Twilight music

Fred Frith about new and old in his music

With his music, Fred Frith settles down in the grey area of our imaginations, somewhere between free improvisation, noise and the schmaltz of lovely melodies. But Fred Frith not only cares about the question, what kind of music to make but also how it comes into being. Because of that you can see his music as experimental plant. Fred Frith now introduces a new CD: Digital Wildlife. Together with his group Maybe Monday Frith has betaken himself in the abysses of improvising and composition. The result: music of iridescent equivocalness.

Digital Wildlife has a complex history of origins. The improvisations of you and your musicians were directly recorded and at the same time manipulated by M. Boisen. After this you took apart and re-assembled the tracks. Is this a new form of composition?

Frith: Is anything new? I doubt it, but to quote Jean Derome: "I'm not interested in whether something is new, but in whether something is alive". My experience of manipulation of improvisation in the recording studio began with Henry Cow in 1974. Since that time I have been fascinated by the combination of studio compositional technique and improvisation, and you'll find similar techniques scattered through a lot of my projects. What made Digital Wildlife different and exciting for me was partly to be working in this way with Miya Masaoka, Larry Ochs and Joan Jeanrenaud, who are such extraordinary players, and partly the fact that Myles Boisen really came through in the manipulation of the material - he was the fifth, essential member of the group, and it really kept us off-balance, which I think is a very good place for an improviser to be! We also were limiting the improvising sometimes, by imposing rules or restrictions. But I don't think this approach could work unless the players are the kind of improvisers who deal more with the structural and interactive aspects of the material that's being generated than with their own virtuosity. Maybe Monday is both a passionate and a reflective group, and one that has many axes.

Improvisation and composition is normally seen as something different. You said once, that it's rather nearly similar. Now Digital Wildlife show something like a hierarchy between improvisation and composition. The process of composition, was it a rational one, which was confronted against the moment of improvisation or did itself has also a moment of coincidence?

Frith: Well you know all the clichés - improvising is 'instant composition', 'spontaneous composition', and so on; interestingly the same kinds of expressions don't exist in the other direction. We don't hear people talk about composition as 'improvisation in slow motion'! Of course there are also prevalent political and economic reasons for that. Existing economic structures privilege composition; and I have a theory that improvisation disappeared from classical music as a result of the creation of copyright laws! I do think that composition and improvisation are different aspects of the same process. What interests me in your question is the use of the word 'rational' - does this imply that improvisation is irrational? Are these words useful in this context? I think the process of creating just about anything involves combinations of rational thought, intuitive choice, ingrained memory, and desire. I could apply all of those words to both composition and improvisation. The process is different, and occupies different time frames, but other aspects are essentially similar. Composing might utilise a system, be it tonality, serialism or aleatoric methods, just as improvising might draw on technique, whether in conventional terms or in terms of the precise height from which you drop the rice on the strings; but relying only on the system or the technique will not produce interesting music in either case. You're constantly confronted with choices, because you are constantly in a dialogue with the material, as with any artist in any medium. Because in music the end-result will be perceived in time, there are different aspects to that dialogue; in improvisation the choices take on the air of a conversation, because it's happening NOW. But the dialogue is still happening when you compose, and perhaps because of being an improviser, I tend to compose very fast. The actual choices of material and ideas for how to juxtapose it are completely intuitive, but informed by my own past experience, not to mention my own pre-occupations. Someone else would have done it differently. There is no single rational way to deal with material.

So would you define art as a process, in which you deal with irritations? And do you see your art and your music as something that should irritate and provoke, as something, that's transverse to all that is conventionally?

Frith: Ah, again one of those words that mean everything and nothing! "Conventional" - what does it mean to you? And must art be seen as the challenger of conventions or isn't that always misleading? This (convention) is not at all the kind of concern that I have when I'm making music, whatever the process involved. I'm mostly concerned with grappling with 'material' and trying to make sense out of it, which makes it just another aspect of living. Of course there are irritations but also wonderful surprises, detours, confirmations, questions of all kinds. And in the process I deal with whatever comes up. I don't have any interest in it being irritating or provocative when I've finished. On the other hand, if it is, too bad! I do hope it will be passionate, alive, and direct, and that it will speak to people on a deep level. If I feel that way about it, the chances are someone else will too. Because in the end music is also about community, about healing, about the kinds of cultural transactions that take place on a non-verbal level.

For me, your music always leads me to borders, of my experience, of my knowledge, but sometimes also my feelings. It's like coming to unknown places, not only in a sense of 'unheard music', but also in a sense of 'unknown forms or traditions'. I always thought of this as a constant factor of your work.

