The Technology of Tears, commissioned by Rosalind Newman and first performed by her dance company at the Joyce Theatre, New York City in February 1987;
Frith composed all the music and plays most of the instruments, with assistance from John Zorn, Tenko Ueno, Christian Marclay and Jim Staley. The Propaganda suite was reworked and remastered in February 2015, and released by Fred Records as Propaganda in November 2015.
The music
On The Technology of Tears, Fred Frith continues his exploration of world dance music he began on Gravity and Speechless, this time supplementing traditional instrumentation with digital technology to generate patterns, pulses and noise. Samples are used throughout, accompanied by horns, sporadic percussion and wordless vocals. The album is a mix of musique concrète, folk music and improvisation. On the first part of the Technology of Tears suite, Frith experiments with Henry Kaiser's newly acquired synclavier, at the time the state-of-the-art sampling and processing technology. On parts two and three of the suite Frith plays mostly "low-grade" instruments with added samples by turntablist Christian Marclay. Jigsaw is a collection of dozens of musical cells, "each recorded separately in increments of between 3 and 12 measures; all at the same tempo, and in the same key". The intention was that the modules could be assembled in any order to create the final piece. The reason for this approach was that Rosalind Newman had requested that many changes be made, and with Jigsaw she could arrange the segments how she wished. In the end, she accepted Frith's demonstration sequence as the final piece.
Reception
A reviewer at AllMusic, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, described the Technology of Tears suite as "... unrelenting slices of hard-edged sounds over a pulse...", Jigsaw as "... patterns with constantly shifting accents and sub-divisions...", and Propaganda as "... a series of brilliantly evocative soundpieces with electronics, guitar, and sound effects...". Reviewing the 2008 CD release of the album, Rick Anderson described the three-part Technology of Tears suite as a "pulsing barrage of sounds", broken occasionally by Frith's East-European rhythms and "angular" melodies, and Zorn's "atonal squawks". He found the sounds "attractive enough in themselves", but at times "a bit overwhelming in this dense and complex context". Anderson called Jigsaw "a highly episodic collection of brief sound collages, each of them built on pulsing but sometimes quirky rhythms". He said it is Frith's "good humor and wit" that stops this work from becoming "purely assaultive skronk", and added that "there is a cheerfulness to even his most abrasive work that makes it far more listenable than that of many of his other... colleagues of the period".
Track listing
All tracks composed by Fred Frith.
LP releases
CD releases
Personnel
Fred Frith – guitars, violin, percussion, keyboards, synclavier, voice
The Technology of Tears – recorded BC Studios, June 1986; Noise New York, November 1986 to January 1987; Synclavier recorded in California, June 1986 with programming
