Embedded Files
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
When music appears which only King Crimson can play, then, sooner or later, King Crimson appears to play the music.
When music appears which only King Crimson can play, then, sooner or later, King Crimson appears to play the music.
Music is the cup that holds the cup of silence, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.
Music is the cup that holds the cup of silence, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.
Larks' Tongues of Aspic (1973)
Larks' Tongues of Aspic (1973)
4. Easy Money (Lyrics)
4. Easy Money (Lyrics)
Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
In the heat from your physique
As you twinkle by in moccasin sneakers
And I thought my heart would break
When you doubled up the stake
With your fingers all a-shake
You could never tell a winner from a snake
Easy money
With your figure and your face
Strutting out at every race
Throw a glass around the place
Show the colour of your crimson suspenders
We could take the money home
Sit around the family throne
My old dog could chew his bone
For two weeks we could appease the Almighty
Easy money
Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
In the heat from your physique
As you twinkle by in moccasin sneakers
Got no truck with the la-di-da
Keep my bread in an old fruit jar
Drive you out in a motor-car
Getting fat on your lucky star
Just making easy money
Red (1974)
Red (1974)
5. Starless (Lyrics)
5. Starless (Lyrics)
Sundown dazzling day
Gold through my eyes
But my eyes turned within
Only see
Starless and bible black
Old friend charity
Cruel twisted smile
And the smile signals emptiness
For me
Starless and bible black
Ice blue silver sky
Fades into grey
To a grey hope that oh years to be
Starless and bible black
Thrak (1995)
Thrak (1995)
10. One Time (Lyrics)
10. One Time (Lyrics)
One eye goes laughing,
one eye goes crying
through the trials and trying of one life
one hand is tied,
one step gets behind
in one breath we're dying
I've been waiting for the sun to come up
waiting for the showers to stop
waiting for the penny to drop
one time
and I've been standing in a cloud of plans
standing on the shifting sands
hoping for an open hand
one time
Re-mixed by Steven Wilson
Re-mixed by Steven Wilson
The reworking of King Crimson's back catalogue was a real labour of love for me. These are albums I grew up listening to, and their influence on my teenage self still forms a large part of my musical DNA. So to be able to actually go inside the music and hear how it was all put together was both an honour and an instruction. What made it even more enlightening was to have Robert Fripp in the room while I was doing it, recounting (mostly unrepeatable!) anecdotes about the recording process and the people who played on the records. Some of these memories still made it painful for him to hear the music, and often at the end of a session both of us left my small studio drained - he from reliving the music and the struggles involved in creating it, and me from wanting to do the legacy justice.
The job at hand was to create 5.1 surround sound mixes, make new stereo mixes where appropriate, and to mix any out-takes and unreleased material I found on the reels.
The first stage was to have the tapes transferred to digital files by a professional tape archiving company, then to recreate the stereo mixes as closely as possible. Being so familiar with the originals, I aimed to be as faithful as I could, so if you hear deviation from the original stereo mix it's probably because Robert didn't like it the way it was and took the opportunity to change it. The tapes were in various degrees of (dis)organization (and as I write some tapes are still completely missing for In the Wake of Poseidon, and Starless and Bible Black). The 80s albums were carefully recorded, compiled, and annotated, but for many of the earlier albums there were many reels of tracking sessions and alternate takes, so the trick was to find the version used, or which parts of which versions were used. Sometimes a track would be made up of small parts of different takes edited together, as with the title track of Lark’s Tongues In Aspic, which was recorded in about 10 short sections, with multiple takes of each.
For personal reasons one of the very first albums I wanted to revamp was Lizard, which is the one album in the catalogue that tends to divide the fans between those that love it and those that find it almost unlistenable. I’m one of those that adore it, and could make a pretty good case for it being one of the most adventurous rock albums ever made. But I also knew it could work better in 5.1, as it’s almost as if there is too much information bursting out of the tracks to be contained in mere stereo. This is not the case in surround sound, where everything has the space to breathe, and the genius of Lizard’s progressive avant-garde jazz rock experiment finally blossoms in all its glorious folly.
Although originally not part of the plan it become apparent that some of the albums could also be made to sound sonically better in stereo as a result of that tape transfer and remix too, and Lizard was definitely one of those. The debut album In the Court of the Crimson King also benefited from us being able to go back to the original multitrack slave reels – in those days the band were using 8 track recording, and so every time the 8 channels were filled up (say with drums, bass and guitars) it was necessary to bounce it down to a one or two tracks of a second tape in order to keep overdubbing the multiple mellotrons, or vocals. Sometimes this would happen 2 or 3 times before a track was ready to mix, so the instruments recorded first had by then become second or third generation copies, with all the problems that brings (tape hiss, reduced frequency range...etc..). We were able to go back to the very first session tracking tapes and synchronise them with the overdub reels, so for the first time in the new mixes of the In the Court every instrument heard is first generation.
We also found several fascinating out-takes and alternate versions which had never been mixed down before – most of these will appear as bonus tracks on the new editions, which will all be CD/DVD combinations (the DVDs will contain any available archive video forage from the appropriate era, as well as the 5.1 mixes and high resolution stereo).
