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Dance Suites – by Fred Thomas

“This is a fascinating and musicologically daring concept. The basic form of the Baroque dance suite is maintained, but the actual movements are pic’n’mixed from the Partitas and French Suites: we open with a Sinfonia (Partita No 2) before proceeding to an Allemande (French Suite No 5), thence to a Corrente (Partita No 6), and so on. Two such ‘complete’ suites are presented.

If it were not for the persuasive pianism and musicality of Thomas, this would be easy to dismiss. It says much that he is almost as persuasive as Perahia in the latter’s DG recording in the Allemande of the French Suite No 5. Thomas lists Rosalyn Tureck as principal influence and there is a line of purity from first to last, delivered with a markedly multivalent touch. Remarkable.”

***** 5 stars – International Piano Magazine

“a boundary-blurring composer and improviser”

“Assembled with the ingenuity of a seasoned DJ”

“beautifully ruminative…the serious care and thought characterising Thomas’ acoustic choices happily extend into his pianism” – Gramophone Magazine

Read Gramophone Magazine’s full review here

“Dance Suites” is released out now on Odradek Records. 

‘Meet the Artist‘ Fred Thomas Interview here

ARTIST STATEMENT: It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to record some of Bach’s solo keyboard music. Its emotional, intellectual, technical and spiritual demands seemed overwhelming. Twice I started only to quit the idea, daunted and feeling unready. Then, in a moment of lucidity, I wondered: when you’re dealing with the most miraculous body of human creation in all the arts, when are you ever ready? Life is short. Bach himself was not prone to procrastination. He produced a quantity and quality of music some consider literally unbelievable. 

I recorded alone with a huge piano, trying to coax the monster-machine into behaving well. Why the piano and not something ‘authentic’? For one thing, it’s my first instrument, but ultimately it’s a tired question, certainly in comparison with the sheer wonder of the music itself. In the end, the most scholarly ruminations on the abstractness of Bach, or on the piano’s range of articulation, or on the futility of pursuing authenticity in the absence of an authentic audience, just can’t match the sonic revelation that, played with some imagination, Bach sounds good on a tenor banjo – more on that soon.

His music is the most transcendent, all-encompassing, wise and child-like thing I know. In the words of Bernard Chazelle, “Bach’s music is soft and gentle, often suffused with piercing tenderness. If his work has an unmistakable child-like quality, it’s because its spiritual aspirations, borne of faith, joy, grace, and wonder, call for the deepest seriousness – and no one is more serious than the child”. I have the immovable feeling – knowledge, almost – that Bach fathoms and encircles everything.

John Cage considered music from the past useful only to the extent to which it leads to the creation of new things, a view far removed from the occasional dogmatism of the historical performance movement. Though I value both viewpoints, my aim lies somewhere in between: to derive something personal from a combination of historical enquiry and poetic imagination, using fantasy to supplement the fragmentary knowledge that contextual study reveals. Furthermore, the violation of chronology – my choice and ordering of tracks – is an attempt to give this record narrative force.

Creative recording techniques also played an aesthetic role. Using many microphones and basing their blended combinations on inherent musical character enables each movement to inhabit a unique soundworld. This process became genuinely interpretative, post-production. Although relatively under-explored in classical music recording (where the goal is often to reproduce the ‘natural’ sound of a live concert), my aim is to treat recording technique as an independent, exploratory art form.

Recorded at the Royal Academy of Music, London, March and June 2015
Engineered and Mixed by Alex Bonney
Mastered by Thomas Vingtrinier, Paris
Produced by Fred Thomas
Piano technician: Clive Ackroyd
Piano: Steinway D

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Peter Thomas and Fred Thomas released their father-son “Duo” record in 2015, to celebrate the former’s 70th birthday.

