Cryogenius
Buzzing like a Fridge, two decades on. By Jim Irvin.
WHEN FRIDGE’S first releases emerged in 1997, they felt like a British response to the sound made by American experi-instrumentalists such as Slint, Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol. A guitar-bass-and-drums trio of school friends from Putney, Fridge quickly established that they’d be forging an unconventional route to wherever it was they were going. The guitar was played and manipulated by Kieran Hebden, Adem Ilhan played bass and Sam Jeffers drummed.
Debut LP Ceefax was an enigmatic object with its info printed in clear varnish on a white sleeve with titles like More EH4-800 giving nothing away. Right from the start they appeared to be straining at genre tethers, with bursts of drum’n’bass disabusing the post-rock premise and the use of treated and sampled sounds coming to dominate during their fouryear outpouring of 10 singles and four LPs.
For album three they unexpectedly signed with indie-major Go! Discs, releasing Eph (1999), whose uneasy charm was surely noted by a certain frontman of Radiohead when he decided he hated rock around the time of Kid
A. Hebden was barely letting the guitar sound like itself by this point, more likely having it sped up, filtered or disguised – the beautiful harp-like loop on Of is a prime example – the band routinely repurposed their basic sounds into fresh forms. These days Eph seems easy to digest – its once-curious textures are all over modern music.
The follow-up, 2001’s Happiness ★★★★, is why we’re here today. A belated ‘20th Anniversary Edition’ of the album that’s often referred to as the band’s high point is now out in a beautifully packaged and remastered vinyl edition on the Brooklyn-based Temporary Residence label, which originally issued Fridge’s work in the US and is itself celebrating its 25th anniversary.
On Happiness, everything is extruded and allowed to meander, melody is tangential, texture rules. Tracks are named after their components – Sample And Clicks; Drums Bass Sonics And Edit. This new edition is a full-length double album with the addition of 10-minute bonus track, Five
Combs. Side one opens with Melodica And Trombone, featuring determinedly untutored use of both objects and ending with two minutes of what feels like being trapped in an air conditioning duct. The non-specific whooshing and rumbling is disturbing, but oddly compelling too, like a blank canvas in a crowded gallery – the audio equivalent of that varnish-on-white sleeve, perhaps? Drum Machines And Glockenspiels,
“Everything is allowed to meander, melody is tangential, texture rules.”
which completes side one, sounds like they’ve raided the junior school music cupboard, lots of recorders, shakers, chimes and those little Arabian dr ums that you roll in your hands. It’s a joyful cacophony of aimless improvisation over what sounds like a rhythm track made from the sound of tape being rewound or possibly digital radio interference. A reasonably challenging listen over 13 minutes, but this is one of those artworks that you need to live with to let its beauty and eloquence emerge.
On Five Four Child Voice, a Fred Neil-like guitar chord is struck to set a kind of oceanic mood, gamelan bells are turned into long smears that spread across the stereo, and toddler talk is heard in the background. It proves slowly, over nine minutes, rising into a euphoric burble. Original closer Long Singing twists around a simple twonote guitar figure that feels like it might gently roll on for ever. Five Combs punctuates a gentle guitar strum with a blast that sounds like an air horn, before a cut-up human voice fails to communicate something. This synthesis of clamour and lull, used to create dynamics within each track and across the album as a whole, became Hebden’s calling card as Four Tet.
Fridge, though inactive since 2007, have never actually officially split. This music, the sound of spaces breathing, continues to be happening somewhere anyway.