Fred Frith solo . Marc Ribot solo

As stylists, Fred Frith and Marc Ribot are the two most influential guitar players of their generation. As a matter of fact, their work is not really all that extraordinary in itself, but they present it in a way that makes people think it is strange. They present their music pieces as if they were sculptures, to be walked around and looked at from different angles, resulting in quite different views. Perhaps the effect can be compared to that of a polished surface that is placed under a microscope and revealed to be so indented and full of scratches that it looks like a mountain landscape. Admittedly, that is not really ordinary. Vaudeville, crammed with noise and gimmicks? Their predilection for distortion and extra-musical sounds is directly connected with their background: Frith via Henry Cow, Art Bears and Zorn's Naked City; Ribot via Chuck Berry, Lurie's Lounge Lizards, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits. The great influence of Fred Frith is his a-historical attitude to guitar. Unburdened by associations with Segovia, Charlie Christian or Jimi Hendrix, he started out 'ab ovo'. The guitar as a board with strings that you can saw at, drum on, lay flat on the table and subject to treatment with garden tools. But Frith knows what he is doing. He works magic with his instruments. Marc Ribot's compositions draw on memories of 'Americana' -- the American past: folk, blues, jazz, soul and pop, doused with a sauce of rhythm and blues. He mixes these various and sometimes conflicting elements in a lively and highly dynamic variant of typical New York 'noise music'.