 

 

Peter Thomas – violin

Fred Thomas – piano

With Eduardo Vassallo – cello (on tracks 9 & 14)

 

Mozart: Violin Sonata No. 32 in Bb major, KV 454, Largo – Allegro

Feldman: Piece for violin and piano

Mozart: Violin Sonata No. 12 in G major, K27, Andante poco Adagio

Webern: Four Pieces, Opus 7, 1. Sehr Langsam

Schubert: An den Mond, D.259

Schumann: In der Fremde, Opus 39

Schubert: An Sylvia, D.891

Strauss: Morgen!, Opus 27

Stravinsky: Valse pour les Enfants (arr. Fred Thomas)

Gibbons: Fantasia à 2, No. 1

Mozart: Minuet in D, No. 6, K355 (arr. Fred Thomas)

Schnittke: Suite in the Old Style – Pantomime

Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Opus 24, Allegro

Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Opus 49, Andante con moto tranquilo

Bach: Sonata in G, BWV 1021, Adagio

Bach: Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein – Partita BWV Ang. II 78, IV (arr. Fred Thomas)

Webern: Four Pieces, Opus 7, 4. Bewegt

Mahler: Rückert-Lieder – Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Bach: Nun lob’, mein’ Seel’, den Herren (Chorale)

 

Recorded at The Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, Birmingham, 2015

Engineered, Mixed & Mastered by Alex Bonney

Produced by Fred Thomas

Design by Nuria Torres

Dedicated to the memory of Tony Fisher, Alice Corser & David Corser

 

 

Some thoughts on the music and why we chose it 

Felix Mendelssohn’s music somehow feels like part of my blood and tissue; there’s a powerful (but sleepy) imprint on my memory of being gently woken on countless mornings by his soaring melodies and naive figurations floating from my Dad’s violin up into my bedroom and inhabiting my half-asleep mind. The Piano Trio Opus 49 included in our program holds a nostalgic place in my heart. I played the cello part when I was 16 and it’s no exaggeration to admit that this experience of duetting in lush counterpoint with the violin was transformative. Mendelssohn’s subtle piano writing style was greatly influenced by Robert Schumann, whose songs Peter grew to love when he was a teenager. I’m sure they helped him cultivate his singing style. But perhaps Schumann influenced my dad in more ways than one: the composer lamented, “You have no idea how often I practically throw money out of the window.”

Despite Peter’s childhood fondness for Schumann, Schumann himself believed Franz Schubert should be “the favourite of youth. He gives what youth desires – an overflowing heart, daring thoughts, and speedy deeds.” Brahms, who insisted that “there is no song of Schubert’s from which one cannot learn something”, may not have approved of choosing just two Schubert songs from his six hundred-plus collection. One easy choice, however, was An Sylvia, which Peter often heard his own father Stanley play by ear on the piano. 

When Ludwig van Beethoven died, a distraught Schubert was present as torch-bearer. A year later, on his own death-bed aged just thirty-one, Schubert asked to be buried next to his idol. Both Schubert and Beethoven have been Peter’s staple diet for most of seventy years; his beloved ‘Spring’ Sonata Opus 24, dedicated to Count von Fries, appears here in all its battered glory. And although it’s a tricky piece, it seems Beethoven couldn’t have cared less, inquiring “do you believe that I think of a wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?”

Ironically and perhaps hypocritically, the Musical Courier wrote in 1899 of Richard Strauss, “the man who wrote this outrageously hideous noise no longer deserving of the word music, is either lunatic, or he is rapidly approaching idiocy.” Current opinion is a little kinder; a besotted and proselytizing Glenn Gould did his bit by proclaiming Strauss a greater text-setter than Schubert. Of all his own output, Strauss rated his songs the highest, and they’re not bad for a man who considered himself a “first-class second-rate composer”.

When I asked what he misses about playing in orchestras, Peter promptly replied, “nothing.” Followed sheepishly by, “except Mahler.” I’m not sure what I can add about the song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. It’s too big and too profound. Gustav Mahler passed on a deep sense of spiritualised landscape and the transformation of nature to his musical godchild, Anton von Webern. Some years ago, following in the footsteps of Webern and his own son Peter, my Dad and I made a musical pilgrimage to the Austrian Alps – a kind of lads on tour for aspiring muso-walkers. Between schnitzels we listened to Webern’s complete works. This didn’t take long. Captivated by tiny alpine flowers, Webern was a master of miniature; Mahler, by contrast, dealt in the monumental. “If you think you’re boring your audience, go slower not faster”, he said, advice we’ve followed in the making of this record.

