Slow Music was the brainchild of Bill Rieflin who, in 2005 while working at home with random abstract sounds generated on synthisizers, wondered what it might be like if those sounds were made by people in real time. “So basically I called the best guys that I know and threw the idea at them and everybody said, ‘Yeah’” explained Bill to journalist Robert Ham.
Everybody, in this case, was Robert Fripp, drummer Matt Chamberlain who has worked with David Bowie, Elton John, Tori Amos, Bob Dylan, and many others; Bassist Fred Chalenor was known for his collaborations with ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper; REM guitarist Pete Buck and French Algerian-born composer, Hector Zazou whose credits include collaborations with Mark Isham, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Manu Di Bango, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and John Cale.
The concept behind the group was simple enough: the music would be entirely improvised, it would take its time to explore emergent ideas, avoid the urge to fill in the empty spaces created by such an approach, and, as Bill put it in an interview at the time, “you also have to pace yourself, so that you don’t shoot your wad in the first few minutes.” The aim of playing wholly improvised music with no preconditions or plans the intention was to be as ‘in the moment’ as possible in order to foster “deeper listening and greater attention among the musicians and audience. When that works, there's an incredible energy that builds up.” With an emphasis on playing nothing as much as striking a note, Slow Music played their debut gig at The Croc in Seattle on 19th October 2005. The following year the group reconvened to play a six-date tour on the American west coast. All of these concerts are available to download via DGMLive. Because of problems with scheduling the group never came back together. In 2008 Hector Zazou passed away with The Guardian noting Zazou was “hailed as a studio enfant terrible, he was compared to the British experimental musicians/producers Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel.” Fred Chalenor died in 2016. He’d been suffering from early onset Alzheimer's disease though had continued to play bass until near the end.
