A good performance of music for dance, all performed by Fred (via extensive overdubbing).

"Any new record from Fred Frith, one of the world's leading avant rock guitarists and composers, is a major event. Accidental was commissioned by a British choreographer who lives in Amsterdam, Paul Selwyn Norton, for a dance piece made with the Batsheva Company in Tel Aviv.
For Fred it's a return to basics, a series of deeply contrasting moods achieved with the simplest of means. Throughout the CD...

Second of a three-box collection by one of the most innovative guitarists and composers of his generation, containing 8 ReR CDs, a bonus Fred title and a fat historic booklet with artwork, photographs, extensive notes & other comments by Fred, all packed into in a sturdy box - and at a budget price.
Box 2 Contains:
Live in Japan
Speechless
Prints
Step Across the Border
Impur 2
Art of Memory II
Skeleton Crew (2 x CDs)
plus bonus CD
Helter Skelter

Gravity is one of Fred's most enduring & endearing works. It was his first post-Henry Cow solo album, and he recorded it with the backing of The Muffins on one side of the original album and Samla Mammas Manna on the other + Marc Hollander.
It's the closest thing to a progressive rock disc that Fred has ever released and it's a tuneful yet still avant progressive rock work. This is a classic and is highly recommended!

“1980's GRAVITY represented guitarist Fred Frith's first major break from.

"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France involving as many of the students as possible, grouped according to their departments - early music, rock, African drumming, classical etc. Each group was set up in a different room in the school building and during the concert the public was encouraged to wander around creating their own mix, or to sit in the courtyard and listen to the sound drifting out through the open...

Long time Waysiders will remember the limited edition box that we sold with the two albums of this concert a very long time ago. They may also remember the many concerts that Fred performed with this set up in that style in the late 70s/early 80s all over the world. I do.

“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...

"This is a retrospective compendium of Fred's work over the last 17 years, with a lot of new material, perfectly put together and exceptionally listenable start to finish- an enlightening journey. It's my favourite of Fred's works in recent times. Close composition for electric and acoustic resources, tapework, concrete constructions, songs, sound effects and noise-art improvisations."
Guests included:
Iva Bittova, Tom Cora, Jean Derome, Haco, Tim Hodgkinson, Lars Hollmer, Rene Lussier...

Originally released as part of the double vinyl lp "Technology Of Tears" in 1986, Propaganda was substantially shortened so as to fit onto a single lp side. Now, the music has been reconstructed from the original two track masters as is now heard as originally intended for the 1st time!

"Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise-sculpting - as well as invented and real instruments, all played by Fred..

This is the soundtrack to the film which followed Fred touring & playing in the late 80's, when he was actively on the road all the time. This functions as a sort of a 'best of' sampler, featuring many aspects of his work, some of which can be found on other albums, but most of which is only available here.
This includes many great players: Tom Cora, Haco, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Rene Lussier, Bob Ostertag, Lars Hollmer, Eino Haapala, Iva Bittova, Hans Bruniusson, Joey Barron, and many many others..

“With an all-star line-up that features Tenko, John Zorn and Christian Marclay (with guest Jim Staley on trombone), Technology of Tears started life in New York in 1986 as a dance commission by Rosalind Newman.
Fred took this opportunity to experiment with Henry Kaiser's brand new synclavier (the absolute state-of-the-art sampling and processing technology of the time - Henry had to take out a second mortgage on his house to buy it). It was the sophisticated sampling that fascinated Fred, and the...

''Written for a dance programme, this is Fred's hommage, in three pieces to the work and influence of John Cage, Earl Brown and Morton Feldman. Beautifully conceived and executed and full of minute and fascinating detail. Also an unalloyed pleasure to ...

“The long-awaited follow up to their first release on Derek Bailey's Incus label and a kind of prequel, going back to the time when Fred was playing home-made instruments and John was using mouthpieces and duck-calls as much or more than alto sax; this was back in the New York glory days when 100 new ideas popped up somewhere every day, and these performances lie right at the fringe of what most people would accept as "music".
Anyone wanting to get back to one of the roots of what later became known..

"Although following The 5th Elephant in its musical organisation - around grids of pulses and highly crafted, rich sonorities - this work is more evolved, more focussed and more internally economic. Following a narrative thread this time, the whole is bound into a complex and ramifying exposition of repetition, transformation and evolution, where a return is no return and where perceiver and perceived are lost to time.
Tightly bounded by speech-derived (but massively re-formed) sonic materials, as...