If the prospect of listening to all this music resembles an exhausting schlepp up Mount Schwarzenbergspitzen or a headphone-assisted guided tour of the Habsburg Empire, fear not, help is at hand. Alfred Schnittke’s Pantomime and Igor Stravinsky’s Valse pour les Enfants (“my music is best understood by children and animals”) inject a shot of Slavic irony and Orlando Gibbons’ Fantasia à 2 offers perhaps the most exquisitely balanced exposition of equal two-part writing I can think of: disarmingly simple yet aurally beguiling – a distillation of what it means for two voices to sing together. Then, if you can feel Morton Feldman blow a whispered draft of cold, cleansing New York air though this sticky swamp of Austro-German mush, so much the better. His was a search for music that “just cleans everything away” – breathe deep, there’s more swamp to come.

A word on the order of program. It’s devised not only to juxtapose pieces in flattering ways, but also to suggest links between composers: Webern adored Schubert and orchestrated several of his songs in his youth; Mendelssohn was largely responsible for the mainstream popularisation of Bach in the nineteenth century; Schnittke may well have been thinking of the Alberti bass-lines of Mozart and Beethoven when composing his roguish Suite in the Old Style; and Stravinsky wanted to banish the operas of Strauss to “whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality” – the temptation to pair them together was just too delicious to resist.

Morton Feldman once mused, “for years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart”. It’s a common complaint that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains the most interpretatively challenging composer of all, easy to listen to but uniquely difficult to actualise. Interpreters may spend a lifetime searching for the perfect proportions, the appropriate intensity and pitch, and all this within an extremely focussed sphere of expression – a kind of musical Goldilocks Zone where only Mozart lives. His Sonata No. 12 in G Major, K27 was written when he was eleven years old.

And finally, Johann Sebastian Bach, the old master. My first inkling of his importance was when, aged ten, I was unsuccessfully bribed by Peter to learn his 371 harmonised chorales (my favourite of which concludes this program). Later, upon receiving CDs of Bach’s complete keyboard music from my uncle Ezekiel, I was hooked, in the same way Peter was as a teenager studying with Eli Goren. For so many people Bach’s music means the cosmos. It’s the most transcendent and all-encompassing thing we know. Significantly, all the composers mentioned above seem to have felt the same. Mendelssohn: “The greatest music in the world.” Schumann: “Studying Bach convinces us that we are all numbskulls.” Schubert: “Bach has done everything completely.” Beethoven: “Not brook but sea should be his name.” Mahler: “In Bach the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” Webern: “Bach composed everything.” Mozart: “Now there is music from which a man can learn something.” And Wagner, whose work it pains me (and relieves many) to exclude: “The most stupendous miracle in all music!”

What’s the relevant common thread linking all these Bach-worshipping composers? For our purposes, it’s their profound significance to us somewhere along the way and the continuity of musical love handed down through a generation. Mendelssohn believed – and I suspect my Dad does too – that music “fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.” In celebration of Peter’s monumental accomplishment of lingering on for seventy years, of everything he has taught me, of the diversity of music and of generous friends’ charitable giving, we hope you will consign these words, in the spirit of old age, to mental oblivion, and take simple pleasure in the sounds within.

Fred Thomas

 

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Fred has worked with Filter since 2014 and has toured USA, India and the UK with ‘Twelfth Night’.

Innovative sound and music based theatre company Filter’s cult version of Twelfth Night re-imagines the madness of Illyria as a chaotic gig in which the audience becomes complict in the action.

