Solos (6xLP Box Set)

Solos is a super deluxe six album box set from The Fiery Furnaces’ own Matthew Friedberger. Each album focuses on a different instrument. Napoléonette - piano, Meet Me In Miramas - guitar, Old Regimes - harp, Cut It Out - drums, Death-In-Life - organ, and Arrested On Charges of Unemployment - bass.

Each LP is a full length album packaged in a full color LP jacket. All six LPs are housed in a heavy duty box with removable lid and hand-pasted cover artwork. These albums were released individually in limited supply in 2011. Very few of the full boxes are available for sale. 

“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. 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.