HARMONY IN DIVERSITY

Line-up:
Peter Banks (guitar)
Andrew Booker (electronic drums)

Peter Banks writes:

Life is full of surprises. Raindrops on roses, fluffy kittens, egg nog, the rough rasp of sandpaper on a buttock, golf, Finland, “Do you smell gas?”, fungi/non-fun guys, “What did you expect? He’s French!”, Wales, the warm blood in your sock... the list is endless. The end is listless.

Harmony In Diversity is not about race, religion, politics, nature or potatoes, but it is brimming with surprise. Harmony In Diversity is the way to the future, as well as being an antidote the White Stripes. Harmony In Diversity is about music of improvisation, clarity, instinct, space, dynamics, intensity and poise, neither rock nor pop, funk, black, white nor beige, blues, prog, soul, jazz nor classical, and has very little connection with Morris dancing.

Andrew Booker (electronic percussion and atmospheres) and Pete Banks (electric guitar and noisy guitar synthesiser) are the ultimate hi-tech self-contained music duo. He hits while I pluck, and to be hitters and pluckers is a good thing in this best of possible worlds.

The music is such of surprise and familiarity, originality and theft, artifice and accident and alliteration, wherein the pressures and stresses of mind-numbing depths of darkness can be transcended to the blinding heat of white light. (Yes, we really do know how to do this.)

We are neither used, users, losers nor abusers. We are a synthesis of the best and the worst excesses of modern rock/pop, and of course, we have a hidden agenda of no categorisation, no labelling. We are un-taggable and we do not play requests. We prefer the fresh rather than the used.

Andrew Booker is clearly one of the most versatile, tight, concise and intelligent drummers around. He is superb at listening and reacting to the spontaneous incidents of Harmony In Diversity. I pluck, strum and noodle on my guitar and have my mixed moments of inspiration in our face-to-faced duo. I have no allegiance or affinity to any one style of music, everything is up for grabs to use or discard.

Harmony In Diversity is not going to change the world, but we are going to change your way of listening and prove that life is full of surprise. We look forward to your participating in hearing us and we will work hard to further your enjoyment and ours. We hope that Harmony In Diversity will be a lifeline from a sleeping past to a luminescent future. Thank you very much. The struggle continues.

PB, November 2005

Andrew Booker writes:

BAM.

Bam BAM. Bam ba-DAM!

So begins the first track of our forthcoming album, and I distinctly remember playing it. So I damn well should, it was only a few months ago... Peter gently howling over the other side of the studio, shortly before plugging in, a powered monitor mix from behind, pointing somewhere above my coccyx. I’m glad, because improvised music is often easily forgotten, scrambling the neurons before you’ve got the keys in the ignition. But why are we improvising anyway, and expecting people to like it? Why aren’t we putting together the finest progressive rock since…

Exactly. Since what? Are we even prog? No, of course not, stupid question, there’s no such music any more. There’s a genre, meaning an audience, but there are no single contemporary defining examples such as there were in the beginning. And stop looking for when it ended. There was an explosion, a big bang, transmitting in all directions, a blast sheen radiating in an ever-expanding sphere… there was no end, just a continuous diffusion into nothing.

I believe people don’t really have any idea why they like music. True, a lot of us have enjoyed “classics” with the occasional complexity to them, difficult bits we didn’t at first understand. The mistake was to assume these difficult bits were the reason we enjoyed the music.

Harmony In Diversity conveniently bypasses this dilemma through the improvisational approach. If you think that’s lazy, you’d be right. To hell with devoting hours and hours to recording something fully polished, proficient, predetermined, chock-full of gratuitous complexities of time signature and tempo, and absolutely inert. Better I listen back to some beautiful atonality that grew from nowhere and still gives me the tingles.

Let me clarify something: experimental, we are not. Experimental means “don’t know what they’re doing”. Don’t think I’m going to show up on stage without knowing exactly what happens when I turn this knob, push that button there, and then hit that pad. Of course do. Expect me to leave the house otherwise?! I even have a rough idea why I get the tinglies. I’m just not telling you.