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“Filter is converened with passion, conflict, truth and trust, and the technological mechanics of how its members communicate all these are laid bare” – Adrian Hilton, The Spectator

“Sound Maestros” – Time Out

“Work that dazzles the eye, enchants the ear, and stimulates both the mind and heart” – Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

“Filter is an experimental company famed for its sonic virtuosity” – Michael Billington, The Guardian

“Filter’s sheer boldness of invention, its ground-breaking use of sound, makes it a company to watch.” – Rachel Halliburton, Evening Standard

 

 

 

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Living Standards is the first album by the duo of Fred Thomas and Zac Gvi and represents a landmark in the development of their collaborative work. The album refines and concentrates an imaginative approach to interpreting well-played repertoire from the jazz songbook, breathing new life into songs whose essential beauty rings true through the passage of time. Featuring luminaries of the burgeoning London Jazz scene Ben Davis – cello (Basquait Strings), Johnny Brierley – bass (Outhouse Ruhabi) and Louisa Jones – vocals (Man Overboard), “Living Standards” is out on the F-IRE Label as of January 2014. Buy it HERE or listen on Spotify

 

Drawing on their experience of having played together in various contexts (Fly Agaric, the Magic Lantern, The Irreverents), Thomas and Gvi turn their attention to the music that brought them together in the first place – the Jazz Standard – bringing to the feast a wealth of new ideas and abilities gleaned from wide-ranging listening, playing and composing. Here the focus of the material is purely on songs written for the music hall and later re-interpreted by many of the great jazz musicians. However, the duos and trios recorded on this record make their own mark on the tunes, playfully re-inventing them while always maintaining a deep sense of respect for the songs, their characters and their stories.

 

This record owes a particular debt to Paul Motian, especially his recordings of standards with the Paul Motian Trio and “On Broadway Vols. 1-5”, whose supremely melodic sensibility is a trailblazing vision into both the deepest past and the brightest future of Jazz. The whole approach to dynamic group improvisation on the present recording takes its cue from that Motian’s impeccable aesthetic, while in Louisa Jones’ harrowingly sincere and unabashed voice there is a clear echo of the spirit of Billie Holiday. In their polyphonic, many-voiced interplay, Thomas and Gvi celebrate the influence of one more shared hero of theirs, Lennie Tristano, whose jazz inventions never cease to sound fresh and intricate.

 

The recording was engineered and produced by long-time collaborator and friend Alex Bonney (Bill Frisell, Evan Parker) at the exquisite Hawksmoor church St. Georges-in-the-East in Shadwell. This album is dedicated to the memory of Fergus Read (1965-2006) whose teaching lives on. Many thanks to Tony Fisher for his amazing CD graphics.

 

Fred Thomas – bass, drums, piano

Zac Gvirtzman – piano, saxophone

Louisa Jones – vocals

Johnny Brierley – double-bass

Ben Davis – cello

 

“Fred Thomas and Zac Gvi twist songbook classics as on their new record ‘Living Standards” – Timeout

 

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Sioux and Gypsy blood runs through Clara’s veins. An exceptionally versatile musician, captivating performer and one of the most original singer-songwriters to emerge from the East London scene, Clara brings a refreshing twist to the folk tradition creating an unmistakable bluesy sound with a continental twist. Carried by the power of a virtuosic voice, her adventurous melodies take unexpected, serpentine turns, her English lyrics breaking into Spanish, French, Catalan as spellbinding stories unfold. She accompanies herself on baroque guitar, charango, Indian harmonium, telecaster, mandolin, a collection as varied as her background.

Born in France, raised in Barcelona, she has grown, after a lengthy tenure in the metropolis, into a Londoner.

In an impressive back catalogue of recordings, theatre and screen credits, Clara features in many movie soundtracks including “The Hobbit”, “Snow White and the Huntsman”, “The Hunger Games” and has appeared at many international festivals, including Glastonbury, The London Jazz Festival and Womad, and mingled with artists from all disciplines: she collaborated with Natacha Atlas, Nizlopi’s frontman Luke Concannon, she appears on screen alongside Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice movie (Mike Radford 2004), on radio with Bill Nighy in the BBC Radio 3 play The Don, on stage with director Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and in concert under the guidance of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the forefather of electronica. She is also the featured singer in the forthcoming Hollywood movie For Greater Glory about the Mexican Cristeros War, with music by James Horner (Titanic), cast including Peter O’Toole, Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria, Ruben Blades. Clara’s song “Nada Igual”, as heard in La Reina del Sur was no. 1 in the iTunes charts (Mexico) in June 2011.

