Oslo

Henry Cow were the most intellectually rigorous band in British progressive rock — Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves, Dagmar Krause, and others building music that drew explicitly on Bartók, free jazz, and avant-garde composition while occupying the space that the rock music industry had created.

Oslo, from their 1973 debut Leg End, demonstrates the Henry Cow approach: time signatures that shift without warning, instrumental passages that develop through collective improvisation, the overall architecture more compositional than rock music typically allowed.

Henry Cow's influence on avant-garde rock, on the Rock in Opposition movement they helped found, and on experimental music broadly is substantial. Their catalog is demanding and rewarding in equal measure.