Album Notes

Frederick Moore is a composer, poet, and producer who lives and works in Los Angeles. He first gained attention in the early 90's as a producer of successful experimental music concerts during a time when very little experimental music was being produced in Los Angeles. As a composer, Moore is well grounded in the technological innovations of both the avant garde and academia, yet he has a way of utilizing these in contexts which are coherent and decidedly nonacademic. As a poet, his varied influences include existential philosophy, popular media, and beat poetry. At times he poses as a teller of stories, while other times as a declaimer of nonlinear meditations which drift in a stream of obliquely related themes.

In recent years Moore has worked almost exclusively as a recording artist, producing Sons of Friction, Lives of the Saints, An Obscure Presence, and 13th Idiot Blessed.


13th Idiot Blessed was released in early 2003 and marks a return to studio compositions. It is essentially a concept album whose formal logic rests on the juxtaposition of three distinct harmonic approaches. There are the usual microtonal excursions. A more conventional harmonic approach characterizes two collaborations with Phil Calvert which feature members of the fusion trio Code Three. The third approach could be described as a nonserial variant of twelve-tone composition. In practice it is probably more accessible than this description might suggest.

Textually, 13th Idiot Blessed features the usual mix of narrative and meditation, but is on the whole thematicallly dark, less buoyant than An Obscure Presence.





Reviews:

“Full of multiple implications and shadowy shades of meaning... charged with religious and spiritual insinuations. Saints, angels, demons, the primal, urban eccentrics touched by something otherworldly, the blessed, and the haunted populate the landscape of Moore’s wandering/ wondering composition/text pieces.” 
 Titus Levi, Keyboard Magazine

“Radio theatre as Brian Eno might have conceived it. I’ll be hanged if I understand any of it, but I like it ........ more substantial than Robert Ashley. It is indeed a pleasure to encounter a recording that’s as unique and interesting as the hype claims”
 Michael Bloom, Boston Rock“

"Against backdrops, musically evocative and varied , Moore tells Brautiganesque stories alive with an uncritical love of language.”
 John Henken, The Los Angeles Times

“Moore is a master of building tension. Complex timbres and textures slowly evolve from simple passages and then suddenly resort back to simplicity with a focus once more on the text . . . (He) captures the alienation of urban life in a nondescript American metropolis”
 Rodney Oakes, Journal SEAMUS

“Quietly lyrical and surprisingly erotic.”
 Laurence Vittes, The L.A. Reader