The Way It Was
Cassiber (phonetically: 'a message smuggled out of prison') crashed like a locomotive into the Deutsche Neue Welle. Founded by Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders and Chris Cutler (his first major project after News From Babel), Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics, improvisation, close structure and musique concrete into an energetic and complex form of studio (and then concert) composition uniqu…
All's Well
After This Heat broke up in 1982, Charles Hayward formed Camberwell Now. The new group included Trefor Goronwy, from the short-lived four-piece version of This Heat, on bass and guitar; and Steven Rickard, who is heard on Sub Rosa's Myths 1 compilation, on tape manipulation and field recordings; Charles Bullen from This Heat, who subsequently left to study music in India, is heard as a guest on the first 12" single "Meridian."
The group, recording in This Heat's Cold Storage studio, onl…
BBC Sessions +
The radio session was first broadcast 1/3/73, and is 20 minutes of pure Faustian hell. The Lurcher is a kind of electric period Miles Davis slouching drum rhythm, augmented by stabs of horn and electric guitar. Krautrock is a 12-minute post Velvet Underground riff, drone and noise-driven meditation, far superior to the version on the Virgin release Faust IV. The session ends with Do So, an outrageously corny slice of sixties pop. The remaining 30 minutes of the CD is prime Faust, culled f…
Faust
"The first 1971 Polydor (transparent) album and one of the great testaments to originality and innovation in the field. Two years in the making.
A breathtaking achievement that hasn't aged. Remastered, repackaged."
71 Minutes
Compiled from "lost" and unreleased material released to us on the 10th Anniversary of their disbandment (inc.prophetic pre-dub mixing) as well as most of the unreleased "FAUST PARTY 3" LP.
The Art of Memory II
Fred Frith summarizes the release on his website as "early 80s weirdness with John Zorn." To expand a bit, perhaps "idiosyncratic improvisation with a strange set of tools from two master musicians" would help place the form and ability of the music of Frith and Zorn, who have travelled and performed sporadically as a duo over several decades. These are five fascinating recordings from the blossoming downtown NY scene, originally from two NYC performances recorded on cassette in 1983 a…
The Happy End Problem (Music for Dance Volume 5)
Frith's Music for Dance Volume 5 - two works for small ensembles, which were performed for each of Amanda Miller's dances created for The Pretty Ugly Dance Company. The first is based on Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and the other a deliberately Western look at Japanes culture.
According to Chris Cutler:
'Happy End' presents two, related, small-ensemble works for 6 and 7 musicians respectively - mostly strings of one sort or another, with percussion, flute, clarinet and electronics. Fred, v…
Impur
"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France. He roped in as many of the students as he could, grouped according to their departments (early music, rock, African drumming, classical &c), and set them up in all the rooms in the building. The public wandered around creating their own mix, or sat in the courtyard listening to the sound drifting out through the open windows.
For their part, each group of musici…
Live In Japan
Concert recordings made at various venues in Japan in 1981 and released by Recommended Records Japan in 1982 in an edition of 1000. Out of print since, though highly sought after, it has now been transferred and remastered by Tom Dimuzio for this official reissue.
Fred was just starting out on his long career as a solo improviser when he made this double LP, and still using the now long retired Charles Fletcher custom double-neck guitar (one fretted, one fretless) and the Burns Black Biso…
Nowhere Sideshow Thin Air
This is Frith's sixth CD of music for dance, featuring three commissions by three different choreographers each sharing, as Fred says ' a certain obsession with melodic deconstruction.' Two of them feature - and were especially written for - the remarkable violinist Carla Kihlstedt.
