Fred Frith is a multi-instrumentalist and a shrewd outsider who walks the line between rock and jazz, improvisation and composition, and hereby presents a breathtaking live double CD with his long-time Bay Area trio. CD1 documents an inspiring trio concert by these extraordinarily creative musicians at Stadthalle Köln as part of Week- End Fest 2019. CD2 features the trio with guests Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva. Both musicians have a long history with the trio – Lotte Anker has played with the trio in San Francisco and New York, and Susana Santos Silva joined them for performances in Brazil in 2018, while both have joined the trio to tour the U.S. East Coast and Europe in 2019. Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva fire up the trio. And in turn the trio’s inspiration has an effect on Lotte and Susana which feeds back into the group. This creates a unique collective sound that delivers an infectious live energy.

A Mountain Doesn't Know It's Tall. The title reflects the mood of this duo record of Fred Frith and Ikue Mori – playful, poetic, mysterious and open. The guitarist and the sound-artist have been working together for forty years. Live excerpts from their work are documented on Fred Frith's 3 CD box set Live at the Stone (Intakt CD 320). In January 2015, Frith and Mori met in Germany to record the music for a radio play for Werner Penzel, the filmmaker and longtime friend of Fred Frith, for his film Zen for Nothing. After finishing their work, they used the free studio day to record their first duo album together. Influenced by the film music and inspired by the long friendship 15 pieces were created that are both wonderful sound sculptures and fascinating dialogues. Fred Frith writes: “Air moving through ears and hair and lungs and pores, through songs,and scrapes, and scraps of this, that and the other.” And Ikue Mori writes: “… it was about playing with the everyday noises that arise when cooking, playing ping-pong, and especially when laughing. There is a lot of joy in working with these recordings, interacting with them and making music.”

One hundred tapes. Recorded by Jean Vapeur on the now legendary Nagra IV S tape recorder. A box full of the original sound recordings for Step Across the Border, the film Werner Penzel and I travelled around the world to make in 1988-1989 with musician Fred Frith. Just before the collapse of Socialism and the digital take-over of the world. Twenty minutes on every tape. That is, thirty-three hours of sound material. In the end, only ninety minutes of it are in the film. The rest of the recordings have been slumbering away in an old crate, and trailed along on our every studio move, surviving icy winters and even a flood in our archive vault. Now and again I need to clean the tape debris off the Nagra with a brush. Little piles of magnetic dust. But the sounds are still there! Wear debris, a symbol of elapsed time.