Since she burst into the global music scene in 2006, with the highly acclaimed album “Clara & The Real Lowdown “, produced by maverick producer and composer Harvey Brough, they’ve recorded another two albums: ”Hopetown House” featuring The Real Lowdown, a collective of the finest folk, jazz and world musicians in London, and “The Emblem”, released in February 2012.

 

“Her sound sits richly somewhere between Camille, Mariza and Joanna Newsom – a gorgeous place to be” – UNCUT Magazine

“visionary… this is something different, something special” – 17 SECONDS

www.clarasanabras.co.uk

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Mojo ‘Folk Album of The Year’ winner and BBC2 Folk Awards nominee Lisa Knapp’s “grippingly fresh… superb” (fRoots) debut album Wild & Unduanted, was at the forefront of the current folk renaissance in Britain. Her vocals “as strange and stirring as a spring day” (Observer), backed by a curious array of acoustic instruments and sonic delights from the technological age, create a “uniquely timeless sound, raw in emotion and feel.. beautiful” (Youth, Killing Joke, producer) – and a highly anticipated 2nd album release awaits in 2013.

Lisa participated in BBC Electric Proms 2008 for the ‘Tribute to Lal Waterson’ concert where she sang with legendary singer Mike Waterson, and alongside the Waterson/Carthy family and James Yorkston.  Lisa has also played numerous times at London’s South Bank Centre; with the likes of Folk Supergroup Bellowhead (Christmas 2007);  A Tribute to Sandy Denny in the Royal Festival Hall where she sang with fiddle legend Dave Swarbrick;  ‘Close of Play’, a weekend of both traditional music and new music inspired by it, curated by long time heroine of Lisa’s, Shirley Collins, which culminated in a Royal Festival Hall appearance where she performed two songs with Gerry Diver and also sang with Linda Thompson and Shirley Collins.  Lisa took part in the last ‘Daughters of Albion’ production singing alongside Lou Rhodes, Kathryn Williams, national treasure Norma Waterson and Bishi.  A highlight was the version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ with legendary Martin Carthy and Lou Rhodes. In May 2009 as part of ‘Tune Up’ tour of Scotland Lisa played with the talented singer/songwriter James Yorkston and the Atheletes (Sarah Scutt, Reuben Taylor and Doogie Paul), with whom she also played for the duration. In September 2009 Lisa was commissioned by Sound UK to take part in an intriguing project called Canal Music.  This was in collaboration with Electronics artist Leafcutter John and included a series of perfomances along the Grand Union Canal starting in London and finishing in Birmingham.  The material for this was entirely written by both Lisa and John and was performed mostly on canal boat ‘Chiswick’. In Autumn 2009 Lisa took part in her first televised recording for BBC 4’s Alternative Christmas Session programme aired in Dec 2009.

Lisa’s new band features Gerry Diver and Pete Flood as well as Fred Thomas on bass and percussion.

 

“..it’s like opening up a Victorian music box to hear the most beguiling and captivating singing and sounds; an original concept throughout, and utterly disarming…  Her song ‘Jack’ is very fine indeed, and if it doesn’t win an award for best new song I’ll eat my May Garland!” – Shirley Collins

“Lisa takes us out of our comfort zone and plants us in  a garden of England we didn’t know was there, but it’s one we’d like to explore further. Her singing and arrangements suit the mood perfectly…  Enchanting..” – BBC Radio 3, Late Junction 

“Hunt the Hare excels with ingenuity and magic and sets Lisa Knapp at the forefront and heart of the English Folk Renaissance, an incredible EP.” – Folk Radio UK 

“..Knapp’s unique voice is earthy, elfin and breathlessly mischievous all at once, proving beyond doubt that, whether with self-penned or traditional material, she is an innovator and creative artist par excellence.” – The Living Tradition 

