SPEECHLESS

Fred Frith's second post-Henry Cow solo album continued the project, begun on Gravity, of Fred collaborating with a range of different bands, so Fred's multi-instrumentalist performances provide the thematic connection strands but the different band approaches keep things fresh. On the first side of the album - that's the material from Kick the Can pt. 1 to Women Speak To Men; Men Speak to Women, Fred is backed up by Etron Fou Leloublan, an established RIO act whose jazz-punk stylings fit the "mutant pop meets world music" style of the compositions nicely.

On the second side, the backing group is Massacre, a No Wave supergroup consisting of Fred himself allied with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher. This was actually an extremely busy year for the Massacre members, because as well as this album they were putting out an official Massacre debut album and Laswell and Maher, having only just wrapped up the New York Gong project with Daevid Allen, were poised to unleash the debut Material album on the world (on which Fred guested). It's the sort of percussive avant-melodic "you can dance to this but you'd look weird doing it" stuff that listeners have come to expect from the Material musical microcosm.