GUITAR SOLOS

Fred Frith's debut solo set was recorded in just 4 days and delivers exactly what is promised in the title - guitar solos. Not in the sense of 'the bass and drums hold down a beat while I shred all over the place' or 'listen to my intricate multitracking create a veritable wall of sound' (nothing wrong with either approach, by the way; this is just to let you know what to expect) but Frith, playing his guitars, live, alone and unedited (mostly; 4 notes were removed from one track, and on another the sounds of his feet and breathing are part of the piece).

Frith began his career as a guitarist playing the acoustic in folk clubs, and once he started playing electric guitar he became fascinated by the possibilities of modifying the sound. He wasn't the first British guitarist to take this approach - fellow Yorkshireman Derek Bailey and AMM's Keith Rowe had been attacking electric guitars in unorthodox ways for a decade or so on the outer fringes of the avant jazz scene - but he was part of the first generation of rock musicians to get seriously into free improvisation.

The album opens with the cheery, upbeat (yes, really) Hello Music, a short piece recorded on a guitar with a pick up fitted at the machine head end as well as in the body, which generates 2 notes simultaneously. What sounds impossible for a single guitarist is simply the result of playing around with basic technology. From here we're defintely into dark, RIO territory; Glass c/w Steel and Ghosts are low rumbles, both recorded on prepared guitars and frequently sounding like almost anything else. 'Out of Their Heads (On Locoweed)' is a similarly brooding piece, but the pace picks up a little here and shards of recognisable guitar melodies make their presence felt, especially when an echo delay system is deployed in the second half - the entry of fuzz guitar is almost blood curdlingly shocking. Vinyl listeners woud then have had to turn the album over, but as this is a CD we move straight into Not Forgotten, a brief acoustic or possibly semi acoustic piece that sounds like it was played in conventional tuning. As sparse as some of the other pieces are dense, here Frith is happy to keep it simple and demonstrate just how good his technique was. Hollow Music is another acoustic interlude using 7th and 12th fret harmonics as the basis for an improvisation that soon builds up to a feverish pace. Heat c/w Moment is an intense, close miked piece where the tapping of his feet, the sounds of his breath and even the impact of plectrum on strings are as loud and important as the guitar itself. And so to the closing piece, No Birds. This piece uses (presumably) modified guitars played through echo delay and reverb units and creates a sound world as intense and involving as Henry Cow's monumental piece Ruins. Many of the ideas heard elsewhere on the album are brought together here, and the piece comes to a satisfying conclusion with a series of simple, melodic, interlocking guitar figures.

As good as it is, and at least half of the album is highly impressive indeed, Guitar Solos sounds more like a showcase for Frith's approach to the guitar than a coherent, fully realised album. It's also something of a specialist album, although if you're looking for an introduction to free improv on the electric guitar you're unlikely to find anything better than this. 3 stars, and add an extra one if you're a diehard RIO fan.

And now for something completely different. As the first reviewer pointed out, this is not what most people think of when they think of guitar solos. Someone should really arrest this man for cruelty to guitars!

This is apparently his third appearance on an official album and his first solo effort. My introduction to Fred Frith was his work with Brian Eno on Before and After Science released four years after. I wonder if this was the stuff that caught Eno's attention?

For me, this is really difficult listening music. I always believe in having some in my collection and this one has been there since sometime shortly after 1991, when the Rec Rec label version was released. It was a fairly early addition to my CD collection, but I have to say I've kept it more as a curiosity than something I'm really drawn to listen to. Sitting down and listening to it on headphones as I write this I can see/hear there's more to it than you might notice with the casually listening ear/eye.

My copy of this recording is the ESD release, with ten extra bonus tracks, and almost twice as long as the original. Most of this album is very good, although much of it seems to be just ideas played out on the guitar, as opposed to fully developed songs. And a good sized chunk of the bonus tracks are just Frith making a bunch of noise on his guitar. As much as I love ROI, when it turns into a mess of random noise, it turns me off. But I digress. Frith's playing is often outstanding, and I can easily say that there is no other guitarist on Earth who sounds like him. While a few songs harken back tHenry Cow, most is pure Frith.

