"I have been fascinated by the sound and potential of gongs since I first heard Stockhausen's Mikrophonie 1 in the late 1960s. When I moved to Oakland in 1999 I discovered the work of Karen Stackpole, one of the few percussionists in the world specializing entirely in gongs, and attended several of her performances. I always tried to imagine how I could combine my own sonic vocabulary with her incredibly rich array, and we enthusiastically agreed to a musical meeting which somehow kept being postponed, year after year.
According to Fred Frith himself, these recordings are among his most precious ones.
Finally, as my teaching career at Mills College was winding down, we succeeded in making an appointment to record together at Karen's home studio in the Californian hills.
As a seasoned professional recording engineer, she had hervast and beautiful collection of gongs meticulously placed and amplified. It was a joy! Guitar as gong, gong as harmony and everything in between, an interweaving that left me breathless."
Fred Frith.

Karen Stackpole
Drummer/percussionist Karen Stackpole has a long-standing passion for gongs, scrap metal, and a range of "ethnic" instruments. She specializes in dynamic soundscapes and textures and has contributed gong sounds to more conventional musical genres as well as providing source material for film soundtracks. In her exploration of metals, she has cultivated some distinctive techniques for drawing harmonics out of tamtams with various implements. In addition to solo work, she has performed and recorded with Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience (a duo with electronics master, Drew Webster), Sabbaticus Rex, Ghost in the House, Vorticella, Malcolm Mooney and
the Tenth Planet, the Francis Wong Unit, and the rock band Steel Hotcakes. Most recently her work has focused on duo performance and recordings with experimental instrument builder Krys Bobrowski (Gliss Glass & Gongs), co.......
more