What impressed me (among many things) about the way these albums were made was the economy of overdubbing - these days I'm used to mixing records where there might be guitars tracked 4 or 5 times, drums split out over 20 channels...etc... But often with King Crimson albums you are hearing what is essentially a live band in the studio, with little or no overdubbing. And yet even with only a guitar, bass, drums line up they still sounded huge. It’s a recording art that has been partly lost in the age of computer recording, where there is no limit to the amount of times that you can layer instruments to make them sound heavier. But sometimes it’s heavier without all the overdubbing – check out the new power trio mix of the title track of Red if you don’t believe me!
Bennett and Gurdjieff
Bennett and Gurdjieff
Spirituality is not identical with religion. The artist, who looks for a quality in his art that this world cannot give, is a spiritual man even if he denies religion. Bennett, A Spiritual Psychology 9
In 1974, Robert Fripp—leader of the progressive rock group King Crimson—had a spiritual experience in which “the top of [his] head blew off.” He became a student of J. G. Bennett, himself a former student of G. I. Gurdjieff, at Sherborne House in Gloucestershire, and remains a member of the Bennett Foundation to this day. When Fripp returned to the music industry, it was with an approach that favored disciplined and geometric compositions over the jagged improvisation of the earlier period.
Work
Work
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a Greek-Armenian teacher and author, and one of a number of “Eastern Guru” figures who emerged in the latter years of the nineteenth century.3 Claiming to have been initiated by a number of mysterious adepts in remote parts of Asia, he offered a confusingly complex, incomplete and ever-changing set of teachings which he described as a synthesis of the three traditional methods towards enlightenment. These traditional methods were described by Gurdjieff as those of the Yogi (based on practices of the control of the mind), the Monk (control of the emotions) and the Fakir (control of the body). His teachings purported to present a fourth route which harmonized each of these areas of control, and indeed, the Fourth Way is often used to denote the whole of his teachings (Blake 239). Alternatively, it is referred to as “the Work.”
The Old World was Dead.
The Old World was Dead.
The old world was dead. How could I be part of the new one? That was my problem. It was a very fast flash that kept on reverberating for three days and put me out of phase for nearly three months. Recording Red was very painful for me.
For Fripp, the trigger was reading the text of Bennett’s “Second Inaugural Lecture,” given at Sherbourne House in 1972:
Discipline
Discipline
The title Discipline invokes the idea of the Work, and particularly of the ideal of creating in oneself, through disciplined practice, conditions to allow music to “come through,” as it were. Moreover, the pieces are deliberately difficult to perform, and on tracks such as Frame by Frame or Discipline, Fripp plays a constant ostinato of semiquavers, showing remarkable stamina and concentration. Inasmuch as he shuns any obviously “showy” playing, and instead plays in a subtle but incredibly demanding style, we might even say that Fripp’s performances are deliberate suffering. Furthermore, Fripp’s insistence on eschewing conventional recording techniques are a realization of “the terror of the situation.” This has been echoed in live performances, where the audience is urged (sometimes forcefully) to become part of the situation, rather than a passive observer of the spectacle, through the banning of photography or his Frippertronics performances in unconventional venues such as museums and bookshops. As such, Fripp sees musical performance—live or in the studio—as “not the creation of subservience by the techniques of dominance but rather as an expression of mutual responsibility on the part of the band and audience for the musical potential available in any event”.
Guitar Craft
Guitar Craft
So despite the emphasis on guitar lessons, the aim is not so much to produce players, but a particular type of attention, as Eric Tamm notes. In Fripp’s own words, a guitar technique that is a “way of life. More akin to yoga than formal guitar technique, actually an approach to living”. More poetically, he writes, “In tuning a note, we are tuning ourselves” (Fripp, Guitar Craft).
The Work was taught to his students in a number of situations, most famously perhaps being the Prieuré in Fontainebleau where Gurdjieff ran the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man from 1922–1924 (officially, although unofficially teaching continued until 1932). Here, resident students were taught a series of “sacred dances” called the Movements, received lectures on cos- mology, as well as carrying out housework, building projects and other mun- dane practical work. Tamm neatly outlines the various aspects of The Work as carried out by Gurdjieff ’s groups: Relaxation, Movements, Division of Attention, Co-ordination of the ‘Centers’ (moving, thinking and emotional), Abstract Symbolism, and Conditions (that is, that the role of the teacher was to create conditions in which the student could grow for themselves). We will return to these categories later. Gurdjieff was apparently attempting to have the students develop each of their centers in parallel, to produce “harmonious development.” At the same time, however, he was putting students into deliberately difficult situations in order to create the necessary conditions for work upon oneself, although it seems that his magisterial, mercurial, and manipulative personal character may well have produced such situations regardless.
Guitar Craft courses are clearly modelled on Bennett’s Sherborne, itself modelled upon Gurdjieff’s Priory. Participants undertake housework on top of their musical activities, as well as relaxation exercises, movements and public performance. Meals are communal, and vegetarian, drugs and tobacco forbidden, and students are not permitted to leave the grounds during the seminar. There are lectures and discussions and manual work, and sleep deprivation is also a feature. Fripp even attempted to establish a residential school, along the lines of the Prieuré, purchasing Red Lion House in Cranborne, Dorset. From 1986 to 1989 it was open to Crafty Guitarists to become residents and develop their practice long-term, for a share of expenses and a contribution to the upkeep. However, a neighbor protested having a music school established, and Fripp put the building up for sale.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse