1976 · Album
Guitar Solos 2
Recorded 1976 · Caroline Records · Produced by Fred Frith
Four Guitarists Arguing in Real Time
Traditional guitar playing is most definitely not the focus of these two LPs.
Guitar Solos 2 sounds like four people thinking out loud on electric guitar, each one pushing the instrument into territory it was not designed to reach. There are no rhythms, no chord changes, no sense of where any solo is headed. Fred Frith plays with industrial noise and feedback layered underneath sparse, almost interrogative lines. Derek Bailey tears through his three tracks with angular, staccato phrases that sound more like malfunctioning machinery than melody. Hans Reichel works in dense, textural clusters — his guitar becomes a percussion instrument, a synthesizer, a broken radio. G. F. Fitzgerald offers one track that feels almost restrained by comparison.
This is the second volume in a series that Frith curated and produced, following his 1974 debut solo album Guitar Solos. Where that first record established the concept of guitar as pure improvisation without commercial intent, Guitar Solos 2 deepens and diversifies it. Each player brings a different approach to the same radical premise: what happens when you remove every safety net?
The album was released in the United Kingdom by Caroline Records in 1976. It sits alongside Guitar Solos 3 in a series designed specifically to challenge what listeners expect from the instrument. This is not an album for passive listening. It demands attention and offers no reward for those seeking melody or swing. But for anyone curious about what guitar could become when stripped of tradition, this remains a document of genuine creative risk.
