Main

Following the 1991 breakup of British trance-rock quartet Loop, bassist Neil McKay joined John Wills in Hair and Skin Trading Company, while guitarists Robert Hampson and Scott Dawson launched the experimental outfit Main. That project fused ambient sensibilities with dense layers of sustained electric guitar tones and brooding, foreboding sonic environments. The group’s earliest releases—the 1991 EP Hydra and the 1992 EP Calm, later compiled on the Hydra-Calm LP—remained their most forceful and retained the strongest links to standard rock forms. Starting with the acclaimed 1992 album Dry Stone Feed, however, the pair shifted toward purely atmospheric textures, methodically stripping away every percussive and rhythmic element.

The 1993 album Firmament and the triple-LP Motion Pool carried Main further into what they termed “drumless space,” an austere, otherworldly domain bearing scant relation to conventional song structures. Firmament II, issued in 1994, completed the break with tradition by presenting two lengthy, abstract environmental works devoid of any terrestrial reference points. After the 1995 collection Ligature, which gathered earlier recordings reworked by Paul Schütze, Jim O’Rourke, and Paul Kendall, the duo embarked on their most expansive undertaking to date: the Hz series. Released as six successive monthly EPs, the project explored harmonic drones, industrial force, and atmospheric reduction to their outer limits.

Once the third chapter of the Firmament series was finished, Scott Dawson departed in late 1996. Robert Hampson maintained Main as an essentially solo endeavor and resurfaced with Firmament IV in 1998. Following the turn of the century, Tau appeared on the K-Raa-K label in 2002; two years later Exosphere was issued as part of Staalplaat’s Mort aux Vaches series. In 2006 Hampson declared he was retiring the Main moniker to concentrate on solo work, citing the weight of expectations from listeners and reviewers who continued to link his output with guitar, an instrument he had long since abandoned. After several quiet years, Hampson immersed himself in multiple solo recordings during 2010 and, by October of that year, revealed plans to revive Main. He enlisted composer Stephan Mathieu as a collaborator, and together they completed the 2013 album Ablation for Editions Mego—the project’s first full-length release since 2006.