Matthew Friedberger

Old Regimes is the third album released in Matthew Friedberger’s 2011 six album series Solos. Matt’s vocals are present and a Lyon and Healy semi-grand harp was the only instrument used on Old Regimes.
“Matt” is Rock-n-Roll musician and songwriter Matthew Friedberger, a Chicagoan. Mr. Friedberger considers R-n-R an anti-vocational sphere of endeavor, as is obvious from its epithet, so spelled, Q.E.D. Therefore a C.V. is drastically inappropriate.
But or so: since 2003, Friedberger has released eight albums with the band he runs with his sister Eleanor, The Fiery Furnaces. The band is planning to record its ninth album before Christmas upcoming. Perhaps the group’s catchiest and most aggressive effort to date, arranged as a concerto for Drum Kit and String Orchestra, this as yet untitled effort may contain such songs as “I met the Queen of the Night in the daytime”, “I was so confused”, “The City of the Sun”, “As insufficient as an Eskimo’s kimono”. And many more.
His six record set, Solos in which he plays only a single given instrument per album (though not necessarily the same actual individual example of the single given instrument), is designed to illustrate the following Cretan-Lacedaemonian principle. Every group of instruments against every other group of instruments; every instrument against every other instrument; and especially, every instrument against itself, all alone. See Laws, Book 1, 626 d. This idea jibes quite well with certain notions that have often been thought constitutively American, no doubt unfortunately. Friedberger thinks it therefore illuminating to apply this principle to such a pre-eminently American music as the aforementioned R-n-R. Despite the fact that this application is no doubt already ongoing.
Mr. Friedberger will again be scoring the Guggenheim’s production of Rob Pruitt presents: The Art Awards, an awards event and performance piece conceived and co-ordinated by the artist Rob Pruitt. This second annual event will take place in New York at Webster Hall on December 9th. The music this year will refer to Webster Hall’s history of various like amusements, up to and including its period as The Ritz. But no further.
Mr. Friedberger is at work on a book called The Progressive Use of Popular Culture 1: Music. In this work, about the same length as Jason Alexander’s non-existent Acting without Acting, he attempts to advance--or exaggerate--the egalitarian potential of the irreducibly esoteric nature of the popular arts. He considers Rock-n-Roll, or Rock ‘n Roll, or Rock, or This Thing, to be the Queen, or King, or Tyrant of Indeterminate Gender, of the Popular Arts. The word Tyrant in the last sentence is meant to include a sense of necessary illegitimacy.