★ReR Megacorp
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…
Impur II
Essentially a pretty great concert by a large 19 strong ensemble with Fred conducting as well as playing. Lots of rhythm, harmony, rock noise, exotic instrumentation, power, complexity and melodic writing, with stretches of chaos, eccentricity and theatre. Totally different, then, from Impur Part I which was a deconstructed, spatialised simultaneity of musical events heard through open windows or by wandering through rooms; Impur Part II was an unannounced performance upon which audience …
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…
Step Across The Border
Although this is technically the soundtrack to a film of the same name by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, Step Across the Border actually serves as an excellent overview of Fred Frith\'s groundbreaking work as a soloist, bandleader, and collaborator. There\'s an example of his \"guitars on the table\" approach (\"Romanisches Cafe\"), and a couple of excellent duos with tape manipulation whiz Bob Ostertag (\"Voice of America, Pt. 3,\" from the lost and lamented Voice of America album they m…
Maps and Mazes
After many years percolating, this third release by Ossatura documents a quite dramatic aesthetic shift – including more acoustic instruments alongside the electronic; more settled, cyclic rhythms; more harmonic concord - even a song. On occasion reminiscent of the Necks in abstract mood, these pieces offer pools of complex, grounded, shifting textures, interpenetrated by atmospheric field recordings. Immersive.
Ossatura are an Italian trio (Elio Martusciello on guitar and sampler, Fabrizio Spe…
The Homosexuals
The Homosexuals appeared, stunned everyone who heard them and then disappeared. Between 1978 and 1982 they released 2 singles and a 12" EP. The three of them individually, under various names, also released a stack of other material, but as The Homosexuals they, curiously, left a whole archive of unreleased material lying around on tape with no idea of releasing it. When everyone had moved on, I was given all the masters and a invitation - if I was really still interested, to get on with it. For…
Abbiamo Tutti I Suoi Problemi
Picchio dal Pozzo is regarded as one of the most original, impressive and highly respected of all the experimental groups to have come out of Italy in the 1970s. They share their original label with Henry Cow's Concerts, and were early invitees to the canonical Recommended Sampler. Aldo De Scalzi, Andrea Beccari, Giorgio Karaghiosoff and Paulo Griguolo all met at infant school and began playing Teleman, Corelli, Bach and Mozart together in their school orchestra. In 1969, Aldo's brother, one of …
Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions
In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…
Health and Efficiency
The EP restored, with both tracks. Remastered. Now available alone.
Long awaited reissue of Health and Efficiency (1980) - the loosely driven, uplifting and abstract follow-up to This Heat’s seminal debut album, and a total classic in its own right. Where their self-titled first album took two years to make, Health and Efficiency was recorded in a fraction of that time, using a mobile 16-track recording studio spied in the backpage ads of Melody Maker to lay down an eight minute improvisation t…
The Road: Volumes 1-5
2015 Restock. There are bands whose finest work allows its roots full exposure while burying them. Henry Cow was one of these, emerging at a time of widespread upheaval and making bold new statements and fashioning order of the resultant chaos. The label has a history of producing similarly fine compendiums, most notably from groups such as Faust, Art Bears and This Heat, but the Cow set is a more ambitious project, befitting the band’s complex style and legacy. With roots deep in the mult…
The Road: Volumes 6-10
Volume 2 of the definitive collection of unreleased recordings, unrecorded compositions, one-off events, radio and concert recordings. These four CDs and one DVD cover the period from 1976 to 1978 and include the legendary Stockholm and Bremen radio concerts, many otherwise unrecorded late compositions, and the only known video ever made of the band (a complete 75 minute concert from 1976). With a substantial 60-page book of information, unpublished photographs, documents, recollections and subs…
40th ANNIVERSARY BOX SET - VOL 3
Finally arrived back, this is the 40th Anniversary Box Set, Volume 3featuring The complete re-mastered Henry Cow studio recordings in the third matching box: Legend, Unrest, Desperate Straights, In Praise of Learning and Western Culture. Formed in 1968 and disbanded in 1978, HENRY COW's influences included rock, blues, classical, opera, jazz and of course, the avant-garde. Their compositions are complex, challenging and extremely original, but they are also dedicated improvisors who would som…
Kew. Rhone.
The classic restored. No extra tracks, just this legendary release as it was originally conceived. Kew Rhone was made soon after Peter and John left Henry Cow, at Carla Bley and Mike Mantler’s Grog Kill studio in New York (they both appear on the CD). Fellow conspirators included singer Lisa Herman and drummer Andrew Cyrille. It’s one of those records which sums up a moment; a creative moment in which ideas have come into clear focus, and just need to be got down; an historical moment at which a…
Rarities (Volumes 1 & 2)
Lindsay Cooper was a rare and extraordinary woman; at home in rock bands (Henry Cow, National Health), Jazz ensembles (Mike Westbrook Orchestra, Maarten Altena Octet) Concert Halls (Concerto for Sopranino Saxophone and Orchestra, Songs for bassoon and Orchestra); she also founded the Feminist Improvising Group, scored feature films and wrote for television, dance, radio, theatre, contemporary ensembles and orchestras - as well as being highly respected as a virtuoso performer on several instrume…
Favourite Sounds of Berlin
Site recordings from Berlin by audio explorer Peter Cusack, documenting evocative locations throughout the city based on an inquiry into Berlin resident's favorite sounds, with a booklet detailing the 31 recordings and the scope of the project