To celebrate the release of the 40th Anniversary Henry Cow box of live recordings, I've decided to brush off this unfinshed article I started over 10 years ago.


The Fred Frith Tapes

I was introduced to the music of Fred Frith and Henry Cow by Hahn Rowe, when we were both freshmen at Tufts University, fall of 1979. My musical tastes were wide compared to most of my high school friends but I was unprepared for the vast range of strange music I would encounter over the next few years, thanks to Hahn and others involved in the Tufts radio station WMFO. There was an excellent show on MFO called Mental Notes, co-hosted by Michael Pailas and Andy MacKenzie, and this weekly show highlighted all of the best avant-garde groups and musicians particularly of the "progressive rock" dominion. I heard Gong and Robert Wyatt and Magma regularly. I got involved with the radio station.

These notes will focus on stray and sometimes overlooked aspects of Frith's work as it relates to taped music, studio production tricks and other tape oddities. I have collected most of Frith's recorded output and seen him perform live over 20 times, and although I'm not the eager fan I once was, I remain indebted to Fred Frith for opening certain sound windows for me.

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler performed in a science lecture room of Barnum Hall in the winter of 1979/80. It was to have been an Art Bears tour, but Dagmar backed out for health reasons. People at WMFO hosted and recorded the concert and Hahn got me to go. I have a cassette dub somewhere. Upon entering, Cutler wrote Noise 101 on the blackboard. Frith played guitars on the table and Cutler used his drums in a very abstract manner and they moved through their series of duet experiments culminating in a kind of anti-jig. This era of performances is captured pretty well on the record Live in Prague and Washington, which is a tough listen but is astounding work to see invented live, especially if new to experimental music.

Skeleton Crew, Frith's duo with Tom Cora (which was expanded to include Zeena Parkins later) visited Boston a number of times when I was student there. They made 2 very good records, Learn To Talk and Country of Blinds, which contain some of Frith's most political songs. He had moved to New York around the time of Reagan coming into "power" and attacked a lot of the Reaganist values through Skeleton Crew agit-improv. Frith incorporated rough cassette recordings into Skeleton Crew live shows and recordings. You might hear Reagan mumble: "We're still free in America", followed by Frith's manic peel of laughter before launching into a song.

The influence of Bob Ostertag can't be downplayed in Frith's incorporation of mixing rough tape sound into his music. Ostertag was an early user of samplers and field recordings and there are some great records of Frith and Ostertag together, particularly "Getting A Head" and "Voice of America". Ostertag also made a record called "Sooner Or Later" which is one of the most unlistenable records ever produced, sampling from a tape of an El Salvadoran boy burying his father killed in the civil war there.

Ostertag also founded the school of No Photos, a period in which Frith and Cutler refused to allow their photos to be easily captured, often holding a hand in front of their face, a clearly political gesture asking people, and photographers in particular, to listen to the massage of music rather than focusing on image and personality. A great example of this is Ostertag's appearance in the film "Step Across The Border", where he is rehearsing with Frith and others and when the film camera turns on him he shoos it away, Don't Look Here. I definitely appreciated this stance for a time, but it's funny how trying to avoid The Eye can sometimes bring more attention to oneself. A strange circular game of control.

Henry Cow, the great English band Frith (and Cutler) led from 1968 until about 1978, learned amazing things about using the recording atudio as a compositional tool. The influence of German group Faust, Virgin Records labelmates, must have been considerable. Faust incorporated incredible tape echo effects and droning oscillator noise in their work and this crept quickly into Henry Cow.

This was the era of "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", Byrne and Eno's dissertation on the use of found (or stolen) sound, and Holger Czukay's "Movies" is another example of the great use of tape recordings of ethno-musical sources as well as field recordings mashed into the mix. Today "mash ups" may be everyone's middle name but in 1980, with the arrival of the Professional Walkman and other recording devices, this was all new territory.

