Nature by Fred Frith + Karen Stackpole
I have been fascinated by the sound and potential of gongs since I first heard Stockhausen's Mikrophonie 1 in the late 1960s. When I moved to Oakland in 1999 I discovered the work of Karen Stackpole, one of the few percussionists in the world specializing entirely in gongs, and attended several of her performances. I always tried to imagine how I could combine my own sonic vocabulary with her incredibly rich array, and we enthusiastically agreed to a musical meeting which somehow kept being postponed, year after year.
According to Fred Frith himself, these recordings are among his most precious ones. Finally, as my teaching career at Mills College was winding down, we succeeded in making an appointment to record
together at Karen's home studio in the Californian hills. As a seasoned professional recording engineer, she had her vast and beautiful collection of gongs meticulously placed and amplified. It was a joy! Guitar as gong, gong as harmony and everything in between, an interweaving that left me breathless.
Fred Frith.
Credits
Karen Stackpole
Drummer/percussionist Karen Stackpole has a long-standing passion for gongs, scrap metal, and a range of "ethnic" instruments. She specializes in dynamic soundscapes and textures and has contributed gong sounds to more conventional musical genres as well as providing source material for film soundtracks. In her exploration of metals, she has cultivated some distinctive techniques for drawing harmonics out of tamtams with various implements. In addition to solo work, she has performed and recorded with Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience (a duo with electronics master, Drew Webster), Sabbaticus Rex, Ghost in the House, Vorticella, Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet, the Francis Wong Unit, and the rock band Steel Hotcakes. Most recently her work has focused on duo performances and recordings with experimental instrument builder Krys Bobrowski (Gliss Glass & Gongs), contrabassist Bill Noertker (Talking Frog), and guitarist extraordinaire Fred Frith.
Fred Frith
Pioneer of the extended electric guitar. He learned to compose in Henry Cow, developed his song-writing skills in Art Bears, explored his multi-instrumentalism in Skeleton Crew, rocked the house with Massacre and is still doing all of those things, having been in one band or another continuously since 1964! Meanwhile his work has been performed by both Baroque and contemporary music ensembles, along with string quartets, chamber orchestras, and a whole range of groups and artists in the ever-expanding field of semi-popular music. Fred composes extensively for film and dance, and taught improvisation for years at Mills College in Oakland, California and the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. His life-long passion for improvising has increasingly led him to work with artists who don't necessarily define themselves as improvisers, including Brazilian drummer Mariá Portugal, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and bricoleur extraordinaire Sudhu Tewari. Fred is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzels' award-winning film Step Across the Border.
License
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Record and production company managed by Guy Marc Hinant and Fred Walheer - releasing records in Electronics/ Experimental/ Unclassical/ Drone/ Noise/ Concrete/ Spoken Words/ Rare recordings/ Rituals genres.