Fred Frith Quotations

I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

Chris Cutler was kind enough to offer his company as an umbrella, so now I can have all my back catalogue under one roof as it were, and it has the same feeling as with Daniel; this is a matter between friends rather than businessmen.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.

There are always things to examine. What's great is not feeling that I have to refuse any of them. Maybe no good from a PR perspective, but from the point of view of everyday life, it keeps things interesting.

I write with a mouse, because it has no psychological associations or memories or habits associated with it.

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

Not necessarily in one concert, but they're all there to be used if you want to use them.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental is it?

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic.

The totality of a record is usually beyond ones ability to imagine when you start working on it, but the component parts are, usually, fairly clear one way or another.

We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.

You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time.

It struck me as not very interesting just to take what was exactly in the film and stick it on a C.D. and put it out as a soundtrack.

I'm usually pretty careful about that kind of thing, but sometimes the music just pushes me into a direction that I can't really avoid following.

I started getting interested in the notes that I could hear being generated when I hammered on while playing a classical guitar.

...what's always exciting is when you hear something amazing when you least expected it. Every now and then I'll hear something for the first time that forces me to re-examine my frames of reference, and re-consider musical parameters in general, and that's wonderful . And what's even more wonderful in a way, is when you hear something that you know, and already think you have an opinion about, and then suddenly discover that it isn't what you thought it was, but something quite different, which makes it just as surprising as if you'd never heard it before. That's REALLY great!

If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.

All the time signatures we used on Gravity were taken from folk music cultures, where those kinds of time signatures are quite normal.