The Fred Frith Tapes, Part 2.

Here is Fred Frith's reply with corrective remarks to my recent blog post.
I truly appreciate the time Fred took to inform me of the details surrounding these histories and mentions and hope people find some good information here. Perhaps much of this information is available elsewhere but it was largely news to me.
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hi
thanks for taking the time to write about this stuff. It's always appreciated. Can't help noticing, however, that there are rather a lot of outright non-facts included. Since you took the time to write it, I will take the time to comment!

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.

—This is a nice idea, but completely untrue - we were never going to perform as Art Bears at Tufts. The only way we could have done that would have been with Marc Hollander and Peter Blegvad, with whom we had recently toured in Europe, but that would have been moot since the "group" ceased to exist immediately after that tour, and we were never booked for any American dates.

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.

—A couple of myths:
1, that Skeleton Crew was an improv band. We weren't. We performed songs, and, since we played all the instruments, those songs took an endless amount of rehearsal. Our records should make it pretty clear that improv was the exception in the group rather than the rule. This was composed music.
2, the voice heard saying "We're still free" is not Reagan, but Jerry Falwell, and the cassette recordings weren't rough, they were purchased by us directly from the Moral Majority, of which Tom was a member!

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".

—Henry Cow introduced field recordings into our live performances as early as 1974, several years before I met Bob and heard his music. When I first heard his music he was playing a Serge synthesizer. His interest in samples was radically enhanced when said instrument blew up in London and he was compelled to use cassette machines for our London concert. This concert became the LP Voice of America.

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.

—no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard Bob or anyone else refer to such a "school", and the idea that I have refused to allow my photo to be taken is refuted by the literally thousands of photos taken over the whole span of my working life from 1973 to the present. The moment in Step Across the Border is probably the only moment Bob ever made such a gesture, and it was probably done by way of letting the filmmakers know that he was not involved in the music they were supposed to be shooting. I have a policy of not allowing photographers to use flash, or to move around in front of an audience when I am performing. The reason for that is because it is distracting both for me and for the audience, who are there to hear music not to watch photographers. This is fairly standard practice among most professional musicians that I know. In fact I know many who are much stricter than I am. My technical rider states that photographers are welcome to come to our sound-checks and take as many pictures as they want. If I'm so against image and personality, how come I'm in (so far) 5 different documentary films?

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.

—I loved the 1973 era Faust, and they definitely had an impact, but when it came to using the recording studio there were plenty of models that both they and we shared, especially Phil Spector, George Martin, and Frank Zappa, and not mention the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio, all of which models were a great deal more pertinent to our studio work, especially early on. Incidentally, Chris didn't join Henry Cow until 1971.

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.

—It's perhaps useful to note that Gravity was made at approximately the same time as both of the above records and it also contains a vast number of sampled recordings, many of them from a well-known tape archive to which I had access for a time. Samples included on Gravity include Iranian demonstrators, various recordings of dance music from renaissance times, and field recordings of native american singing and drumming, as well as a whole catalog of nature recordings from the Arctic, including seabirds and seals. Much of this material had also been used at Henry Cow concerts in the mid-70s, as I said earlier, using reel to reel tape recorders on stage.

"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.

—Being a hopeless pedant I can't resist pointing out that they aren't birds but frogs!!

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.)

—Hmm. Interesting! I did one collaboration with Steve Gore, and one only. I don't know what conversation with me you're referring to but one or the other or both of must have been on drugs! I did indeed refuse to do a guitar solo, but I certainly didn't cut up the original and reassemble it. I left it completely alone. What I added was a recording of a siren in upstate New York being tested. It is a very long continuous downwards glissando and it has the effect of always pulling the chords into its psychological orbit. I found it absolutely haunting, and added recordings of a demonstration in New York to create a kind of "narrative" feeling. I was very pleased with the result. I sent it to Steve, and as far as I remember he used exactly what I sent him, as did I when I put it on the Speechless re-release. I'm not aware of any difference between the two versions. I have no recollection of any conversation on an internet bulletin board with Steve. I always found him to be an intense and eccentric and supremely creative fellow.

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.

—Certainly not a rush, and no loops either. A meticulously constructed tape piece which used some part of everything Henry Cow ever recorded assembled according to a strict mathematical template and took a lot of studio hours to complete.

"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.

—1. there is one scene in the film with seagulls
—2. Alienated Industrial Seagulls is just a silly title, and has nothing to do with the actual birds
—3. strange radio broadcasts are not invoked by the guitar. They are exactly that - strange radio broadcasts, amplified by holding the radio over the pickups. Old trick..

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 never heard of this, and certainly had nothing to do with it. Just somebody using my name I'm afraid.

there we have it.
cheers
Fred