Fred Frith

The music industry creates nothing, it can only exploit the abilities of its victims (the musicians); the music industry wants to keep its customers' desires as low as possible, because easy formulas are simpler to reproduce. Musicians with integrity are harder to control; the music industry makes all its decisions based on profit, they only have ears for the rustle of money

(Excerpt from the Rock In Opposition Manifesto written by Chris Cutler)

Rock In Opposition was a proudly minority movement with a single concern: defending musicians' freedom of expression. Born in England thanks to Henry Cow, within a milieu close to the internationalist left, it grew to bring together bands from various countries around the world, including, from the very start, Stormy Six, Samla Mammas Manna, Univers Zero, Etron Fou Leloublan, soon joined by Art Zoyd, Art Bears and Aksak Maboul. In this context, which it would be limiting even to call niche, multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith is one of the most creative minds, the author of a multifaceted career, still active today, in the course of which he has managed to collaborate with artists such as Robert Wyatt, Derek Bailey, Residents, Mike Oldfield, Brian Eno, Mike Patton and others.

Regarded as one of the most original British guitarists, Frith launched his solo career early on with "Guitar Solos" (1974), notable for its remarkable technique, before landing on the Residents' label, Ralph Records, with "Gravity" (1980), an LP firmly in Rock In Opposition territory, recorded half with Samla Mammas Manna and half with the American band Muffins. The following year Frith continued his solo quest for a utopian, all-encompassing music (that is, one that can't be pinned to any known genre) with "Speechless" (1981), in which he repeats the same approach as its predecessor (the twin collaboration with different bands).

Recorded with the French band Etron Fou Leloublan on the A-side tracks and with New York's Massacre on the B-side, "Speechless" can be considered a culmination (up to that point) of that imaginary line connecting the masters of the avant-garde, from Edgard Varese to the minimalists, with AMM, Faust, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa's Mothers, Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, as well as part of prog-rock and the Canterbury school, with the musicians of Rock In Opposition. Frith pushes beyond the endpoint of this trajectory, updating Rock In Opposition to embrace the ironic, surreal new wave of the Residents too, so much so that it's their very own label, the legendary Ralph, that produces the album.

"Speechless" (1981) confirms Frith as a visionary creator of sounds that stand as a striking example of organized delirium, a geometric chaos that stands out spectacularly for its originality and complexity. This is a bizarre work, at times outright deranged, pushing the anti-commercial stance of Henry Cow even further to the extreme. It's hard to imagine a more varied and chaotic container, one capable of blending field recordings taken from the streets of New York, musique concrète, tape manipulation, free improvisation, folk music, free jazz and deconstructed rock music, into a bizarre marriage of avant-garde music that doesn't take itself seriously, distinguished precisely by its irony (a trait typical of much of the Rock In Opposition movement).

In this magma of sounds picked up from the street, a post-punk bassline suddenly emerges ("A Spit In A Ocean") that could have come from a Tuxedomoon album, before giving way to an ambient folk with vaguely Spanish overtones ("Navajo"), a bizarre mix of flute and jaw harp across the two versions of "Kick The Can", the avant-garde new wave of "Balance", or the fully free sounds of "Saving Grace".

If irony is present, it's nonetheless charged with anguish in the two minutes of indescribable music (somewhere between circus music and electronic rhythms) of "Carnival On Wall" or in the Eastern-tinged progression of "Ahead In The Sand".

Frith finds the perfect synthesis in the seven minutes of "Laughing Matter/Experanza", a sonic delirium that spins folk music, rock and the avant-garde together into a single vessel, as if King Crimson were trying their hand at Frank Zappa's collages. It's anything but a simple formula, yet it marks an enormous step toward that all-encompassing music so many have stubbornly pursued. The collage of "Women Speak To Men" is another cauldron containing everything at once, one that wouldn't look out of place on "Trout Mask Replica", "Uncle Meat" or "Meet The Residents", effectively containing elements present in each of these three masterpieces.

On the title track Frith has fun manipulating field recordings of passersby's voices, attempting to recover (by manipulating them) the musical insights of John Cage (the idea that everything is music). Scattered among the tracks are quirks reminiscent of his friends the Residents, as in "Conversations With White Arc", whose rhythm is practically identical to the devolution manifesto "Six Things To A Cycle".

“Speechless” has been regarded as a work out of step with its time, so much so that Frith himself has been called a naive musician. In fact, ever since his embrace of the internationalist ideals of Henry Cow, Frith can hardly be seen as detached from his era - if anything, he's ahead of it. His masterpiece “Speechless” should therefore be viewed as a great act of love for freedom, which for that very reason doesn't speak to his generation alone, but aspires to speak to all generations, beyond the constraints of time. And it's remarkable that avant-garde music, typically seen as the epitome of absolute incommunicability, can aspire to so much.

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31/10/2021