fred frith s&d

if you don't like Dagmar Krause's vocals, perhaps you should approach the Art Bears with caution, or perhaps you should throw caution to the wind and just buy the 'winter songs'/'world as it is today' (two albums, one CD) and listen to it until it sounds like home. Songs with bent, soaring eastern folk melodies and incomprehensibly strange production (especially on 'world'). It'd be impossible for me to coherently express my feelings for these two albums. You should at least hear them.

'Gravity' is the all time classic Frith studio record, 'Speechless' is its immediate followup, edgier and more studio-drenched. Both absolutely essential. Can't go wrong starting with 'Gravity', maybe 'Speechless' if you like squervy production. The first Skeleton Crew record with Tom Cora, 'Learn to Talk'. Many of his classic songs are on these records.

Massacre's 'Killing Time', early 80's, his heavy metal power trio with Laswell and Fred Maher, impossible tightly composed and executed songs linked by improv. Haven't heard the later reunion records, evidently stresses the improv.

'Step Across The Border' compiles his solo guitar and improv stuff with some of his compositions, it's another keystone.

Some of my other favorites: 'Technology of Tears', 'The Top of His Head', 'Nous Autres' (with Jean Derome), 'Pacifica', 'Guitar Solos', the records with Henry Kaiser. There are a lot of improv records, many are excellent documents but you don't tend to pull them off the shelf once you've heard them through once.

I actually think Ayaya Moses is brilliant. The way the four guitars come together, the interplay, the dynamics and textures, the precision are all really great.

Freedom In Fragments, a composition for the Rova Sax Quartet, has some very nice stuff in it, some nice melodic things and harmonic shifts. Overall a bit of a more sombre mood, which I like a bit.

I haven't listened to Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire all the way through yet but what I've heard is great. Improvisations by musicians using sometimes beautiful graphic scores by Frith.

The string quartet, written for Iva Bittova, is also not bad.

I could live without any of the Henry Cow I've heard. I also found Gravity and Speechless a bit less interesting for me.

If I go any further I'll end up listing everything right down to my favorite henry cow live bootlegs (okay peel session '71 and stockholm '77)

on the other hand, his Winter&Winter cd's seem to be of the 'approach-with-caution' kind.
they are fairly interesting in intent and execution (one's made with Ensemble Modern and utilises Tom Cora samples, e.g.), yet... dunno, i'll sure give them another try someday but so far their oblique unfinished-ness (not a bad thing in itself, i kno, especially as regards Frith's music) still sounds more of a not-quite-followed-through variety

full disclosure, I did the preliminary listening and editing assembly for the release, but if I'm advertising the record it's out of pure enthusiasm for the contents, the Keep The Dog stuff is sort of his lost pop record and I hope it doesn't get lost in the flood of discs documenting his live improv stuff he's been releasing in the last decade... the stuff on 'winter and winter' for instance is quite accomplished and his focus on integrating composed modules into improv contexts is yielding results, but of course it's experienced best in concert. Especially something like 'traffic continues', the improvised signals he prompts the orchestra with just aren't on the record.

Upbeat is sort of like the sister album of Ayaya Moses, I guess, a little more uptempo, a little more tuneful.

I liked the recent abstract Eye to Ear II a lot but it definitely had to grow on me.

just watched step across the border, which is brilliant at times, and realized i only have the art bears/henry cow/massacre-stuff. any thoughts on his better live/improv stuff?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/840/20120226gravitysmii.jpg

or hey, just this

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/coverart/large/gravity.jpg

Was listening to Speechless the other day

"Step across the border" is by far my favourite music movie of all time, so, search that.

I don't know I dismissed Henry Cow and Gravity and Speechless before.

And yeah OTM re Step Across the Border. I overrated Freedom in Fragments. Upbeat is v classic; I'm not sure which I'd choose if I had to pick between it and Ayaya Moses. Still listen to To Sail, to Sail.

"don't know how I could have dismissed..."

