That House We Lived In

That House We Lived In
Live album by Keep the Dog
Released August 2003
Recorded 1991, Austria, Italy, Germany
Genre Avant-rock
Length 96:17
Label Fred (UK)
Producer Fred Frith
Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
AllMusic [1]
Clouds and Clocks favorable[2]

That House We Lived In is a double live album by the United States experimental rock band Keep the Dog. It comprises material from their final European tour in 1991 and was released by Fred Frith on his own Fred Records in 2003.

Background

Keep the Dog (1989–1991) was Fred Frith's review band that performed live in Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union. Material for this album comes from DAT recordings of the band's final performances in Austria, Germany and Italy in May and June 1991. Frith only considered releasing an album of their work in 2002 when Jon Leidecker spotted the tapes in Frith's office and volunteered to assemble a montage for review.[3]

Frith arranged the tracks on the two CDs to "... re-create the feeling of a typical two-set concert while including as much of our repertoire as possible within the time constraints of the format." [4] While the pieces represented a typical concert, they were in fact selected from some 20 different performances on their final tour.

Content

The tracks on That House We Lived In are primarily Frith compositions from about a dozen of his solo, group and project albums. All are free interpretations by the band of the originals, often leading to improvisation. These include "pop" tunes like "Some Clouds Do" from Cheap at Half the Price, "dance" numbers like "Rock and a Hard Place" from Allies, "Hola, On Danse!" from the rock opera, Dropera, and two of Frith's "classics": "Norrgården Nyvla" from Gravity, and "Domaine de Langendreer" (originally "Domaine de Planousset") from Speechless. Two versions of Massacre's "Bones" are here: a take on the original, and a slow number rendering it barely recognisable as "Bones". A few of the tracks are entirely improvised and do not appear elsewhere, like "Revelation" and "That Home We Lived In".

That House We Lived In is largely an instrumental album with the occasional vocal utterances from members of the group. The closest anyone comes to actually singing is when Frith belts out the refrain "some clouds do, some clouds don't" on "Some Clouds Do".

Track listing

Disc 1
  1. "Revelation" (Derome) / "Bones" (Frith, Laswell, Maher) – 4:59
  2. "Rock and a Hard Place" (Frith) – 5:45
  3. "Hola, On Danse!" (Frith, Richard) – 2:20
  4. "Foot in Hole" (Frith) – 7:38
  5. "Fanfare" / "Lizard's Tail" (Frith) – 4:31
  6. "Suspended" (Frith) – 2:02
  7. "Quick Sign" (Frith) – 5:16
  8. "Propaganda Suite" (Frith) – 8:37
  9. "Walking Song" (Frith) – 5:32
  10. "Some Clouds Do" (Frith) – 2:57
Disc 2
  1. "The Same Eye" / "Fives" (Frith) – 5:37
  2. "No Legs" / "Slow Bones" (Frith) – 7:13
  3. "That Home We Lived In" (Keep the Dog) / "Candy Machine" (Frith) – 3:24
  4. "The Trace" (Frith, Kaiser) – 5:18
  5. "True Love (instrumental version)" (Frith) – 4:01
  6. "Instant Party" (Frith) – 3:07
  7. "Small Mercy II" (Frith) – 3:34
  8. "Norrgården Nyvla" (Frith) – 3:13
  9. "Year of the Monkey" / "Dark as a Match" (Frith) – 6:21
  10. "Domaine de Langendreer" (Frith) – 4:52

Original recordings

Most of the above tracks were adapted from original recordings by Fred Frith that appeared on the following albums:

Performance venues

The tracks on That House We Lived In were taken from Keep the Dog's final European tour in May and June 1991 performed at:

Personnel

Production

References

  1. ↑ Couture, François. "Keep the Dog: That House We Lived In". AllMusic. Retrieved 2011-06-22.
  2. ↑ Colli, Beppe (2003-09-07). "Keep The Dog". Clouds and Clocks. Retrieved 2012-04-30.
  3. ↑ Sękowski, Tom. "Fred Frith interview, October 2003". Bagatellen.com. Retrieved 2007-06-13.
  4. ↑ That House We Lived In CD liner notes.

External links