And another thing… this is a gig, right? That means, you people should have some effect on us. We can instantly tell whether you like what we’re doing. If we’re improvising, we can instantly do something about it. Unless we improvise, we can’t.

And so, we present the unedited effusion of our dual subconscious, exposed before you in real time under hot lights and with adequately protected underarms, I promise. And if you don’t like it, forget the photos, it wasn’t really us. Me? I was at home, talking to the plant and watering the frogs.

AB, November 2005

 

Biography

Peter Banks’s career began in the late 60’s, most notably with The Syn, with bassist Chris Squire, and subsequently Mable Greer’s Toyshop with Squire and singer Jon Anderson. With the addition of keyboardist Tony Kaye and drummer Bill Bruford, they became legendary progressive rock supergroup Yes. Peter recorded two albums with the band, 'Yes' and 'Time and a Word', and also came up a with temporary suggestion for the band's name. It has stuck for four decades.

After Yes, Peter played enjoyed a stint with Blodwyn Pig before forming Flash in 1971, and sessions began for an eponymous first album featuring Tony Kaye, which appeared in 1972 to a warm reception. Flash recorded and released their second album ‘In the Can’ in November of same year; and a third ‘Out of Our Hands’ in 1973.

Not long after the third Flash release came his first solo album, 'Two Sides of Peter Banks', with an impressive array of guest musicians. Jan Akkerman, John Wetton, Phil Collins, Steve Hackett and Flash rhythm section Ray Bennett and Mike Hough all contributed.

Trying to form a new version of his last group, a ‘Flash Mark II’ as he remarked, Banks formed Empire and recorded three albums until 1980.

After a long hiatus, Banks released three albums with few or no collaborators; 'Instinct' in 1993, a superb solo album of instrumental tracks with him playing all the parts; 'Self Contained' (1995), and 'Reduction' (1999).

Peter was mainly responsible for the release of a double-live set called ‘Something's Coming’ (subsequently released in the US as ‘Beyond and Before’), a collection of Yes appearances at the BBC during 1969 and 1970. A collection of his oldest recordings, all previously unreleased, called ‘Can I Play You Something?’ was released in 2000, and included some early recordings by The Syn, Mabel's Greer Toyshop and Yes.

Banks also contributed to ‘Tales From Yesterday’ for the Magna Cata label (1995) with a vibrant reworking of ‘Astral Traveller’, produced in collaboration with Robert Berry. Other recent collaborations include "Jabberwocky" (2000) and "Hound of the Baskervilles" (2002), a pair of albums recorded with Oliver (son of Rick) Wakeman and Clive Nolan.

In October 2004 Peter joined duo Pulse Engine (bassist Nick Cottam and drummer Andrew Booker) on stage for three numbers, and the trio concluded the gig with an improvisation that proved the highlight of the evening. They embarked on recording rehearsal-room improvisations, some of which the players considered to be the finest music they had ever played, but subsequent attempts to improvise live proved difficult to pull off.

As an experiment, the band split into pairs to work on improvisations. Surprisingly, the pairing of Peter and Andrew worked out very well, with Peter alternating between MIDI guitar and his trademark Ibanez Jem, and Andrew providing MIDI drumming and notes from his kit to make up for a lack of bass. Since Andrew and Nick were already working well together as Pulse Engine, and the Peter/Nick pairing seemed the least promising at that point, the trio lineup of Harmony In Diversity was parked and Peter and Andrew continued as a duo.

Harmony In Diversity have an album currently in production for possible release in 2005 with a working title "What is this?", a reference to the hard-to-classify nature of their music. An eclectic amalgam of blues, rock, free jazz improvisation and electronica, Harmony In Diversity operate in the true tradition of progressive rock, while managing to sound nothing like current progressive bands.