Music Arcades: The Roches: The Roches

You remember my account of tracking down obscure music-related text in the University Library…? That's a rhetorical question: here it is. A bit of Googling has found me at least the periodical in which Robert Fripp's essays were published: it was Musician, Player and Listener, in assorted issues between 1980 and 1982, according to Chapter 8 of Eric Tamm's book on Fripp. I can't recall exactly how it worked, but I remember having to give one of the library staff a slip with details of the exact pages that I wanted photocopied. I imagine those photocopies are still in a box in the attic somewhere, but it'll take something more pressing than a frivolous blog post to get me dig them out.

In lieu of that, Tamm offers an account of one particular Fripp piece :

In "Moving Off Center: New Concepts in Stereo Mixing," Fripp offered a capsule history of the recording of rock music, noting various unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of where to put each instrument in the left-to-right aural field opened up with the development of stereo. To Fripp's way of thinking, among the more flagrant abuses of stereo were "flying tom-toms and giant drum kits straddling the stereo, conform[ing] to no performance reality" whatsoever. His personal solution, exemplified in The Zero of the Signified, was to place the rhythm section smack in the middle, effectively in mono, with the solo guitar and Frippertronics around it. In this column Fripp also discussed the approach behind his production of the Roches' first album.

Ergo my acquisition, from Their Price for £3.49, of The Roches, produced in "audio verité" by Robert Fripp. In this interview, Robert elaborates, "there's two senses to audio verite: the first is that it's a commitment to discover whatever the essence of the artists might be and try and express it on record; and this is done in the second sense of the term by, as far as possible, not interfering with the performance by equalization, limiting and so on."

With all that discourse as a preamble, I was expecting something more radical than what we get, which is a pleasant enough collection of songs, kooky folk rather than freak folk. The three Roche sisters seem to have fallen into the orbit of the Talking Heads/Eno/Fripp/Blondie(?)/Television(??) Downtown NYC scene, yet emerged relatively unscathed. Their three genetically-linked voices take centre stage, and everything else, even the off-beat humour, and, yes, the verité mix is secondary. There are no drums so the issue of them straddling the stereo is moot/mute. Occasionally you get the lead vocal in the left channel, while the guitar and harmony vocals are right of centre, but I find I have to pay close attention to notice.

Thirty years on, what became of audio verité? Aside from his own solo and band albums, Robert Fripp's career as a producer was short, running from Sacred Songs and this album in 1979 to The Roches' third album in 1982. All of them have Tony Levin playing bass. It looks like this line of work went on the backburner once Fripp and Levin had re-ignited King Crimson, and never got revived.