For buying a Cassette, please go to:
thokeitapes.bandcamp.com

Hand of Glory are:
Peter Caldwell
Martin Fisher
Kent Ericksen
Alec Forbes
Sean Erin Lynch
Gillian Eva Boyd

Recorded By Greg Locke, Orange Recordings 1992
Mixed by Gillian Eva Boyd (AKA G E Craig), at The Secret Beehive 2020


29 || 92

2nd millennium music for the 21st century

Happenstance is a fine thing. Hand of Glory is a happenstance band. To hashtag HOG might be to use words and phrases such as guitar sourced grooves and Kirikiriroa.

Hand of Glory is an analogue band. A live band of street corners, art gallery exhibition openings and the occasional dimly hazy lounge – a speciality.

After travelling down south and back by bus – the stoic, sometime belligerent, but yet always faithful Bedford bus – the band decided to record some of the tunes that had fed and watered the tour.

Outside, on the back of that stout-hearted old bus there was a painting, a reproduction of a McCahon, and in that painting these words appeared – “Tomorrow will be the same, but not as this is”. A lyrical reminder that every performance played, every song sung is at that moment quite unique.

A set list might be the same from one performance, one gig, to another .. but the playing, that is always different.

So while these recordings, these versions, these ‘little black dots on the lines of life’ are themselves specifically singular, they are also representative – resplendently so even, but still, only the one reading.

Duly these songs, tunes, grooves were set down, transcribed on tape over a long weekend, in a house on the hillside in Kawhia - overlooking the harbour, on the west coast of the North Island. And engineered, once again, by Greg – Hand of Glory Hand of Glory ( the difficult first album ).

2nd millennium music for the 21st century

Then, after all the port had been drunk, the final cigarettes shared and the lights turned off .. the band gently departed – spools in hand.

However .. the then expected forward progress of those reels did not quite materialise .. and may well be better described by the horning in of some words by Shakespeare, that then “enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action”. The tapes stayed still .. and silent. Such it was.

Happenstance may be described, in a free-form sense, as a confluence of circumstance and happening. It can be exampled by the recollection of the band performing one time .. say .. one sunday afternoon, in an inner city band rotunda just by the river, and all of a sudden the sun then begins to shine - glories so splendid .. and the mood and the feel shifts - so the version of the song next played is a consequence of that and all else that is present. However the happenstance of 29 || 92 is different to that.

29 || 92 has 2 tracks that are the same song. But different.
29 || 92 has 1 track that first appeared on the first album. But different.
29 || 92 also has, just as Hand of Glory Hand of Glory has, a tune in the style of the Surrealists abstracted art game ‘exquisite corpse’. A bespoke, one-off creation. Recorded to be heard again and again .. but never to be played again. Different once more.

Sadly though, 29 || 92 does not have the recording of the cover of John Cage’s 4’33” – that tape is indeed lost. And that fate could well have befallen these tracks. But happenstance arrived .. just before the lockdown .. when looking for a specific recording of a required sound, Gillian found, re-found, the ‘Kawhia Tapes’.

Is this the happenstance ? Or is it that, that the lockdown then descended and the time and space and quiet were all there – to be .. to stir and to fold and to mix ? Or is it both ?

Happenstance is a fine thing. Hand of Glory is a happenstance band. Hand of Glory is a Hamilton band.

2nd millennium music for the 21st century

29 || 92

Alec Forbes