Joshua Fried emerged from New York’s downtown experimental music and East Village performance art scenes of the 1980s. His full-length HEADFONE FOLLIES completed its 12-week run at HERE Arts Center in 2001 with a rotating cast of sixty-four headphone-driven performers. His collaboration with choreographer Douglas Dunn, Spell for Opening the Mouth of N (featuring eight headphone-driven singer/actors and a dance company of ten), premiered in a sold-out run at The Kitchen, New York, and was one of the highlights of the 1997 Lincoln Center-Out-of-Doors Festival. Fried’s 30-minute Welcome to the Ice-Box, commissioned by Danish Radio and recorded at Danish Broadcasting Corp. studios, recently premiered on Danish Radio and at Sound/Gallery–25 loudspeakers permanently installed in Copenhagen’s main town square.
Look at his performance at Flea Theater, the 7th of January 2007, for the Music With A View series, a FREE music performance series featuring new sounds and lively talk continues @ The Flea Theater, where contemporary musicians devoted the stage to the discovery of new, fresh sound created and performed.
Fried is known for turning technology on its head, challenging its assumptions, while using machines to accentuate the raw human qualities of live events that are unique to the moment. His work partakes equally of minimalism and the rhythmic experimentation of Nancarrow and his followers, as well as contemporary performance art, dance rhythm and sound processing techniques.
Fried is also known for his invention The Musical Shoes, four ordinary shoes mounted upside-down on stands and plugged into electronics which are activated by striking the shoes.
Fried’s 1986 recording “Jimmy Because,” with guest guitarist Fred Frith, was released by Atlantic Records. He is re-mix producer on dance records by They Might Be Giants, Chaka Khan and Ofra Haza.
