Fred Frith and Ikue Mori are not just big names in the world of experimental music, they’ve both held that status for ages, so their early 2021 release A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall is a welcome meeting of old pros. Frith co-founded the Canterbury ensemble Henry Cow that thrived in the 70s and all I can think of when I listen to my Unrest CD is how much Frith’s guitar sounded like some forward-thinking guitar player of the 21st century was dropped into 1974. Since then, he’s built an exhaustive catalog of wide-ranging material under his own name and teamed up with a number of liked-minded avanteers.
Mori was the drummer in that groundbreaking no-wave band DNA for a few short but critical years with Arto Lindsay in the late 70s around the time Henry Cow was splitting apart. Afterwards, she moved on to programmed drums and started dabbling into sampling, finally settling on the laptop computer. There, she completely mastered the art of creating on the fly from an arsenal of an endless array of noises. She’s collaborated with many fellow prominent experimentalists and filmmakers over the years and lately we’ve been getting a heaping helping of her skills on recordings involving fellow Japanese native Satoko Fujii.
A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall is collaboration of artists very familiar with each other; Frith and Mori have worked together for more than four decades. They were even in the same band in the 90s along with bassist Kato Hidek, called Death Ambient. That was back when Mori was playing drum machines; Mountain pits Frith one-on-one against Mori — now on laptop — for the first time.
Most of these tracks run less than three minutes; several of them under two. But it’s best to take in this record not as a discreet set of “songs” but a continuous string of extemporaneous performances. Frith’s clinical, yet chaotic approach to guitar, along with home-made instruments, “various toys and objects” with all its unusual timbres makes it such an impeccable fit for Mori’s randomized menagerie of bent circuit sounds both tonal and percussive. Often, it’s hard to pull the two apart.
“Nothing To It” is only one of a couple of occasions where Frith is playing guitar. It’s also the first track that runs long enough to evolve and amid Mori’s symphonic, threatening backdrops and random chirping is Frith’s heavy fuzztone articulating the tension suggested from the laptop. “Nothing At All” shows that these artists of noise can deftly create and manipulate silence and hushed moments. “Hishiryo” is a Japanese-sounding title and similarly, the music has a distantly Japanese folk flavor to it, a reminder us that this synthetic music is organically inspired.
“Now Here” begins with a church-like solemnity while Frith noodles on his guitar as the later sounds of a guitar looped backwards contrasts with it. The concluding track “Samadhi” runs through a succession of trippy phases where Mori’s laptop mimics the resonance of an organ from hell.
This is obviously not music for all tastes but if you know about Fred Frith and Ikue Mori, then you know how good they are at making noise; for A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall they make beautiful noise together.
A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall is now available, from Intakt Records.
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