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Friends & Enemies

by Fred Frith & Henry Kaiser

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

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      $23 USD or more 

     

1.
It Moves... 02:07
2.
3.
It Sings 05:43
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Strandloper 01:16
14.
15.
16.
See Over 09:06
17.
Fourth Rail 05:16
18.
Squirrely 05:42
19.
20.
Black Glass 05:30
21.
Third Rail 03:30
22.
23.
24.
Roy Rogers 05:02
25.
26.
27.
28.
The Trace 02:53
29.
Life in Hell 05:37
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.

about

Friends & Enemies is the complete recordings (1979-1999) by Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser, who, separately & together, have both pushed the boundaries of what can be done in music and with their instruments for many decades now.
This includes the albums "With Friends Like These", "Who Needs Enemies", their unreleased live album (which was originally slated to be Cuneiform Rune 5), and 30 minutes of material recorded expressly for this set in January, 1999!
Despite the fact that both players are "guitarists", there is a very wide range of sounds & styles to be found here.

"In 1979, guitarists Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser made an album titled With Friends Like These... on the Metalanguage label. It was one of the defining documents of the downtown avant-garde scene, a collection of improvised duets on which both players essentially redefined the sound of the guitar, Frith with his physically altered (and sometimes beaten) instruments, and Kaiser with his virtuosic and harmonically adventurous technique.
Four years later they reunited to make Who Needs Enemies?, again on Metalanguage, and on this second album they expanded their arsenal to include the Linn drum and sequencer. Until now the only in-print remnant from those two albums was a condensed single-disc package on SST.
The Cuneiform reissue improves on the SST item enormously, first of all by including the entirety of both albums, secondly by adding another full album's worth of previously unreleased live material, and thirdly by adding on top of that another half hour of new studio performances.
In short, this set offers everything Frith and Kaiser have recorded together, and at mid-price. Absolutely a must for noise fans, skronk hounds, and adventurous guitarheads." – AllMusic

credits

released May 15, 1999

Fred Frith - electric & acoustic guitars, 4 & 6 string bass, "drums", violin, marimba, piano, Casio 202 organ
Henry Kaiser - electric & acoustic guitars, 6 string bass, "drums", electric sitar, banjo, piano
Oliver DiCicco - engineering

1-5 and 19-22 from "With Friends Like These", recorded July, 1979.
5-10 and 23-28 from "Who Needs Enemies", recorded October, 1983.
11-15 and 29-34 were recorded live, October 1984
16-18 and 35-36 were recorded especially for this album, January, 1999.

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about

Cuneiform Records Washington, D.C.

Cuneiform Records is an independent record label releasing adventurous, boundary-bursting music by artists from around the world.

Founded in 1984.
Based in Washington D.C.

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