 

www.lisaknapp.co.uk

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Basquiat Strings is a strings-based jazz quartet led by the cellist Ben Davis. Released in 2007, their first album, entitled simply Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford, was one of the 2007 Mercury Prize nominees. The second incarnation of Basquiat Strings now features:

Ben Davis – cello and composition

Seb Rochford – drums

Graeme Stephen – acoustic guitar

Fred Thomas – double bass

Here are some words from Ben Davis on the new project:

“With the completion of the second album, I’d reached a point where I needed to experiment with different instrumentation and approaches to writing. I am still very interested in blending specific sounds, but want to get away from heavily arranged parts so I’ve brought a natural comping instrument, in the form of Graeme Stephen, into the frame. Graeme’s steel string playing combines perfectly with the broad tonal range of the cello and allows the band to play entirely acoustically if needed. Bass player Fred Thomas was brought up in a classical household which reflects in his sensitivity as a jazz musician. His main instrument is the piano but I’ve seen him as a drummer on many occasions! Seb Rochford, of course, has a great sense for the overall sound of a group and adjusts accordingly. Its been a pleasure to play and record with him over the years. The repertoire well include some material from the second album but will mainly be made up of new material. An interpretation of a standard or two will be included. I’m looking forward to touring this band in a double-bill with Jonny Phillips’ stunning band Oriole. We will be starting again on the exhilarating road of developing new sounds.”

Basquiat Strings’ Part Two has just been released.

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Electrofeit is an album of J.S. Bach solo organ music recorded by Fred Thomas and released by music publisher and record label The Silent Howl

Buy it from Bandcamp

Recorded 2014 at St. Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield courtesy of Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay & University of Huddersfield
Engineered & Mastered by Dominic Thibault
Mixed by Alex Bonney and Fred Thomas
Artwork by Ted Allen
Produced by Fred Thomas

Some words……

There were several sources of inspiration for this recording: a sudden love affair with church organs, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Glenn Gould’s obsession with technology and how it relates to classical music.

Then I heard some lectures by the historian Hayden White that seem pertinent to the interpretation of music or art of the past. His ideas are a gift  to anybody into period performance practice.

Here are some of Hayden White’s thoughts (paraphrased):

–  How can a creative student of the past use imagination to supplement the kind of knowledge, always fragmentary, always incomplete, often hidden, that historical methodologies dig up? Is there an essence that you can derive from a combination of so-called scientific enquiry and poetic imagination, without transforming fact into fiction? In fact, what is the status of fact and fiction? Can they even be clearly demarcated?

–  History can be an artistic treatment of reality. Novelist Toni Morrison says her book ‘Beloved’ is “historically true in essence, but not strictly factual”.

– Literary devices such as the anecdote or epigraph are instruments for treating the past artistically, for interpreting facts poetically, for drawing attention to your message by giving it formal coherence. Form articulates or even enacts message. These literary devices are poetic precisely in so far as they draw attention to their own processes of production. They tell you something about the text itself.

– To tell things chronologically results in a chronicle. To relate a history you must violate chronology, and it’s this that gives it narrative force. Why do we want a narrative or story? Because identifying the structure that holds events together in a particular pattern of cause and effect or functional relationship is not enough; the dramatisation of events is key i.e. to separate agents into protagonists/antagonists, strong/weak, agents/patients and thus extract meaning.

In my mind at least, all this relates deeply to recording music of the past. 
In the case of ‘electrofeit’, I recorded the fugues by over-dubbing (multi-tracking) the voices. Starting off by recording a whole fugue with all its voices, I then replaced each voice individually, finally removing the original template from underneath – a bit like drawing on tracing paper on top of an original.

To a certain extent, this ‘device’ tells the listener how I feel about the text. It draws attention to itself, through technological tricks such as panning, distance, eq, timbre etc. It dramatises the music by separating the voices into their ever-changing roles of protagonist or antagonist, leader or follower. And the device itself enacts the polyphonic nature of the music.

