Biography
Composer and arranger Paul Frith built a wide-ranging career that encompasses contributions to releases by the xx and Radiohead along with numerous documentary scores, yet his closest and most sustained partnership has been with the indie folk ensemble Bear's Den. That association began with the group's debut album, Islands, issued in 2014, and continued through the follow-up records Red Earth & Pouring Rain in 2016 and So That You Might Hear Me in 2019. Between those projects he composed the 2015 album Iskra for Iskra String Quartet, scored the 2017 BBC Horizon documentary Antarctica: Ice Station Rescue, and contributed to the xx's I See You that same year. In 2018 he presented a one-off concert that stripped Bear's Den material down for classical piano and strings; the band responded by inviting him back into the studio to develop the arrangements further, resulting in the full collection of reimagined tracks released as Fragments in 2020. Earlier that year he had also worked with Dan Croll on the album Grand Plan.