Friends & Enemies

Friends & Enemies Artist: Fred Frith & Henry Kaiser
Label: Cuneiform
Category: Music


Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 2


UPC: 045775011721
EAN: 0045775011721
ASIN: B00000J5V7


Release Date: 1999-05-15

Friends & Enemies


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Tracks:

  1. It Moves...
  2. The Changing Of Names
  3. It Sings
  4. Believing What We Read
  5. ...But Does It Swing?
  6. Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues
  7. The Golden Eighties
  8. Everyday Objects
  9. The Kirghiz Light
  10. Special Rider Blues
  11. Drowsy Maggie
  12. An HK Guitar Solo
  13. Strandloper
  14. Major Nichols
  15. The Live Trace
  16. See Over
  17. Fourth Rail
  18. Squirrely

Tracks:

  1. Twisted Memories Give Way To The Angry Present
  2. Black Glass
  3. Third Rail
  4. Three Languages
  5. One Of Nature's Mistakes
  6. Roy Rogers
  7. The Confession
  8. Objects Everyday
  9. Wool And Water
  10. The Trace
  11. Life In Hell
  12. The Incarceration
  13. An FF Bass Solo
  14. John S. French
  15. Fifteen Blues
  16. Dog Puppet Born Out Of A Sock
  17. Reading Glasses
  18. A Portrait Of The Artists As Two Old Men

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Amazon.com

Looking back on guitar history during the 1970s and 1980s, it seems like Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith are separated by a generation. After all, Frith got his steely nerve from Henry Cow, who formed in the early 1970s, and Kaiser seemed to step into his own as a brilliant musician fully formed in the late 1970s. The pair has always been tight--and close in both age and temperament--as this two-CD set demonstrates. Kaiser and Frith alternate squiggles and wiggles and string tickles here, giving lots of attention to the details of improvised abstractions. They also sink their picks into an assembly of song structures that sometimes verges on the absurdly bouncy and beat-driven, even when at the core of their sound the pair could spin into the ether with ringing, caustic finality. Frith loves to tinker with the actual guitar, altering the machine's ability to project the expected sounds. Kaiser, by contrast, seems perfectly seated when controlling the projections and mangling, tangling, and laying them in disconnected lines. If you're in need of two generously packed reams of guitar genius, Kaiser and Frith offer one of free music's best opportunities, and this is pinnacle work for both. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars One tight package, every possible way to attack a guitar.......2006-08-10

With SST Records' abridged version of the "Friends & Enemies" material currently rotting in cutout bins, Cuneiform is, in one huge shot, attempting to right every wrong committed on these dense, brain-scrambling collaborations. Clocking in at over two hours, and often as difficult to absorb as that playing time implies, "Friends & Enemies" presents, re-sequenced, both of the duo LPs -- 1979's "With Friends Like These" and 1983's "Who Needs Enemies?" -- from these brilliant composers/improvisers, and adds 16 previously unreleased studio and live tracks. A scan of the music, most of which is guitar-based, reveals idiosyncratic fingerings; modal alien blues; weird hammer-on skirmishes, pick scrapes and fretboard surgeries; and some frenzied, if dated-sounding, drum programs that prefigure Derek Bailey's more recent album "Guitar, Drums 'N' Bass." Not surprisingly, given Frith's and Kaiser's work with and respect for both guitar-improv grandpa Bailey and Captain Beefheart's early band, "Friends"' blues-meets-juju-pop-meets-Webern-meets-harmolodics sound simultaneously recalls Bailey, the Magic Band's Drumbo and Zoot Horn Rollo, and, at times, even modal-blues guitarist James Blood Ulmer ("The Kirghiz Light"). Perhaps the perfect mind-meld of Frith's "Guitar Solos," Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" and Kaiser's "Outside Aloha Pleasure" reissue, this is sonic manna for any egghead interested in the innumerable possibilities of the guitar.

5 out of 5 stars Mmmmm...twangggg.......2000-07-24

Being the complete recorded collaborations of Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser, and a wonder it is too; a pair of thoroughly stuffed CDs containing not only Frith and Kaiser's two previous albums together, but also the substance of a previously unreleased live album and some brand new (as of 1999) tracks.

Frith and Kaiser are a remarkable pairing. By the time Kaiser picked up a guitar for the first time, Frith had already been playing in his first major band (Henry Cow) for a year. They formed a celebrated supergroup with Richard Thompson and John French and have each been manically active as players, composers, producers and general facilitators of stirring music for a long time. As a duo, they have a lovely dynamic: Kaiser tends to be all processed noises, a nerdy, middle-class white Hendrix unable to keep his foot off the Strangeness pedal, while Frith has a more sombre, European stateliness about his playing, but they clearly bounce off each other.

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