Normal is Fred Frith and Sudhu Tewari, playing manually & electronically manipulated

home-made instruments. Not really instruments in the sense of beautifully crafted art

objects requiring Extended Techniques, so much as de-constructions and re-

constructions using the simplest of means, and requiring only minimal exertion to

produce sound. Fred's "planks of wood with strings" were almost all built in the early

1980s, when for a period of several years he abandoned the guitar as his primary

vehicle for improvising.

 

The birth of this duo in 2001 marked the first time he had

performed with them in many years. The fact that he is doing so again is the

responsibility of Sudhu, a tinkerer of genius who plunders garages and junkshops and

the street outside for the sources of his sound world, turning the smallest spring into

a potential orchestra. In 2020 Sudhu and Fred were invited to present their work in a

virtual exhibition at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. This gave rise to a

number of new creations including the Portable Street Piano, the Post Hole Tone

Music Box, the No Strings Guitar, Sudhu’s Infernal Spring Thing and the Superstrut

Bandsaw Bass. The first Normal CD—Moving Parts—was released on the Foc’s’le

label in May 2023.

 

 

Fred Frith is a pioneer of the extended electric guitar. He learned to compose in

Henry Cow, developed his song-writing skills in Art Bears, explored his multi-

instrumentalism in Skeleton Crew, rocked the house with Massacre and is still doing

all of those things, having been in one band or another continuously since 1964!

Meanwhile his work has been performed by ensembles, string quartets, chamber

orchestras, and a whole range of groups and artists in the ever-expanding field of

semi-popular music. Fred also composes extensively for film and dance, and taught

improvisation for years at Mills College in Oakland, California and the Musik

Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. His passion for improvising, evident from the

beginning, has increasingly led him to work with artists who don’t necessarily define

themselves as improvisers.

 

Sudhu Tewari has been described as “bricoleur”, “junkyard maven”, and “audio-

gadgeteer”.  He invents, designs and builds musical instruments from whatever

materials are to hand—kinetic and sound sculptures, interactive installations, audio

electronics, and wearable sound art. He has performed with Normal and in other

configurations in Europe, Japan and the USA. His visual and interactive art has been

exhibited in spaces large and small, including the Exploratorium and the Museum of

Modern Art in San Francisco, the Tech Museum in San Jose, the Oakland Museum of

California, and PROGR and the Laboratoire Village Nomade in Switzerland. Sudhu

teaches electronics and sound art, and continues to build and perform with self-

governing musical systems and self-built musical instruments. Relentless curiosity

and delight in unlikely solutions to intractable problems are manifest in all of his

work.