Customer Reviews

Friends & Enemies

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Being the complete recorded collaborations of Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser, and a wonder it is too; a pair of thoroughly stuffed CDs containing not only Frith and Kaiser's two previous albums together, but also the substance of a previously unreleased live album and some brand new (as of 1999) tracks.

Frith and Kaiser are a remarkable pairing. By the time Kaiser picked up a guitar for the first time, Frith had already been playing in his first major band (Henry Cow) for a year. They formed a celebrated supergroup with Richard Thompson and John French and have each been manically active as players, composers, producers and general facilitators of stirring music for a long time. As a duo, they have a lovely dynamic: Kaiser tends to be all processed noises, a nerdy, middle-class white Hendrix unable to keep his foot off the Strangeness pedal, while Frith has a more sombre, European stateliness about his playing, but they clearly bounce off each other.

The earliest stuff is the most abrasive. Shredding noise and indeterminate clanks are the order of the day. During the mid-period they explore Linn drums and cheesy keyboards, to not always very satisfying effect, but they also take time out to play some old-style blues. Kaiser, the master of genre, is the more faithful bluesman, but Frith's take on a Skip James tune is actually more rewarding, as his microtonal bends and clanging sound make the Mississippi sound like it flowed through back-country Bulgaria. The 1999 tracks are packed full of strange information. Kaiser doesn't play much full-on guitar these days, which is a sad loss. (Leave off the Grateful Dead tributes, Henry.) This album crams an indecent amount of remarkable music into a small space, and is as beautifully recorded as we've come to expect from Oliver DiCicco. Recommended for guitar fans who've outgrown the dull.

With SST Records' abridged version of the "Friends & Enemies" material currently rotting in cutout bins, Cuneiform is, in one huge shot, attempting to right every wrong committed on these dense, brain-scrambling collaborations. Clocking in at over two hours, and often as difficult to absorb as that playing time implies, "Friends & Enemies" presents, re-sequenced, both of the duo LPs -- 1979's "With Friends Like These" and 1983's "Who Needs Enemies?" -- from these brilliant composers/improvisers, and adds 16 previously unreleased studio and live tracks. A scan of the music, most of which is guitar-based, reveals idiosyncratic fingerings; modal alien blues; weird hammer-on skirmishes, pick scrapes and fretboard surgeries; and some frenzied, if dated-sounding, drum programs that prefigure Derek Bailey's more recent album "Guitar, Drums 'N' Bass." Not surprisingly, given Frith's and Kaiser's work with and respect for both guitar-improv grandpa Bailey and Captain Beefheart's early band, "Friends"' blues-meets-juju-pop-meets-Webern-meets-harmolodics sound simultaneously recalls Bailey, the Magic Band's Drumbo and Zoot Horn Rollo, and, at times, even modal-blues guitarist James Blood Ulmer ("The Kirghiz Light"). Perhaps the perfect mind-meld of Frith's "Guitar Solos," Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" and Kaiser's "Outside Aloha Pleasure" reissue, this is sonic manna for any egghead interested in the innumerable possibilities of the guitar.