Fred and Carla perform one of them (Fred playing a huge array of instruments here as on all pieces), are joined by Fred Guiliano, (samples) and Gail Brand (trombone) on another, while the third features Fred, …
Allies
For an artist known for incredible prolificacy and the seeming instantaneousness of his work, Fred Frith's ballet score Allies has managed to acquire a long and checkered history. Created in 1989 for the post-modernist Bebe Miller Dance Company, Allies appears near the start of a period where Frith began to separate his efforts in multi-movement works designed for dance, theater productions, and film from the short, improvised guitar pieces and work within rock styled ensembles that he had…
Guitar Solos
Although it was originally recorded in 1974, there are pieces on Fred Frith's landmark Guitar Solos album that are probably still making guitar players scratch their heads wondering "How did he do that?" Don't expect any kind of Yngwie Malmsteen-style wankage; Frith instead uses a volume pedal, tapping, and other extended techniques to produce everything from chiming, bell-like notes to unearthly howls. It almost never sounds like standard guitar-with-plectrum playing, but the pieces have a …
Cheap at Half the Price
Frith's last album for Ralph Records stepped back from the progressions of Speechless to a concoction of pop-like ditties and instrumentals recorded at home on a four track. And for the first time, Frith sings, in a strange high-pitched tone. A little more production and sound manipulation and this could almost be a Residents album, circa 1978. As a pop-song writer, Frith is okay; he shrouds socialist discussion in lyrics about dogs and insects while keeping the song structure simple and r…
Technology of Tears (And Other Music for Dance)
"Sadness, Its Bleached Bones Behind Us," and "You Are What You Eat" are unrelenting slices of hard-edged sounds over a pulse. "The Palace of Laughter, The Technology of Tears" is an imaginative, intense, varied suite comparing music which represents the past "frozen tears" of sadness -- displayed as images before us by the media, etc. -- with the "hot tears" of the moment that cannot be absorbed by technology. "Jigsaw" and "Jigsaw Coda" (1986) creates patterns with constantly shifting acc…
Early works 1980-82
CD version. Innersleeve with liner notes and lyrics, as well as photos. With this release, EM Records shine a light into the dark and yet strangely uplifting world of Inryo-fuen's early '80s wonderland: a surreal, adventurously analog, positively negative realm of freedom. Following the EM Records release of Inryo-fuen's enigmatic Ho-aku (EM 1125CD), Early Years 1980-82 collects the band's earliest recordings, originally released on flexi and vinyl, here re-edited, re-mixed and remastered.…
La Porte Ouverte
La Porte Ouverte is the Elodie's highly anticipated new vinyl-only album, released on Andrew Chalk own Faraway Press imprint. Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk have been collaborating extensively as Elodie over the past year, often helped by Tom James Scott here tickling the keys of the piano to augment with his own strings and treatments. The album is constructed from slowly revolving patterns of delicate harmonics floating around an omnipresent timbral drone, plenty of bells and gongs, and while…
The Synthetic Elements
Crisis of Taste is thrilled to offer ‘The Synthetic Elements’, a new LP by stalwarts of the outré Avant Garde, Idea Fire Company. For the better part of three decades Karla Borecky and Scott Foust have charted their own distinct course through the choppy waters of the experimental underground, their only interaction with the countless flash in the pan trends whipping passed their sails being a direct refutation of them.
Often enjoying the company of a number of like-minded champions of the …
Resonators
Four pieces from a residency in the Czech Republic by the trio of George Cremaschi (double bass and electronics), Irene Kepl (violin and electronics) and Petr Vrba (trumpet, clarinet and electronics). "We're concerned with using the acoustics of the resonant spaces we seek out as a sort of additional member of the group, composing with this interaction particularly in mind." Acoustic instruments and feedback devices combined in old stone spaces, such as the courtyard of a monastery, creating a r…
Diddy Wah Diddy / Who Do You Think You're Fooling / Moonchild /
In the high desert of California, they were referred to simply as “Beefheart.” Don Van Vliet acquired the habit of singing along to vintage blues records while hanging with high school chum Frank Zappa. Founder Alex Snouffer formed the Magic Band in late 1964. And, by early 1965, the powerful and charismatic local blues combo had made quite a name for itself locally as “the band” for local dances at the fairgrounds. By late ’65 the inclusion of master guitarist Rich Hepner explosively changed th…
Molecular Affinity
Thollem McDonas : “This is the third trio album Nels and I have made together, each time with a different 3rd partner. The previous two were The Gowanus Session with William Parker and Radical Empathy with Michael Wimberly. Though each session has been unique in itself (different prescribed approaches, the environment and of course the uniqueness that each individual brings), there are definitely overarching themes pollinating each album. As the instigator of each of these sessions, I’ve always …