FRED FRITH
BARRY GUY

BACKSCATTER BRIGTH BLUE

Fred Frith: Electric Guitar
Barry Guy: Double Bass

1. Where the Cities Gleam in Darkness
2. Big Flowers
3. Breaking and Entering
4. The Circus Is a Song of Praise
5. Little by Little
6. A Single Street Stretched Tight by the Waters
7. Climbing the Ladder
8. D ependence over the Abyss
9. Walking on Wire
10. Moments Full of Many Lives

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Music by Fred Frith and Barry Guy, except 3 by Fred Frith. Recorded at Studio Klangdach, Guntershausen, August 14, 2007. Mixed and mastered at Studio Klangdach, March 14, 2014. Engineer: Willy Strehler. Titles extracted from the poetry of Robert Lax. Cover art: Heike Liss. Graphic design: Jonas Schoder. Liner notes: Fred Frith, Barry Guy.

Intakt CD 236 / 2014

LOTTE ANKER
FRED FRITH

EDGE OF THE LIGHT

Lotte Anker: Saxophones
Fred Frith: Electric Guitar

1. Anchor Point
2. Run Don't Hide
3. Reasonably Available Control Measure
4. The Mountain is as Quiet as the Eternal Past
5. Non-precision Approach Procedure
6. Thief Breaks into an Empty House
7. The Same Dirt
8. Hallucinating Angels

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Music by Fred Frith and Lotte Anker. Recorded at Village Recording, Copenhagen, July 11, 2010. Engineer: Thomas Vang. Mixed at Guerilla Recordings, Oakland, CA, March 3, 2013. Mastered at Headless Buddha, Oakland, CA, January 9, 2014. Engineer: Myles Boisen. Cover art: Heike Liss. Graphic design: Jonas Schoder. Liner notes: Lotte Anker, Fred Frith

Intakt CD 237 / 2014

FRED FRITH - BARRY GUY

Electric guitar and the amplified acoustic bass – two distinctive sound generators capable
of creating a picture of almost symphonic dimensions.
Intakt Records' inspirational director Patrik Landolt had a feel about the outcome and
brought us into the studio of Willy Strehler in Switzerland to fulfill a long standing ambition
to record an album of music together.
Never having performed on the same stage, we created a music which is syllogistic in the
sense that the end product is drawn from two very different musical lives each reflecting
our own history.
But with the medium of improvisation being collaborative, the conclusion was an eventful
working out of possibilities, both of us intently "listening in" to the other's sound world and
extending our own techniques to create surprising new colours.
This recording experience represented a warm symbiotic encounter even with the result
that each of us independently suggested the poet Robert Lax as the generator for track
titles. A surprising but confirmational pointer to where the music had led us.

Barry Guy, 2014

The excitement I felt when Patrik first suggested this recording goes back all the way to my
first steps in the world of free improvisation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a way it
began with the first solo release by Barre Phillips – Unaccompanied Barre – which reimagined the double bass as a sound source of infinite potential. More than anything else
I heard at the time, this record committed me to improvisation, and opened my ears to
what the electric guitar could become.
A few years later I found myself sharing the stage with two players who were already considered icons of British improvised music, Paul Rutherford and Barry Guy, performing for
10 minutes as part of a benefit concert at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. Barry has forgotten all about this gig I'm happy to say. I remember being overwhelmed, painfully aware of my limitations, lacking the resources necessary to be able to communicate at this level. It
was a tough but useful lesson.
Since then I've paid careful attention to Barry's music, whether orchestral creations, graphic
scores, or many-faceted bass performances. Nearly 40 years after that London concert,
the vagaries of our personal histories found us both resident in Switzerland for a
while, and after crossing paths here and there this recording "moment" felt inevitable. Now
I'm looking forward to more.

Fred Frith, 2014

Fred Frith, Barry Guy, Studio Willy Strehler, Switzerland, 2014. Photo by Patrik Landolt

LOTTE ANKER - FRED FRITH

July 11, 2010: Sunday in Copenhagen and last day of the annual (ten days long and
intense) Copenhagen Jazz Festival. Today is also the World Cup Final in Johannesburg:
Holland vs Spain. Oppressively hot, thunder in the air.
Fred and I are in the Village Studio a little outside Copenhagen for a session, after having
played a duo concert at CJF a couple of days before.
No predetermined concepts or plans – just playing. Guitar and saxophone: I love playing
with stringed instruments, and especially with Fred's sound(s). It's really easy to
blend with but it can still also be edgy. The energy and the changing worlds and forms
felt extremely clear that afternoon. Landscapes you could easily move in and out
of – slow or with abrupt changes – like in dreams. But real and present. Four hours in
our own timeless bubble. A bubble that was small, but in a way also vast.
Back in the city.
Later that day Marilyn Crispell calls and says she's arranged a Cup Final party in my
apartment (where she is staying) for a few 'homeless' musicians in town in connection
with the CJF: Crispell herself, Gerald Cleaver, Carla Rodea, Okkyung Lee, Michael Formanek
and a couple of Danes. Fred and I join, drinking canned beer and rooting for Spain…
After the match the entire city is partying down.
Many worlds in one day, some of them captured here…

Lotte Anker

In the last few years I seem to have gravitated every summer to Copenhagen – sometimes
for some teaching at the so-called "rhythm academy" but mostly to work in a
variety of contexts with Lotte Anker, who I've come to consider the musical soul of
the city.
We started out in a quartet with Ikue Mori and Sylvie Courvoisier, two old friends who
helped bring us together in the first place, and meanwhile we've played in quite a few
different configurations. These days, though, we mostly work as a duo.
The duo is my favorite form anyway, because it embodies ideas – about meeting, conversing,
challenging each other, changing your mind, not changing your mind, running
together for the fun of it – that are mostly pretty uncomplicated. And I can't think of
many musicians with whom I felt such an immediate rapport as I did the first time
I played with Lotte.
Making music together felt and feels so natural and logical it really does seem as if the
music is simply there, and all we have to do is get out of the way and let it be. Intensely
easy going, obstinately flexible, convolutedly simple, strangely obvious, I can't really
explain it. All I know is, it feels like coming home. No explanation necessary.

Fred Frith

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Lotte Anker, Fred Frith (Photos: Miriam Nielsen, Heike Liss)