Massacre
Massacre is an experimental rock trio formed in New York in 1980 by guitarist Fred Frith and bassist Bill Laswell. The group mixes free improvisation with the drive of rock and punk, and its first album was Killing Time (1981). The first lineup, with Fred Maher on drums in 1980 and 1981, recorded Killing Time for the French label Celluloid. When Frith and Laswell revived the group in 1998, the drummer was Charles Hayward. This trio released the live albums Meltdown (2001), Lonely Heart (2007), recorded in Paris and Denmark in 2003, and Love Me Tender (2013) on Tzadik.
Speechless
Henry Cow's and Art Bears' Fred Frith experimental and sometimes tuneful beautiful 1981 album for the Resident's Ralph Records, featuring Etron Fou Leloublan and Massacre's Bill Laswell and Fred Maher. With original innersleeve.
Killing Time
Massacre's only album from their first period, recorded in 1981 by Fred Frith, Bill Laswell and Fred Maher. This reissue plays at the correct pitch, after decades in which it circulated at the wrong one, with six bonus tracks.
Love Me Tender
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* One of the first, longest running and most acclaimed improvisational rock ensembles in the world presents a special collection of live recordings culled from the private archives of guitarist extraordinaire Fred Frith. Hand picked for this release, the music comes from their exciting 1999 European tour, and from their most recent onslaughts in 2008. An essential document of one of the most incendiary rock trios in music history.
Lonely Heart
Together since 1980, Massacre is one of the world’s classic cutting edge rock guitar trios. Opening for Metallica on the stage of the Roskilde Rock festival in front of an audience of 10,000 metal heads, they break out like never before. Here Frith puts down his brushes and chains and whips out some of the greatest flatout guitar fireworks he has ever performed. Three masters of rock improvisation kick out the jams in one of the greatest performances of their nearly thirty year existence. Astoni…
Meltdown
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* A blistering live performance by one of the greatest instrumental rock trios ever. Fred Frith, Bill Laswell and Charles Hayward have each been responsible for some of the greatest concerts in new music in the last twenty years, and collectively they take rock improvisation to ecstatic new heights. Beautifully recorded by longtime Laswell associate Oz Fritz at Robert Wyatt’s Meltdown Festival in London, 2001, Meltdown is one of the most exciting recordings by…
Funny Valentine
In 1983, Bill Laswell's Celluloid label released a minor masterpiece by a downtown power trio called Massacre; the group consisted of Fred Frith on guitar, Laswell on bass and Fred Maher on drums. The album was called Killing Time, and it was a brilliant combination of quirky but composed avant-gardisms, experimental noise and post-punk funk. That album remains one of the great monuments of the downtown scene, right up there with A Taste of DNA and No New York. Fifteen years later, Frith and Las…