While all this might be vaguely true, possibly, most of all it was really really fun and satisfying to record.

Press

https://www.vice.com/en/article/kbng9v/fred-thomas-is-bringing-bach-into-the-21st-century

“These pieces take on a deep and magical dimension…each detail revealed in overwhelming relief thanks to quality sound recording and mixing, supported by an interpretative finesse that brings to mind the contemporary and subtle games of a Glenn Gould. More than yet another standard interpretation of the works of J.S. Bach, ‘Electrofeit’ is a brilliant renewal of his work’s modernism, a wonderful bridge between past and present, a moment of auditory peace and contemplation. In a word: sublime” – SilenceAndSound

“Fred Thomas…is utilizing modern recording and post-production technologies to create unique compositions and reinventions of traditional classical music. By utilizing this kind of creative experimentation and exploring the realm of multi-track recording, Thomas is challenging the status quo of the classical music genre…Electrofeit is…a creative product and work of art wholly his own. Just as Brian Eno considers himself a composer beholden to the studio and constantly evolving recording technologies, Thomas is now pioneering this methodology in the classical genre. Electrofeit has a sound that is both more full and resonant than typical Bach recordings, with a sonic depth that can only be paralleled in music and film genres outside of the traditional“ – The Creators Project

Click here to read the whole article.

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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

– Oscar Wilde

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Fourteenth century France was a place of radical musical developments, particularly in rhythmic structures, polyphony and notation systems. The greatest testament to this style is the Chantilly Codex, a book of music by French and Italian ‘Ars Subtilior’ composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. Containing heart-shaped musical scores and canons set out in 33-bar spirals, this codex is one of the most exquisite syntheses of two artforms: graphic design and musical notation. The experimentation of composers such as Solage) and Trebor (Robert backwards) gave birth to an effervescence of richness and strangeness, a radical pushing of the boundaries of notational complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it has the capacity to connect deeply with contemporary artists; this fleeting and isolated style, in leaving no immediate descendants, retains its perennial novelty and remains forever gilded in mystery.

 

Fred Thomas is currently preparing a recording of this music using contemporary recording techniques and a wide range of strange instruments, both old and new.

 

….more to come….

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This new duo play improvised compositions using prepared piano – bluetac, rubbers, pegs, coins, plectrums, mallets, and cymbals – filtered through live electronics. Their debut album, ‘Below the Blue Whale’, is out now in digital form on the Loop Collective label. Buy it here or to purchase a hard copy write to Fred Thomas here.

 

Fred Thomas – prepared piano

Alex Bonney – electronics

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“Music is everywhere. Countless radio stations pump it out 24/7. It sells cars, shampoo, drinks – even political parties. Music is always there to cover up a lull in the conversation; it soothes us on take-off and on landing, and it makes us feel good… or does it? Subconsciously we crave for something that goes much deeper: well-crafted, inspiring music with real emotional meaning.

Thankfully, each new generation is blessed with a few young people who embrace music as an art form. They explore, invent, discuss, rehearse, and live their music. What they create enriches and entertains the audience without patronising it.

The artists in the F-ire Collective will give you depth, inspiration, surprise, and above all, hope.”

– Django Bates

 

 

www.f-ire.com

f-ire record label

www.facebook.com/firecollectivelondon

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This trio produced sounds that were a synthesis of Fred’s compositions and free improv, exploring those made possible by delving into the bowels of a grand piano – using bluetac, rubbers, pegs, coins, plectrums, mallets, and cymbals – and uniting these discoveries with the exquisite playing of Robin Fincker and Ben Bryant. Their E.P. ‘It’s Time’ came out in 2006 and was Fred Thomas’ first ever release.

 

Fred Thomas – (prepared) piano

Robin Fincker – clarinet

Ben Bryant – percussion

 

https://fredthomas.bandcamp.com/album/its-time

 

[soundcloud id=’11930438′]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWwmmuPCZAM[/youtube]

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6OAg27_8Nc&spfreload=10[/youtube]

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMtmw0cES5c&spfreload=10[/youtube]