One Bad M.F. Live!!

One Bad M.F. Live!! captures a concert given at the Centro Cultural in Mexico City on 14 April 2018. Fourteen tracks run for about eighty-two minutes, drawn from the music Marty Friedman has written under his own name. Phrases assembled with great care on the studio records arrive here as playing happening in front of you. His trademarks — the timing that makes the guitar sing, the breath between one tone and the next — are sharpened rather than softened by an audience reacting in real time. On the two medleys the construction itself becomes the attraction, one short fragment handed straight to the next. Friedman produced it; it was mixed at Power House Studios in Tokyo and mastered at Victor Studios, also in Tokyo. The heat of the stage and the clarity of a record finished in Japan sit side by side on the same disc.