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Fred Frith

Fred Frith
Guitar Solos / Fifty

Catalog: WE 5
Format: 2xLP & Digital
Release: February 16, 2024

Fred Frith is simultaneously a singular musical figure and a collection of musical lifetimes.

He‘s the composer who wrote fragile avant-garde music in the tradition of John Cage and Earle Brown, the innovator who created new concepts of underground rock with his colleagues in the band Henry Cow, and the improviser who developed his very own language on the guitar. The many facets of Frith‘s musical oeuvre shimmer in vibrant and unique colors, but stand as one rainbow monolith of musical creation, never disintegrating into esoteric eclecticism.

Always musically curious and unbiased, he develops his ideas in the moment, demonstrating in real time how his creative process, while free of old hat conventions and tricks, creates an immediate yet unrandom and committed music. At the core is his unique guitar playing, which is on full display across these two records.

His debut, Guitar Solos, opened up a space beyond rock and improvised music, and now, 50 years later comes Fifty, a new solo guitar album that sounds completely different and yet familiar, that adds to his monolith of musical creation with another new vibrant color.

Tracklisting
Guitar Solos (1974):
1. Hello Music
2. Glass c/w Steel
3. Ghosts
4. Out Of Their Heads (On Locoweed)
5. Not Forgotten
6. Hollow Music
7. Heat c/w Moment
8. No Birds

Tracklisting
Fifty (2024):
1. Dawns
2. Outer Order
3. Tempus Fugit
4. Quicksilver (for Simone)
5. Unterwegs (for Roman)
6. Phalaropes
7. Jack’s Neap Tide
8. Schlechte Gewissen
9. Move Indigo
10. To Do
11. The Map of Dreams
12. Locomoting
13. Dusks