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Mojo DECEMBER 2022 - by John Bungey

ROBERT FRIPP: THE GUITAR CIRCLE

The King Crimson leader explains how playing guitar the Fripp way will change your life.

If you want practical advice on how to finger, say, an A sus 4 chord, this is not the book for you. Robert Fripp's musical wisdom, as dispensed in this doorstopper, is more esoteric: "If you know what you are going to play, play something else," or "There is only one musician, in many bodies." It's aphorisms a go-go ("Silence is not silent") as the most scholarly rocker of them all expounds on the secrets of the immersive guitar teaching and personal development courses he has run internationally since 1985. We're closer to Gurdjieff mysticism than Play In A Day, and any reader who's a "three chords and the truth" kind of axe-basher will probably lob the book at the wall on being told more than once that "Music is the cup that holds the wine of Silence." Lots of old e-mails to Guitar Craft students are reproduced, including advice not to go pro because "the life is wretched in ways that are impossible to describe". Intriguing, baffling, heartfelt, obtuse - like a good King Crimson track really.