Fred Frith Quotes

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.
Fred Frith

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

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

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.
Fred Frith

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.
Fred Frith

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

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

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.
Fred Frith

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.
Fred Frith

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.
Fred Frith

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.
Fred Frith

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.
Fred Frith

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

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.
Fred Frith