Fred Frith

Can't offer too much in light of additions to your Frith search and I agree whole-heartedly about the endless moot fracases that people decide to have here since they don't have lives (people should use this site to gather news on shows or expand their palates are far as I'm concerned).  But I'm pretty sure Frith was the guitarist/keyboardist on a few of the Art Bears albums as well.

Getting into a lot of "RIO" bands lately...so far I'm liking Thinking Plague and 5uus the best...of what I've heard at least...I have the other heavy hitting names as well but I haven't gotten a chance to listen yet.

Fred Frith first came to prominence (in a very low key kind of way) with Henry Cow, where he was one of the main composers. He's best known as a guitarist, but is also an accomplished performer on piano, violin, viola and xylophone, and seems to have turned his hand to everything else at one point or another. After Henry Cow split he formed Art Bears with Dagmar Krause and Chris Cutler - Frith wrote the music and played most of the instruments, Cutler wrote the words and played the drums and Dagamar was the singer.

He's also been a guest musician on countless albums - on this site he's played on albums by Eno, Robert Wyatt, Aqsak Maboul and Jade Warrior to name but several. 

Then there's his solo career...

He started out with Guitar Solos on the Caroline label, an album of very strange solo improvs. Later came Guitar solos 2 and 3, which also featured solos from other avant-jazz-rock improv merchants. 'Gravity' and 'Speechless' were recorded around 1980 with backing from The Muffins and Sammla Mammas Manna among others. Those albums are probably his most accessible. He spent some time in New York where he recorded with Bill Laswell's Material and worked on many other projects. He has composed for film and theatre, become an internationally renowned improviser, sometimes in the company of Chris Cutler on drums (there's a recording of a gig in Prague which is as intense as rock improv gets). He's still experimenting and innovating to this day - a lot of his music is closer to contemporary avant garde than to prog, but Gravity and Speechless should be included on this site, as should the (John) French, Frith, (Henry) Kaiser and (Richard) Thompson albums.

To find out more, go to http://www.fredfrith.com/

A good source for this kind of music is http://www.rermegacorp.com/ which was started up and is still run by his old bandmate Chris Cutler.