The Technology of Tears

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.

The three-movement Technology of Tears suite was commissioned by Rosalind Newman. She had previously used parts of Frith's Gravity and Skeleton Crew's Learn to Talk to choreograph sequences for her dance company. For Technology of Tears, Frith worked closely with Newman.[1] He explained:

She kind of gave me an idea of the sort of direction she wanted me to start from, and we planned out a structure of the piece, and then I would go and work on it and bring back my work. And she would criticize it and we would edit it together... It was a very important learning process for me because I had never worked with a non-musician in that way... Sometimes she would make a suggestion that I really wouldn't like, but in the end, with compromise on both sides, we both ended up being pretty happy with the result.[1]

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".[2] The intention was that the modules could be assembled in any order to create the final piece. The reason for this approach was that 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.[2]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[3]
DownBeat	[4]

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 ...".[3]

Reviewing the 2008 CD release of the album in the music journal, Notes, 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".[5] 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".[5]

Nicole V. Gagné was a little more critical of the album. She wrote in her 1990 book, Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music that while it "has some beautiful stuff, [it] mines a rather narrow vein in Frith's music; a beat-dominated, humorless, and strident vein".[1] She opined that the writing in the Technology of Tears suite "is unexpectedly weak",[6] but had praise for Frith's bass playing towards the end of Part 1, and the inclusion of guests Marclay, Tenko and Zorn. Gagné felt much the same about the Jigsaw suit, adding that "Frith's weird playing and tape manipulations start sounding more arbitrary or just clever or even redundant." However, she liked Jigsaw's coda, calling it "superb – a memorably moody landscape refined from selected gestures of the piece."[6] Gagné called the 14 tracks in Propaganda "a persuasive suite", adding that "they all seem to reflect and support each other through Frith's shifting atmospheres: barren landscapes punctuated by an ominous thudding pulse".[6]

All tracks composed by Fred Frith.

• Fred Frith – guitars, violin, percussion, keyboards, synclavier, voice
• John Zorn – alto saxophone (The Technology of Tears)
• Tenko Ueno – voice (The Technology of Tears)
• Christian Marclay – turntables (The Technology of Tears)
• Jim Staley – trombone (Jigsaw)

• Gagné, Nicole V. (1990). Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music. De Falco Books. ISBN 978-0-9625145-0-0.

• The Technology of Tears at Discogs (list of releases)
• Dance: Rosalind Newman. The New York Times Archives, 25 February 1987 (The Technology of Tears premiere).