The meeting between Fred Frith's guitar strings and percussionist Karen Stackpole's gongs.
"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.
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
Fred Frith (born 1949 in Sussex) is a musician, multi-instrumentalist but above all guitarist, and composer, an essential and emblematic figure of the experimental and improvised music scene. Co-founder of the bands Henry Cow (1968-1978), Art Bears and Skeleton Crew, he is at the origin of the Rock in Opposition musical movement. Based in New York City since the late 1970s, where he has collaborated with
John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Tom Cora, Bob Ostertag, and many others, he has appeared on over 200 albums, composed for dance, film, and theater, and performed all over the world. Fred Frith is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzels' award-winning film
Step Across the Border.
Karen Stackpole is a Bay Area drummer / percussionist and improviser who performs and records using 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. Her work then has focused on duo performances and recordings with experimental instrument builder Krys Bobrowski (Gliss Glass & Gongs), contrabassist Bill Noertker (Talking Frog), and guitarist
Fred Frith.
