Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Prog DECEMBER 2021 - by Nick Holmes

ROBERT FRIPP / KING CRIMSON: MUSIC FOR QUIET MOMENTS / MUSIC IS OUR FRIEND

Two of the many sides of Mr Fripp.

Robert Fripp's approach to lockdown was partly to join his wife in their amusing Toyah And Robert's Sunday Lunch, which became a YouTube sensation. But he also used the pandemic as an opportunity to feed the soul via weekly episodes of Music For Quiet Moments on YouTube. These ambient soundscapes were recorded live between 2004 and 2009, as part of shows with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai and Porcupine Tree as well as at festivals and in churches.

They're now collected into a handsome eight-CD box set with a 58-page booklet. Building on his work with Brian Eno and Frippertronics, which used tape recorders to build up loops, Fripp used digital delays and effects to create mesmerising, slowly evolving, shimmering, quietly ecstatic soundscapes that transport the listener into other worlds. Many tracks start with low, cello-like drones and classical strings and King Crimson-style virtuosic guitar soloing is kept to a minimum.

Some tracks sound uncannily like early Tangerine Dream (Horizon). Others use bell-like, celestial sounds, sometimes like meditative bells from an ancient temple (A Move Inside), sometimes bursting into joy (A Full Heart). Time stands still on the epic version of Elegy that fills disc seven, using a simple repeated motif that can create a trance-like state beyond linear time.

As soon as lockdown eased, King Crimson themselves began their rescheduled North American tour in July. In keeping with the intimate mood of Music For Quiet Moments, the end of the second CD of the new live official bootleg Music Is Our Friend was recorded at a small "family and friends" gig at the Egg in Albany, and includes two intimate minimalist guitar pieces (Discipline and Lark's Tongue II) as well as an achingly gorgeous version of Islands. The rest of the tracks come from the last date on the North American tour in Washington.

Over a gentle soundscape intro, Fripp promises "fireballs of rock fury" and reminds us that "music remains hope for us all." What follows is stunning. The band are on urgently virtuosic form, almost teasing the audience with the level of their playing, always threatening to go over the edge of a cliff but somehow remaining incredibly tight, viscerally exciting and emotional in the final song Starless. The encore is a blistering version of 21st Century Schizoid Man, with passionately raw vocals, a terrifying guitar solo, an amazing solo by the three drummers and an anthemic return to the main theme of a track that was the first song the band played in North America fifty-two years earlier.