New Grass

Critic Simon Reynolds coined the term “post-rock” partly in response to Laughing Stock, and “New Grass” is the track that makes the case most clearly for why an entirely new genre descriptor was necessary. This is not rock music with unusual instruments. It is not art rock with post-punk influences. It is something that did not exist before Mark Hollis created it: music that uses the space between sounds as primary material, that builds meaning through absence as much as presence.

Laughing Stock was recorded in near-darkness, musicians asked to play as quietly as possible, allowed into the studio only when Hollis felt the atmosphere was right. Sessions lasted months. The musicians — many of them jazz players — were given minimal instruction, allowed to respond to the room and to each other rather than following charts. The result sounds like music being discovered in real time, which is exactly what it is.

“New Grass” opens with a tentative guitar figure — the word tentative is not pejorative here, it is descriptive of a specific quality of restraint that communicates a great deal. What you hear is a musician choosing each note as if the choice matters, as if the silence that surrounds the note is part of the note’s meaning. Hollis’s voice enters with the same quality: fragile, barely present, hovering at the edge of audibility.

“Though I know / In peace your love walks with me / Nothing more than this.”

The accumulation of the song over nearly ten minutes is not dramatic in the way a classical crescendo is dramatic. It is dramatic in the way a room fills with light as the sun moves — gradual, inevitable, something you notice only when it has already happened. The organ that enters around the six-minute mark changes the song’s emotional temperature without announcing itself. The guitar response that follows completes a conversation you didn’t realize had begun.

Laughing Stock was a commercial disaster in 1991. It is now recognized as one of the most influential albums ever made. “New Grass” is why.