Frith: I'm pleased that listening to my music leads you to 'the borders', and especially pleased that for you this seems to be a positive experience. As far as unknown forms or traditions goes, clearly for me the experience is different; I would say that known forms and traditions can show up somewhere that I wouldn't expect to find them. Or that there is a constant tension in my work between a somehow recognisable surface and the unruly elements that are simmering underneath it.

This constant tension: What relation to form and tradition do you have? Is their a special field of musical forms or developments you see yourself more related to?

Frith: Form and tradition are inescapable. All you can do is situate yourself somewhere in relation to them, because you can't get away from them. For me, my past links me inextricably to two things - the voice, and the song. My first serious musical experience was singing in the church choir, through which I learned about the primacy of the voice in music, and the critical importance (in all music) of collaboration. Then, after having a very difficult relationship with the violin and a classical education, I discovered the guitar, and, through the blues, improvisation. Almost everything I've done since is some kind of collaboration involving song-form, improvisation, and the 'voice' inherent in the sound material I use. Furthermore I think melody runs through practically everything I do - all kinds of melody, and certainly not always melody in the traditional sense, but melody nonetheless. In the end song, and melody, are what human beings in every culture share, and it would be perverse to turn one's back on it. So if I relate to any musical development it tends to be in identifying with other musician-composers who are interested in discovering ways to refresh the idea of melody, and who operate in the kind of twilight zone between vernacular and so-called 'high' culture - what René Lussier likes to call 'semi-popular music'! I guess I don't see myself in relation to a "field of musical forms and developments" so much as to a community of artists who share some of the same concerns, composers who also improvise, improvisers who also write songs, anyone who refuses to accept constraints, people like Jean Derome, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Beth Custer, René Lussier, Amy Denio, Annie Gosfield, Joane Hétu, Haco, Lars Hollmer. The forms and developments are both constantly changing and always the same, but either way, the community is enormously important to me.

Do you see your work as trans-cultural, particular not linked to western culture?

Frith: I can't really avoid Western Culture, even if I wanted to! But the communicative currency of today involves the complete breakdown of 'culture'. Consider these two quotations: "Musicians have always stolen, borrowed, exchanged or imposed influences, but for the past one hundred years music has become voracious in its openness - vampiric in one respect, colonial in its rabid exploitation, restless, uncentered, but also asking to be informed and enriched by new input and the transfer of gifts." (David Toop, from Ocean of Sound)

"You are often asked how you get away with doing these plunderphonic projects.The assumption is that any sort of creative activity that blatantly refers to some other existing creative activity has potentially dire legal consequences (...) pop is so rarely original that a reference is usually a sub-reference to some antecedent, which is in turn.....somewhat infinitely." (John Oswald, interviewed in Arcana)

These statements were coined in reference to the prevalent musical technique of sampling, but I think pretty much all artistic endeavor these days balances uneasily between rooted-ness and rootlessness. If an aspect of all art is about the desire to belong, then art now is (desperately) trying to figure where we belong, and who we belong to!

If you look upon your studies and your own work, would you see electronics as something that freed art and artist in a sense of Beuys concept, that everyone is an artist or in a sense of a more democratic art?

Frith: Any discussion about that issue would revolve around what art is, and who it's for. It's certainly true that electronics have, in their consumer forms, allowed for a huge upsurge in creativity, and to a certain extent have paved the way for a radically different attitude to consumerism itself. It really is possible for just about anyone to sit in front of a computer and make stuff, if you happen to live in a culture which has easy access to computers, and software, and education as to how to use them. And when you've made your stuff you can also disseminate it quite easily and beyond the control of large distribution networks. That's pretty cool. If I have any questions they tend to be about the stuff itself - what it is and what it means to people. The whole idea of the artist seems to me to be going through a change, as predicted by Jaques Attali in the book Noise, but where that change is leading is an open question; and the change seems to have much more to do with the process by which stuff is made and distributed than with the stuff itself! On some level I'm interested in art as a moral force, not in any narrow-minded religious way, but in the its ability to go to the heart of our dilemmas and illuminate them. But music mostly is used to sell stuff, to increase productivity, to provide background, to keep us happy; and it is marketed more and more in visual terms. I like to stay in touch with my physical environment through hearing and smelling and touching it, and I want to make music that has that physical sense to it, to revel in dirt and imperfection. I like everything that's going on off the map, all those unknown or forgotten seekers, seers, and survivors. Anyway, for most people it's not art, or even democracy that's the issue but where the next meal's coming from.

Fred Frith, Maybe Monday: Digital Wildlife. Winter & Winter. Vertrieb: Edel Also new: Fred Frith: Freedom in Fragments. Tzadik records. Vertrieb: Sunny Moon