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.

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.

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.

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.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends.