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In the spring of 1981, when I first heard Speechless, Frith’s second album for Ralph Records, it was background music. I was sitting with him at his kitchen table, going over an interview we’d done a few months earlier. As he was explaining and refining some of the corrections he’d made to the transcript, he was playing a newly arrived test pressing of the record, just to hear that everything had come off all right. I remember how tough it was to follow what he was saying about the interview, because my ears kept drifting to that other room with all those strange sounds coming out of it. (At some point we must have knocked off so I could listen to some of it; I’m certain that the first time I dug the bagpipes of “Esperanza,” I was at Frith’s.)
I finally got a chance to really hear the album when it was released a few months later. At that time, it seemed to me the most original, finely crafted, and just plain beautiful record he’d ever made – and certainly the most disturbing. Today it sounds even better.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Essay, part 7
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on Fred Frith, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…
Music: SFCR Radio Show #6, Postmodernism, part 3: Three Contemporary Masters
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 