Frith, Fred - Impur
SKU
FREDFRFC1
"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 windows. For their part, each group of musicians had to play musical material Fred had prepared for them - occasionally they could improvise. In order to co-ordinate all the groups, who naturally couldn't hear each other, everyone followed a precise time-score prepared by Fred (55 minutes regulated by synchronized stopwatches). The entire event was recorded on 4 A-DAT machines, to be mixed down later, and this CD is the result: a lurching, complex and capricious beast with many heads: an orchestra tuning up; a salute to Sonny Blount; a roiling chaotic mass of sound splitting into layers, colliding back together, pullulating, ululating, roaring and sometimes mewing like a kitten."