Matching Mole

Matching Mole was an English rock band from the Canterbury scene.

Formation

The group Matching Mole was founded in October 1971 by the former Soft Machine drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt. Other founding members were Phil Miller (guitar ), Dave Sinclair (keyboards, with the group caravan before) and Bill MacCormick ( bass, formerly of the group Quiet Sun ). The name " Matching Mole " is an allusion to Wyatt's previous band - " Soft Machine " is translated into French, " Machine Molle ."

Music and career

The band moved musically between rock and jazz. The first album varied between sung, mostly ballad-like pop songs like " O Caroline " and sprawling instrumentals, which left much room for improvisation and instrumental interaction. Characteristic are introductory keyboard arrangements of pronounced melancholy mood, which then develop into improvisations on rock base, such as in the plays "Instant Kitten" or "Part of the Dance" in this music. Both the rock instrumentation with electric guitar as well as the waiver of intricate harmonies and odd time signatures made ​​the first album to appear musically more conventional than the previous albums by Soft Machine.

Special mention deserves the use of the Mellotron in the play " Immediate Curtain". Through the use of clustering techniques Robert Wyatt produced on this instrument dissonant sounds of gloomy atmospheric intensity, as they can be found for example in many late-romantic and expressionist pieces at the beginning of the twentieth century.

On some pieces of the first album worked with keyboardist Dave MacRae, who eventually a permanent member in February 1972. Shortly thereafter, David Sinclair left the band. In the next six months Matching Mole played numerous concerts in England and on the Continent, and took several BBC sessions on. Finally, in August they recorded their second album Matching Mole 's Little Red Record, a less Wyatt - centered group work. Unlike the first album the band broke here further from conventional pop- schemes. Matching Mole widened here from their musical spectrum in areas such as minimal music, experimental electronic music and e - avant-garde. Some titles but also show an affinity for rapid, fast-paced rock jazz playing styles like they were in their mid -seventies very common.

A short time later, Wyatt broke up the band. Plans for a reformation of Matching Mole ( with keyboardist Francis Monkman, formerly of Curved Air, and saxophonist Gary Windo ) in the summer of 1973 failed because of a tragic accident, a paraplegic since Wyatt.

Further career of the individual musicians

• David Sinclair and Phil Miller founded in October 1972 Hatfield and the North. Sinclair left the group but before their first album back in 1973 returned back to Caravan and also belonged to temporarily Camel and the band of his cousin Richard Sinclair.
• Phil Miller played, after Hatfield and the North in 1975 initially disbanded in the late 1970s in the National Health, from the 1980s in In Cahoots and in the 1990s in Short Wave, in a duo with Fred T. Baker, and in a trio with Mark Hewins and his brother, keyboardist Steve Miller (not to be confused with the American guitarist ). With Hatfield and the North Phil Miller comes to live on today, see eg.
• Dave McRae worked with Ian Carr's Nucleus as well as on the album Nite Flights by the Walker Brothers.
• Bill MacCormick played in 1976 along with Phil Manzanera, with whom he had already worked together in the band Quiet Sun, and Brian Eno in the band 801 In the late seventies he founded with guitarist David Rhodes (who later played for Peter Gabriel ), the band Random Hold, following its dissolution in 1980, he retired from the music business.
• Robert Wyatt was a singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter a renowned solo artist.

Discography

• Matching Mole (1972 )

• Little Red Record ( 1972)

• BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert (1994 )

• Smoke Signals (2001)

• March ( 2002)