Intakt Releases New Fred Frith Duo Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

While English guitarist Fred Frith, a major figure in the avant-rock movement half a century ago, has become an equally significant figure in the Bay Area, where, hopefully, he is still teaching composition in the Music Department at Mills College, I fear that I have not kept up with his work as I have with other local “bleeding edge” figures. He has accumulated a modest discography with the Zürich-based Intakt Records, but this site has accounted for only two of those releases. The earlier of these caught my attention due to the F-bomb in its title. The second, like the first, was a trio album with percussionist Jordan Glenn and Jason Hoopes alternating between electric bass and double bass entitled Closer to the Ground.

Both of these play out adventurous improvisations in which unconventional sonorities tend to take precedence over themes or motifs. Each album is neatly divided into tracks, but whether or not there is an audible break separating a pair of successive tracks is often left to the listener to discern. It would not be outrageous to suggest that Frith and his trio partners went into the studio to jam, capturing everything on the recording. When it came to pressing the CD, Frith may then have decided where he wanted the breaks to be and what titles he wished to assign to the resulting tracks.

This may also be the case with his latest Intakt album, A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall. This is a duo recording, which he made with Ikue Mori, who specialized in real-time electronic synthesis controlled by laptop software. They had originally partnered to record music for a radio play. However, after finishing that project, on January 24, 2015 they spend an extra day in the studio to record their first duo album; and the fifteen tracks on A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall constitute the results. What is interesting is that Frith plays electric guitar on only two of those tracks, “Nothing to It” and “Now Here.” Quoting from the back cover of the album, on the remaining tracks he plays “Home-made instruments, various toys and objects.”

One gets the impression that the spontaneity of improvisation owes much to the spontaneity with which Frith selects his “instruments” and the ways in which he elicits sounds from them. It is almost as if each of his choices initiates a new dialogue with Mori, possibly challenging Mori to “discover the right response” through the prodigious scope of his synthesis software. Thus, if the overall album does “parse” into distinguishable tracks, it is because those tracks are distinguished by the sound-producing materials involved.

The advance material that Intakt provided for this recording describes the overall album as “playful, poetic, mysterious and open.” I would endorse that description. However, I would also point out that “playful” is the first of the adjectives. This is one of those offerings that serves up what I like to call “the dual semantics of ‘play.’” “Play” is the verb that describes how one performs on an instrument; but, on this duo album, it also sets the tone for the playful social dynamics of interaction that results in a listening experience that is as engaging for the listener as it probably was for the two performers.