King Crimson - Radical Action to unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind

[Botch]

"We Shall Rebuild" - Anonymous, possibly after Katrina



Know what it feels like to have an invisible hand grip your brainstem, and give it a good jerk?

I do. Three times now.
It was, I think, 1979 or so, when a band called King Crimson came onto some network's answer to Saturday Night Live, on a Friday. My jaw hit the floor, and at 9:03 the next morning I walked out of the record shop with KC's Discipline, on vinyl. My folks hated me by the end of the weekend.

What was that "guitar neck", with ten strings, that the bald guy was fretting but not strumming?? What the HELL was that pretty boy doing to HIS guitar? And the smiling guy, sitting down, was playing incredible stuff on his guitar, not riffing at all. To this day, one of the biggest awakenings I've ever had.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and Fripp had changed KC from the Belew/Fripp/Levin/Bruford quartet, to a double-trio format: two guitarists, two bass/Sticks, and two drummers. A flood of more interesting music.

Amazon warned me that Radical Action was coming, and I've had it on pre-order awhile now. The Man In The Brown Shorts brought it tonight: 3 separate concerts on 3 CDs, and a 5.1 Bluray concert I'm watching now. Done in a "tri-chromatic" style (mostly multi-level purples, performers in yellow, and the drum toms (and ONLY the toms) in brilliant blue. Weird). KC has done concerts in weird colors before, it's okay but I'd prefer more true pics.

Band hits the stage. THREE drumsets, center-stage! Behind them, left-to-right, a full-time reed guy (yay! not since Starless and Bible-Black), Levin on Stick/bass, the new vocalist/guitarist (excellent guitarist, vocals sound more like the first KC vocalist John Wetton rather than Belew, has a lot of "J"s in his name) and finally Fripp on guitar and three tall racks of electronic effects. First tune, the flute player quotes Baby Elephant Walk, (Mancini?), hah!

Bluray sounds excellent! Good mix of new material and old classics. I'm anxious to read Fripp's comments on drummers; he was notoriously hard on Bruford, constantly asking him to play less, and now he has three of them pounding away!

This new band is definitely a huge change. I'll have more to post after hearing the 3 concerts on CD. I thought Fripp had run his course (many of the recent KC releases were called pRoJekts, and featured various combos of the previous bands, many (all?) of which didn't involve Fripp.
He's not done. Not yet. Nor has his well run dry. Wow.

Here's a clip of one of the new songs, played live in Japan (not from the bluray):

Confusion, will be my Epitaph.

 

[Flint]

Nice...

I love how Tony Levin created a look, or "visual brand", as a thin, lanky, bald bass player with a thick moustache in the late 1970s and has looked essentially the same ever since. Whenever you see him on a stage, there is no denying who he is. So, even though he is mostly just a session guy, people buy records merely because he is on them because they see what he has done with so many people, KC, Yes, Peter Gabriel, etc., and they know at least the bass work will be amazing.

I also recall Fripp pushing the limits of technology long after most musicians of his generation has settled into playing covers of their old music to make a living. If you recall, KC's "Thrak" DVD attempted to use all the channels of the discrete surround sound to place an instrument and you could use the "change angles" feature of the DVD tech to see what you wanted from the various cameras used. It was a bold attempt at maximizing the new technology, even though it didn't work all that well. It was the impetus for my conviction that all the speakers in a surround sound setup should sound as identical as possible - something which was reinforced more and more as I researched it.

Fripp also created the system sounds for one of the big releases of Windows, I think it was Vista. Prior to that Brian Eno (a former collaborator with Fripp) has done the sounds.

Crazy stuff.

I am eager to get this new album.

 

[Deleted member 133]

Coincidence: I'm in the process of acquiring Blu-ray Audio copies of KC's "Thrak" and "Starless."