Fred Frith & Ikue Mori

A newly minted MacArthur Genius recipient, Ikue Mori was born in Tokyo and moved to New York in 1977, where she started playing drums and formed the experimental no wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay. In the mid 1980s, John Zorn introduced her to the downtown improvised music scene and she began to perform using drum machines—an unlikely choice in the context of improvised music—forging her own unique approach. In 1999 she was awarded the Ars Electronica Digital Music prize, after which she began using a laptop computer to expand her vocabulary, not only for playing sounds but for creating and controlling images. Since then Mori has collaborated with numerous musicians in diverse genres and styles while continuing to produce and record her own compositions. In this duo, Mori reunites with Fred Frith, with whom she has spent four decades collaborating in numerous concerts and recordings. Notably, they worked together in a trio with bassist Mark Dresser, Lotte Anker’s What River is This ensemble, and in the legendary Death Ambient with Kato Hideki. Their album, A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall, was released in 2021.