Accidental (Music for Dance Volume 3) is a studio album by Englishguitarist, composer and improvisorFred Frith. It is the third of a series of Music for Dance albums Frith made,[a] and was recorded between December 1995 and January 1996 at Studio Jankowski in Stuttgart, Germany. The album was released on CD in March 2002 on Fred Records and was the first release in Frith's archival release program on the record label.
Background
Accidental was commissioned in 1995 by the Britishchoreographer Paul Selwyn Norton for the dance piece "Rogue Tool", with funding provided by the British Council through the British/Israeli cultural initiative, BI Arts. "Rogue Tool" was premiered by the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Israel in February 1996.
Frith constructed the music on Accidental using a principle he called "block-melodies" [1] and he incorporated random events, or "accidents", into the compositions, including "found sounds" and field recordings, to trigger new patterns. Frith explained the background to the making of the album:[2]
I'm fascinated by accidents. When I do solo improvisations I think of myself as being in continuous dialogue with the unexpected, and its always dynamic. Do I ignore this, do I embrace it, do I integrate it, do I keep my distance? When making this music I was constantly using random elements like radio tuning and trying to frame them in metric or harmonic structures.
Bill Tilland of the BBC wrote in a review of this album:[3]
It's fairly standard practice for dance companies to commission "new music" composers to write (and sometimes perform) material for dance performances, and nearly all such work has moments of purely musical interest. But none that I can remember leaves such a strong overall impression as this one. Accidental is a real tribute to Frith's imaginative faculties.
In a review for AllMusic, François Couture commented: "Accidental may not be as ambitious, challenging, or cutting-edge as the man's other output from the 1990s, but it sure sounds sweet to fans of his avant rock work from the previous two decades. Recommended."[4]
Chris Brook, writing for the Rough Guide to Rock, stated that the album title "suggest[s] exactly the principles behind the compositions," and noted that the recording "took elements as diverse as improvised mandolin and random radio tunings and assembled them into a mesmerizing whole."[5]
Jesse Jarnow of Jambands.com remarked: "When I
listen to Accidental... I don't think in terms of narrative... I imagine something moving. That's not to say that I visualize anything, either. It just moves. It's a feeling I don't get from... other proper dance/groove music. Groove music makes one move, but there is often little movement within it." He concluded that Accidental "invert[s] that idea, but keep[s] it just as compelling, and a lot more challenging."[6]
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