"Erk Gah" (later retitled "Hold to the Zero Burn, Imagine") is a song written by Tim Hodgkinson for the English experimental rock group Henry Cow.
[1] Henry Cow continued to perform "Erk Gah" live several times in 1978, though rearranged as an instrumental due to vocalist Dagmar Krause's departure from the group.
[7] In 1993 Hodgkinson – along with Krause, Cutler, and former Henry Cow woodwind player Lindsay Cooper – recorded "Erk Gah" with his original lyrics as "Hold to the Zero Burn, Imagine" for his solo album Each in Our Own Thoughts.
"[9] When Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith first saw the sheet music for the then-untitled piece, he exclaimed "Erk Gah", a nonsense expression used by Don Martin in his cartoons for Mad magazine.
Hodgkinson described the piece as "a wild, shifting, fluid chaos of transient forms"; Piekut states that "tonal, textural, and rhythmic elements mutate often throughout the work".
[12] Also present is "a rhythmic figure in which successive beats are divided into an increasing or decreasing number of attacks", or "acceleration or deceleration [that] takes place inside a steady tempo".
Piekut concludes that "Erk Gah" "holds little converse with rock convention" and "sounds more like modernist chamber music scored mainly for amplified instruments".
[14] François Couture of AllMusic considered the Stockholm & Göteborg recording "a tour de force of complex avant-garde rock" in his review of the album.