On Saturday, June 28th at 1:30pm, Test Pattern welcomes multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, Fred Frith to the KALX studios for a live interview.
Frith has been making noise of one kind or another for more than 50 years, starting with the rock collective Henry Cow, which he co-founded with Tim Hodgkinson in 1968.
Fred is best known as a pioneering electric guitarist and improviser, song-writer, and composer for film, dance and theater. Through bands like Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Cosa Brava, and the FF Trio he has stayed close to his roots in rock and folk music while branching out in many other directions.
He is currently performing solo and with Normal (home-made instrument duo with Sudhu Tewari) and Frelonia (with Lotte Anker and Núria Andorrà), as well as in countless combinations of his favorite co-conspirators.
The recipient of Italy’s Demetrio Stratos Prize for his life’s work in experimental music and an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in his home county of Yorkshire, Fred taught for twenty years at the legendary epicenter of American experimental music, Mills College in Oakland, California; as well as co-directing (with Alfred Zimmerlin) the improvisation master’s program at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. He is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel’s much loved Step Across the Border, cited by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 20th century’s hundred most influential films.