In New York, Frith began producing records for other groups. I think of The Muffins record 185, which has great contributions by Frith as a player and also in the use of tapes, like the appearance of what sounds like a creaking ship mast on "Antidote To Drydock", a sound which also appears in Frith's sound collage masterpiece record "Speechless". (The LP "Gravity" should also be mentioned for the appearance of early tape sound, rain on a tin roof for example, an early drum machine?) Frith produced records by many groups during this period (early to mid-80's), including V Effect, the Orthotonics and France's Etron Fou Leloublon.

"Speechless" (Ralph Records LP, now on Fred Records CD) includes numerable exquisitely creative uses of documentary tape sound, and so serves as a great snapshot of its time and place (mid 80's NYC). Police: "Get back, get back"/(cut) Woman: "I don't know where to go." There are sprawling sections of street protests Frith recorded in New York. Even the Satie-esque "Domain de Planousset" is suffused with tapes of night birds.

Frith collaborated with the Michigan studio duo Rascal Reporters on a number of tape-by-mail projects, including a re-working of Frith's New York protest tapes into the track "No More War", which appears as an extra on the recent "Speechless" re-issue. Frith told me that Steve Gore sent him a 1/4" reel tape of very complex time signature playing, asking for a guitar solo to which FF responded by cutting the tape up into fragments and randomly re-attaching them. A large part of that appeared on the Rascal Reporters LP "Ridin' On A Bummer" and Frith's re-do of that is the classic "No More War", which was discussed at large on an internet bulletin board where Frith and Gore clashed over the merits of improvised vs. composed musical activity. Anyway, there was a fruitful friendship between Steve and Fred, one which made people think, even if contentious. (The recent death of Steve Gore is a huge loss to the American progressive music community, if such a thing exists.)

Morgan Fisher created a great LP of "1 Minute Masterpieces" called "Miniatures" which includes Frith's looping summary "The Complete Recorded Works of Henry Cow", a tongue-in-cheek rush through their sonic catalog which should be heard.

"Step Across The Border" should be mentioned again as a good glimpse of Frith at work. I recall the film containing a number of seagull appearances, and the sound of seagulls is something Frith returns to again and again. See also his track on the guitar compilation "Guitar Solos 3", called "Alienated Industrial Seagulls". All of Frith's solo guitar recordings deserve consideration for his ability to use the instrument to invoke other sound sources, like strange radio broadcasts coming through his guitar pickups.

Perhaps the strangest Fred Frith tape I have in my collection, and never see on any recordings lists, is from a Japanese cassette compilation called Omni 1. It's actually a Tim Hodgkinson piece, with organ and saxophone solo in heavy reverb, called "Pampkin The Great", and Frith chants with Dagmar Krause various terms of sexual "pathology", "Nymphomania" for example. I'll have to transfer that tape to new media sometime soon.

I have way too many Fred Frith records. He has been a central figure in my own development as a musical thinker and he continues to create sometimes astoundingly great music. His contribution to the "Rivers and Tides" documentary, while subtle and minimal, is wonderful. His homage to John Cage on the record "The Previous Evening" is an astounding piece of modern collage sound and a beautiful tribute. And the Evelyn Glennie film "Touch The Sound" has beautiful footage of Frith and Gleniie performing in an old factory, Frith en-lightening the moment by playfully tossing rolls of tissue paper down several stories.

Here is an abbreviated list of Fred Frith performances I have attended:
Frith and Cutler, Barnum Hall, Tufts University 1979
Frith solo guitar, Mass College of Art, 1980
Skeleton Crew, Mass Art 1982(?)
Skeleton Crew, Medford Jewish Center 1984(?)
Frith and Phil Minton, DC Space, Wash, DC 1984(?)
Frith and Hans Reichel, Nightstage, Cambridge, Mass. 1987
Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Victoriaville Festival, Quebec 1996
Massacre, Great American Music Hall, SF 1997(?)
Frith/Ochs/Masaoka, Great American, SF 1998(?)
Fred Frith Re-Mix, Mills College, Oakland 2000(?)
Fred Frith solo guitar, Berkeley Rep Theater 2005(?)

I hope to consider Frith's compositonal techniques, including the ideas of "melody extraction" and "block melodies" in a future post.

For info on the Henry Cow 40th Anniversary set and other new music, see www.rermegacorp.com