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Apr 21.2011
Here you are, my friends… performance of my song “Little Guy” from the April 11th performance at CFAN, in NYC.
Just a little back story - the inspiration for this show largely came from working with Liuh-Wen Ting. She’s a brilliant violist and has shown a real interest in my music. We did a little test run together in Spain last October and it lit my imagination on fire! As soon as I came back I started developing arrangements of most of the songs for two violas and harpsichord. Plus, or course, a bunch of sine waves and voices.
Rehearsing for this show was an amazing pleasure. Liuh-Wen brought in Eddy Malave, another brilliant violist, and we began to work on perfecting the viola parts.
My pal Leigh looked me up with Michael Resnick, who’s a drummer in several really great bands, including Inlets and Arpline. He’s awesome, and worked so hard in a very short period of time to prepare for the show.
Finally, a couple words about the song… It’s called Little Guy and it’s about a paranoid schizophrenic living on the boundaries of a small suburban town. He has a war going on (in his head of course) with the children of the town, who in reality spend a lot of time teasing him. He has a personal relationship with Zeus, who has given him the power to create lightning. The battle goes down halfway through between the little guy and the towns-children. You might notice I sing “and lightning strikes!” and then that line is repeated 4 bars later. From that section on I am doing voice looping, building up a pattern of voice harmonies.
This song always makes me cry! Hope it moves you too!
Anyway, many thanks to Jennifer and J from Flat World Productions for inviting us to do this show, as well as providing me with the first mix. I’ll announce this again later on, but we’re preparing for a show on August 13th at the same place. I’m definitely looking for strong male singers for the show, so if any of you in the NYC whereabouts know of any, please let me know!
Jaime’s writeup!Apr 12.2011
Great digital writeup of the April 9th show at CFAN from Jaime’s Weekly Concert Update! YAY!
“Fredo Viola @ Church For All Nations (4/9/11) - A buddy of mine asked me to check out this artist and when I asked for description here is what I got: “Very hard to describe. Esoteric, beautiful, artsy, adventurous.” And having caught the show, I would say those were all accurate in describing the music. Although, I would probably add theatrical somewhere in there. Fredo came equipped with a gentle yet transcending voice that reminded me strongly of Devotchka mixed with Jonsi. His band, which consisted of a couple violinists and a drummer, were simple yet complex in their compositions. It was the type of music that begged for your attention as it drifted by you.
On a side note, I have never been to this venue - a church on 57th btwn 9th and 10th ave - but it was pretty awesome. The acoustics were nice and the room leant itself perfectly to the music.”