A strange story: My brother, who mostly listens to fairly accessible 1990s alternative rock, loves the opening track off this album. Then again, he also likes Captain Beefheart and black midi, so I think he just has a hidden taste for crazy avant-prog. The opening track doesn't sound much like the rest of this album, though. It's more of a jaunty randomized atonal version of the Super Mario theme for 90 seconds. The rest of it is sparse drones and improvisation, with the occasional stranger sounds like on No Birds seeping through the already unique sheen of noise. I'd argue what he does here is more understandable (maybe not accessible) to the average person than Van Halen or the like, but that's a discussion for another day. All in all, this album is a real head-turner, some sounds with guitars that I haven't really heard replicated. Like, what is going on in Glass c/w Steel, or Heat c/w Moment, or Not Forgotten, or...

Jeremy Webster Frith better known in the world of avant-garde music as FRED FRITH was born into a musical family where he learned all the traditional styles of playing at very young age but somewhere along the line in his formal eduction something went very wrong and his tastes totally derailed into the world of the avant-garde. After meeting a like minded partner in crime in the form of Tim Hodgkinson, together they formed Henry Cow and which introduced to the world a form of avant-garde music called Rock In Opposition. By crafting complex compositions based on 20th century classical, jazz and progressive rock, Henry Cow shocked the world with its style of musical expressions that seemingly came from another universe.

Only one album in with the Henry Cow project, FRITH was already setting out to start his solo career. Lauded as one of the most unusually creative guitarists of all time for his insanely unique contributions to the "Legend" album, FRITH released his very first solo work the following year in 1974. GUITAR SOLOS was a highly experimental album of guitar compositions that featured eight tracks that were unaccompanied without any production tricks like overdubbing. Every track features a unique prepared guitar that offered free improvisational avant-garde techniques that were completely unstructured unlike the works of Henry Cow which were highly structured.

GUITAR SOLOS truly is a very strange album indeed and one of those where you wonder how in the world did he do that without the manipulative assistance of a production process. The album was recorded in July 1974 and played on a modified 1936 Gibson K-11 with an extra pickup over the strings which allowed the amplification process to emerge from both sides of the fretted note. By splitting the fretboard with a capo, FRITH essentially had two guitars in one and given his arsenal of alternative tunings, picking styles and other tricks up his sleeve, he crafted one of the most alien sounded guitar albums of the ages. The results are indeed bizarre with unfamiliarity at every turn yet FRITH tackles totally unique and challenging turf as effortlessly as the Henry Cow band unleashed an equally alienating mix of strange sounds that were taken to their logical conclusion from the very beginning.

Many however were not impressed citing the 1971 album "Solo Guitar" by Derek Bailey as the main influence behind his avant-garde compositions and that isn't exactly far from the truth because if you listen to that album, it indeed precede this album by three years and set out to showcase the performance techniques of free improvisation guitar by mixing jazz, exploring atonality, noise and whatever fancied Bailey's whim at the moment. Inspired by Bailey's work perhaps but a careful listening experience to both albums back to back reveal that despite both based in the avant-garde world of free improvisation, the two guitarists shared completely different styles and therefore despite not really being the first album to navigate these waters, FRITH's GUITAR SOLOS was very much unique in its own way.

Even 50 years later this album sounds as startlingly fresh as i'm sure it sounded back in those days. Outside of Derek Bailey's 1971 release, there's really not much to compare it with. Each track focuses on different aspects of the guitar whether it be strange scales, unexperienced timbres or freaky contrapuntal elements that emerged from the "two" guitars playing together. The longest track is the closing "No Birds" which at 13 minutes showcases some of the most experimental approaches. This track was played on two prepared guitars simultaneously and simulates the timbre and range of an entire orchestra. Clever placement and the use of stereo guitars resulted in a bizarre outcome. FRITH did utilize electric guitar tools such as volume pedals, feedback and filtered sounds to add to the multi-dimensional nature of the release.

GUITAR SOLOS has remained an enigmatic solo release in FRITH's massive solo canon since its first release in 1974 and now 50 years later in the year 2024 the album has been remastered and re-released with an entirely new album in the same spirit simply titled "Fifty." The album can be purchased separately or as a combo pack with the original GUITAR SOLOS. While FRITH was not your conventional guitar hero, the Virgin Records label tried to make him one but FRITH's outsider persona has served him more good in the longevity department than any mainstream guitarist has sustained. His music is therefore more timeless sounding and the alienating effects of the vast array of experimentation on this release is nothing short of breathtaking. GUITAR SOLOS was a landmark of avant-garde music and remains a popular cult hit due to Henry Cow's increasing popularity over the ensuing decades. The re-release of this album with a brand new companion release is the absolute perfect way to allow newer generations to experience GUITAR SOLOS in all its bizarre experimental grandeur.