The Fred Frith Trio began life almost by accident in 2013. A couple of low key local gigs in Oakland gave rise to a European tour, a debut record on Intakt, and an always busy schedule. Now - multiple international tours and 3 records later - having performed in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Istanbul, New York, Paris, Prague, Sao Paolo, Vienna, Warsaw, Zagreb and a wealth of other places, they’ve created an identity that revolves around memories of a bygone psychedelic rock era filtered through the lens of razor-sharp contemporary improvisation.
Canadian music critic Raul da Gama described the Fred Frith Trio as “three extravagantly creative musicians employed in making music like we’ve never heard before”. DownBeat magazine critic Peter Margasak said they are “a scrappy improvising trio” who deftly revisit many of Frith's musical endeavors in “a gritty, unified attack”. Andy Robson wrote in the British monthly Jazzwise that they “conjure improvised soundscapes that defy definition”, and musician and educator Kevin Coultas wrote that the trio is one of Frith's “most superlative bands since Henry Cow.”
Of the Trio, Frith says, “When I proposed this trio I had nothing in mind beyond getting together with a couple of formidable musicians who I love and respect and seeing what would happen”. Frith explained that he found himself drawing on his “earliest rock and roll experiences,” and, “with Jason’s stunning ability to wring everything there is to be wrung out of an electric bass, and Jordan’s playful, irreverent, and absolute authority...anything can happen. Really. It's a bloody great feeling.”
Phipps Pt. is a sound-based project of Canadian artist and conduit, Lovage Sharrock.
What began as a series of one-off performances pairing her hypnotic guitar patterns and vocals with rotating collaborators has evolved with the addition of Jon Leidecker (Wobbly). Each conjured performance is unfiltered, distinct and unrepeatable. Their debut album, Kiss You So Many Times You Can’t Count My Love, was released on Sanity Muffin Records. The follow-up album, Songs We No Longer Sing, is set to release later this year.
Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) is a human in the loop, making music with people and machines that listen. By improvising with recordings as readily as people, and through the use of sampling, feedback and automation, the goal is to produce sounds that seem to be asking questions – hopefully the right ones. A long and winding list of collaborators blurs the line between solo and group work – current touring projects include Negativland, the Thurston Moore Group, Jennifer Walshe, Zoh Amba, and Cheryl E. Leonard. Talks on the secret histories of electronic music have been presented at Oxford, Stanford, Mills, UC Berkeley and Peabody, and his nine hour overview of sampling and collage, ‘Variations’, is hosted online by the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. Radio remains his home medium, with Negativland’s Over The Edge livemix broadcast continuing to emerge out of KPFA FM, Berkeley.