from 4 specially produced CDRs with samples and effects.
Firmament III - Reviewed in The Sunday Times For his work as Main, Robert Hampson has abandoned any concessions his old band, Loop, made to rock convention, and collaborated with the American free improviser Jim O'Rourke and Wire's Bruce Gilbert respectively. Depending on how big a leap of faith you are prepared to make, the disparate, a-rhythmical scratches and pulses of FirmamentIII represent either the "ambient clatter if life", or just the sound of some particularly sluggardly plumbers working on the bathroom of an old lady who is quietly nibbling on a very dry biscuit. But trust, and you will be at least a little thrilled by Firmament III's singleminded purity and clarity of vision. Here are 40 inexplicably compelling minutes of spectral rattles and iridescent hums, threatening to explode; an aural sleight of hand that might make everyday sounds both unfamiliarly sinister and unfamiliarly beautiful; that might teach you to hear anew. - Stewart Lee MASS - The Spitz - London / 18 September 1996 Reviewed in Melody Maker - 19 October Pictograms. Maybe slivers of tape embedded in each page like a barcode. I don't know what it would take to do injustice to tonight's music, but you only need glance at the audience to see the dilemma, that ever widening discrepancy between the existing ways of dealing with music and the music itself. This might be a chin-stroking crowd of hipsters, but even they are reduced to the age old gig stance - arms crossed, eyes front - even though there's little to watch except a man and a mixing desk. It's wildly inappropriate, like TV addicts watching a microwave. It looks like a gig, feels like a gig... until five minutes into MASS' set, when the floor doesn't even feel like a floor. Stretching sounds with a Labradford-ian precicion, the MAIN ACTIVE SOUND SYSTEM sets up a slow, fucked dynamic, a vapourous mix of sturm and drone. For something to be truly uncanny, it's first meant to strike a subconscious chord and these soft shifts and slides, these dismembered half-beats, have a strange resonance. In the absence of a whole new dictionary, I'll let the dazzling club visuals explain. Spinning spacemen. Data printouts. Neurofen ads. The heads of The Beatles, exploding. - Victoria Segal
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Over the last few years, Main have put together a remarkable and unique body of work. It was obvious from the first release - the Hydra EP - that Robert Hampson had parted company forever with traditional rock, and was intent on exploring new areas of sound. Main took the hoariest symbol of rock's conservative posturing - the electric guitar - and set out to make it once more a tool of the imagination, a sound generator that could break free from the suffocating influence of the retro rulebook.
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FIRMAMENT II
FIRMAMENT III
FIRMAMENT IV
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