RIP Mark Hollis

RIP Mark Hollis.
I spent the first half of 2012 working on an album that eventually came out under the name Photographic Reflection. At the time I’d been listening to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis’s solo album pretty intensely, and they had a profound influence on the album. I have books of notes about the album, and it was originally going to be structured as six long tracks. Although that never came to be, much of Hollis’s influence can still be found. The long gaps of silence between many of the tracks were a direct homage to his solo record. Both Talk Talk and his solo material featured frequently in the mixes I made around the time.
I’m devastated to hear of Hollis’s death today, at the young age of 64. Few artists stuck to their guns and shunned commercialism in the way he did, simply bringing his career to a conclusion after a solo recording, deciding he had nowhere else to go in the world of recorded music, and choosing instead to spend time with his family. His occasional interviews from the 1990s were beautiful pieces, full of rare insight from an extraordinary mind. He may have been silent to the public – a 50 second piece of film music aside – for the past 20 years, but the knowledge that he is no longer with us is still deeply saddening.