Biography
Towering Inferno’s mid-’90s release Kaddish has gradually earned recognition as one of the era’s more striking fusions of rock and experimental music. Brian Eno has singled it out as the most frightening record he has ever encountered. The British duo Richard Wolfson and Andy Saunders, who operate under the Towering Inferno name, handled the bulk of the compositional work—supplemented by outside contributions—along with the majority of the programming, keyboard parts, and guitar lines. Key supporting roles were filled by prog-rock veterans Elton Dean, John Marshall (formerly of Soft Machine), and Chris Cutler, together with Hungarian folk singer Marta Sebestyen, on the seventy-five-minute Holocaust-themed concept album. Rabbinical chants, hard rock and heavy metal guitar textures, ambient synthesizer layers, and Eastern European folk vocals combine in a deliberately wide-ranging sonic palette that conveys its unsettling theme without descending into didacticism. Wolfson and Saunders have also staged Kaddish in mixed-media live settings. First issued in 1994, the project later attracted interest from Island, which re-released it for wider circulation and brought it to American audiences in 1996. For their subsequent undertaking the pair envisioned something markedly lighter, telling the British magazine Record Collector they had in mind “a light-hearted, fun, post-rave kind of B-movie affair.”
Albums