"This album was born out of studio improvisations by Glandien with drummer Chris Cutler (Pere Ubu, Henry Cow, Cassiber), and avant tuba player Michael Vogt (Berlin Symphony Orchestra). Listening back to the tapes, the group agreed that the results were a failure. This did not stop them from ripping through a storming live set at Berlin's Anorak club the day after the studio session, but the general mood was that the recordings should be scrapped.
A year later Glandien decided to re-look at the...

"With Chris Cutler, The Icarus Ensemble, Sira and Boubacar Djebate, Johannes Bauer, Tiziano Popoli, Jocelyn B. Smith and the Orchestra of the Teatro Popoli, Bologna, conducted by Yoichi Sugiyama, this is a rare release from one of the pioneers of...

This disc, the fourth in a series of recordings from the visionary geography of Anaphoria Island, is the premiere recording of a new acoustic orchestra of instruments created and hand-built by Kraig Grady. All of the instruments are tuned to a unique m...

GZ are fronted by fabled Japanese sampler/guitar terrorist Otomo Yoshihide. This is one of the best by them I've heard. It starts with sampled (?) futozao shamisen that slowly builds up constantly, in added instrumentation & i...

"This album is gorgeous. I picked it up expecting some crazy experimental thing because it's a Haco project, but what I ended up hearing was an achingly beautiful collaboration of slow, climaxing songs, inventive string technique, and head-bobbing goodness. This is a really, really good disc."-Eon Fontes May

"Charismatic singer, lyricist and performer Haco came to the fore in the early 80s with the group After Dinner, a sublime incarnation of surreal, direct, and offbeat Japanese/European pop...

"Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake met in 1980 at a Denver recording studio where Bob was working as an engineer. They immediately discovered a musical kinship and have continued to play and record in various projects since, notably Hail, but also Denver legends Thinking Plague and 5UUs.
Their first LP (Venus Handcuffs, 1986) was recorded in an abandoned yoghurt factory, the second (Gypsy cat and Gypsy Bird, 1983) followed soon after. At about this time Bob got a job as a sound-effects engineer for a horror

"Ad Hoc Records' new, four-panel digipack reissue of The Hat Shoes debut album will be especially welcomed by lovers of intelligent and thoughtful progressive music, with a hint of Romanticism.
Originally released in 1991, Differently Desperate is a studio offering of diverse avant-pop songs by a 'super-group' comprised of members Bill Gilonis (The Work), Catherine Jauniaux (Fluvial), Charles Hayward (This Heat, Camberwell Now) and Tom Cora (Skeleton Crew, Curlew). There's also a slew of well-known...

Charles Hayward is, of course, best known for his drumming and vocalizing feats with This Heat, Camberwell Now and Quiet Sun, but in addition to doing some improvising work, he has released a number of solo albums contsructed out of his excellent drumming, distinctive voice and single drones made from keyboards, melodica, etc. I saw him perform at RIO in 2009 and it was a real treat to finally see the great man behind the kit and in full voice. This is his first in quite some time and is a good one...

The last of the Henry Cow albums on Virgin, this includes their amazing final BBC session; 25' of Henry Cow perfection, a small taste of the famous shows that they performed with Robert Wyatt and a lot of purely free improvisation or prepared free improvisation, which is what they were doing live at this time.
This has been out of print for a bit now and is always in demand, and it has been remastered by Bob Drake and sounds significantly better to my ears!

"Originally released in 197

“A further collection of missing pieces uncovered since the release of the 18 CD Henry Cow Box that fills in parts of the story still undocumented - even on the bootleg circuit.
Contents: 1: the earliest and only known stage recording of the band as it was in June 1972 (Martin Ditcham, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson) at the first Glastonbury Fayre. The recording is quite clean, though the mix heavily favours bass and guitar but, in a way, this makes it of special interest, both...

This features very strong playing & compositions coupled with a ''lightness'' of sound unlike any of their other albums; the closest Cow ever got to sounding like Hatfield & The North!

Their 2nd album featured the addition of Lindsay Cooper's bassoon/oboe, giving them sort of a proto-Univers Zero sound (Cow were first) & is reissued with superior sonics. One side of composed music and one side of (mostly) improvised music with studio...

Nearly 8 years after the big box set by Henry Cow was unleashed on the world, they’ve made the sets available individually!

”This opens with a series of well-recorded tracks from an unknown source, largely culled from Unrest but demonstrating Cow's penchant for mixing things up in performance so that, while all the signposts of Frith's "Ruins" are there, the complexion is changed by inserting "Half Asleep" smack dab in the middle. Frith doesn't reproduce the razor's edge tone of his solo on the...