Fred is getting interviewed Thursday night on KPFA FM at 10pm in Berkeley about this Saturday's show and some of the back stories about Gravity

saw him a few months ago w/ a friend and now whenever we go see shows we're both like "that's no fred frith"

http://www.slimstickets.com/events/183310/Fred%20Frith%20plays%20GRAVITY

o dam dom

Frith also seems like a really decent person. I knew (possibly still know in the sense that it might be possible to reactivate the relationship, but there have been some bumps) someone married to a Japanese musician. He said that Frith was the first person who called to check on them after one of Japan's earthquakes. (Leaving out specifics to discourage googlability.)

Sund4r's EOY album nomination, Fred Frith/Darren Johnston's Everybody's Somebody's Nobody sounds good on first listen.

Do we need a (Frith/Jonston's) Everybody's Somebody's Nobody vs. (Steve Tyler's) We're All Somebody From Somewhere poll? (Have not heard the latter.)

This is mostly very good. First new Frith-involved recording I've liked for a while.

Glad someone else likes it! I was pretty pleasantly surprised and excited as well.

I don't know what to say about it. It's kind of jazzy for a Fred Frith album, but if I say it's jazzy that will create the wrong expectations. Probably the jazz comes in more from Johnston's playing. Frith does a good job at times making up for a missing rhythm section.

It's mostly on the quiet side, for memebers of the audience out there wondering if they want to listen. (Who lurks on the Fred Frith thread?)

Listened to it this morning (it's on Spotify) -- loved it.

It didn't hit me how frithertronics "Standard Candles" (or at least a stretch of it) is until now.

Probably just toward the end.

Yeah, totally. It has a bit of an Evening Star quality.

Ha, it also reminds me a bit of some of the SYR EPs, although I think it's better realised than most of those.

It's kind of jazzy for a Fred Frith album, but if I say it's jazzy that will create the wrong expectations. Probably the jazz comes in more from Johnston's playing.

Johnston is a jazz musician and a trumpet player. It is going to sound like jazz. Fred also has a trio with a bassist and drummer (not sure if their album came out this year or is coming out next year), and that sounds less "jazzy".

His trio album "another day in fucking paradise" is v good as well.

It pleases me greatly to see the musicians on these records being discussed and praised.

rhythm section on the trio record is Jordan Glenn and Jason Hoopes, also of Jack o' the Clock for the prog fans here.

i'm also told that frith plays on the new jack o' the clock record, which is their best yet.

what is fred playing here????
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNmb-lIE71Q&feature=youtu.be

Idk the answer but I've been listening to this year's album with Hans Koch on Spotify and there is some surprising and evocative music on there. Pretty 'out' improv stuff with an emphasis on timbre and dynamics.

Pulled out Ironic Universe, with Janet Feder, yesterday, after not having listened to it in years. It holds up amazingly well, sounds like a precursor to a lot of the acoustic avant-folk picking stuff from the last few years.

Observations of Deviance, a show on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio stream, had a 3-hour Frith special tonight including a longish interview with FF broken into 3 parts. The show is at https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/127732 and I assume the archived audio will be up in the next couple of hours. Frith's a very good interviewee even with a poor to so-so interviewer, which was the case tonight.

Frith is a guy I always forget about for some reason but always really enjoy

best cover

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FwQ9InXaMAAbpzG?format=jpg&name=medium

best album!

I saw him "conducting", I guess, a big group improvisation in 1998 in a church on Toronto Island, I still recall a weird slow-motion klezmer tangent the music took at one point. "Beautiful as the moon - terrible as an army with banners" is one of my favourite songs, but I still haven't heard the last Art Bears album yet. Are any of his subsequent recordings in that vein?

i feel like i see frith play all the freakin time and hes always just tappin on his guitar but its always good

so i shot awake last night out of strange forgotten dreams with the thought "FRED FRITH AND LITTLE MY!"

ilx plz help me process and further this important thought

I accidentally slept through Fred Friths set in Berlin last weekend. Is it possible that we connected on the astral plane and I sent you show?