Dave Pike had made eleven albums with Herbie Mann and played with Bill Evans and Paul Bley before he moved to Germany. There he met Volker Kriegel, a Frankfurt guitarist who had abandoned a sociology degree under Adorno to play with the Mangelsdorff brothers, and who also owned a sitar. The Dave Pike Set was the result, with Hans Rettenbacher on bass and Peter Baumeister on drums.
Noisy Silence - Gentle Noise was recorded in one day, 21 January 1969, at the MPS studio in Villingen, produced by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. Kriegel wrote most of it. MPS's own description runs through the programme: the poppish I'm on My Way, the folk blues Regards from Freddy Horrowitz (named, according to the blog What Is Wrong With Grooving, after a toy monkey that hung in the band's Citroën 2CV), the ballad Somewhat Somewhere Somehow, the title track jumping into double time, Frank Zappa's Mother People reworked as a showpiece, and Mathar, the sitar piece that went further than the rest of the record and is, per Rough Trade's reissue text, still streamed in the millions.
Der Spiegel listed it at 19 marks in September 1969. MPS reissued it on vinyl recently. The rest of the group's catalogue (Four Reasons, Live at the Philharmonie, Infra Red) follows from here.
Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.
