Fred Frith Quotes

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

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

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

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.

...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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.