Hugo Largo

There was this New York band in the late ‘80s that we at Melody Maker loved - Hugo Largo. 

They had a unique sound -  no drums, almost no guitar... instead two melodic basses and an electric violin supporting and winding around the voice of Mimi Goese, a performance artist and dancer who brought gesture and mesmerizing presence to the group's intimate shows. 

The songs were slow, still, soft....  yet suggestive of great tensile strength...  and often piercingly dramatic,  bursting with overflowing emotion. Echoes of Young Marble Giants, pointers towards slowcore and that kind of thing, but also, obliquely, maybe Earwig / Insides.... various other groups on the edge of things -  outfits too original and one-off in their conception and execution to be shunted into any kind of scene or movement.  

Inevitably, Hugo Largo did get bracketed as "ethereal", operators in the vicinity of Cocteau Twins and 4AD-ish stuff. But that is misleading, as their thing was grounded in the real world - the natural world especially -  and the wonder to be found all around us,  rather than some fairy-tale fantasia. The lyrics, in particular, were acute, sometimes funny, always surprising.  For the most part, the words were clear and legible in their delivery and placing in the mix - very far from speaking in tongues or mystic gibberish.

Hugo Largo had some famous supporters. 

Michael Stipe co-produced their debut album Drum - and sang backing vocals on a couple of songs.

They got signed by Brian Eno to his label Opal / All Saints, for which they recorded Mettle.

And then that was it. The group split up over directional conflicts, dispersing to pursue different paths in music, the record business, and other creative avenues. 

For a long, long time their music has been unavailable - out of print, not on the streamers.

Until now.

Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984-1991 brings all their music back into circulation again, in the form of a 3 LP boxed set that includes Drum, Mettle, and an album of unreleased and live recordings. It's released by Missing Piece Records, a label founded by Michael Krumper, who back in the day worked at Relativity when that company put out Drum. You can buy it here.

The box comes with a booklet that includes essays by Eno, Stipe and the group’s own Tim Sommer, who prior to forming the band had worked as a New York correspondent for Sounds and written for a bunch of American publications, while also presenting Noise the Show, a legendary punk / hardcore radio program on WYNU.  Hugo Largo was in part conceived as a reaction against, or at least, a different way forward from the post-hardcore noise thing. Sommer, co-bassist Adam Peacock and violin man Hahn Rowe had all previously played in Glenn Branca's "guitar army"; Hugo Largo could not have been further from that assaultive density, creating instead a sound whose moving parts were naked to the eye-ear. 

The music is also on streamers for the first time. 

And there's new videos for a couple of their most beloved songs.  

Here's one they made back in the day for "Turtle Song", off Mettle.

As I mentioned, we at Melody Maker - or a contingent there -  loved Hugo Largo. So keen were we that somehow the paper contrived to review the debut Drum no less than three times.

Credit to Joy Press - now the missus, then friend and colleague - who was first to spot the specialness and did the first review + first interview + first live review.

Then  I ended up giving Drum its second review - this time as a lead review - but still as a US import release

And then it was put out officially in the UK on Land (an imprint of Eno's Opal), with some extra tracks, and Paul Oldfield gave it the most in-depth appraisal yet. 

Hugo Largo's amazing cover of  "Fancy" by The Kinks

And a live version from 1988, at the ICA - unusually guitar-y for them

Paul also reviewed them live when they played the ICA for the second time in 1988 (the first go they were handled by one of the few Hugo-sceptics on the paper, Jonh Wilde). 

He also wrote about Mettle.

Somewhere in there I interviewed Hugo Largo twice, and David Stubbs also did a profile.

Here's my review of their farewell concert at the Knitting Factory, NYC. 

Footage of concerts from their prime.