It's challenging when Music Arcades throws two boxed sets at me in as many days. Unlike yesterday's example, this was a very whimsical purchase, prompted by a DGM Live emailing almost exactly a year ago, saying they had found "a handful of additional Soundscapes Box Sets… packaged in a free box with stunning John Miller artwork." I guess if I'd read that closely I might have realised that I was paying a premium price (don't ask about the shipping costs from the US!) for the benefit of getting three CDs — effectively two since I already had one of them — plus a small bit of cardboard with a picture on it. A very nice picture, true.
But once you've clicked that button, time to put those concerns behind you. The karma balanced out, anyway, when I won an additional soundscapes CD for free.
You may say these soundscapes all sound the same. To which I might reply (possibly not for the first time) by quoting John Cage,
If you think something is boring, try doing it for two minutes. If you still think it's boring, try it for four. If you still think it's boring, try it for eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, and so on and so forth. Soon enough you'll find that it's really not boring at all.
Certainly when you listen to two and a half hours, you feel the changes in moods. There is calm in there, for sure, but also — explicitly, as Fripp mentions his mother's death at length in two of the CDs' notes — mourning and loss, plus, it sounds to me, moments of terror and staring into/over the abyss — though with titles like On the Approach of Doubt and The Leap on Volume 3, I guess I'm just stating the obvious. The only reason the music sounds similar, is because no one else makes similar sounds. (The soundscapes are all made with digital loops, the generation of technology that followed the analogue tape loops on (No Pussyfooting) and Evening Star.)
Allow me one more aside, following on from yesterday's comments about researching Laurie Anderson's references. When Bill Bruford joined Fripp to reform King Crimson and make Discipline, he records,"I wasn't given a set-list when I joined the band, more a reading list. Ouspensky, JG Bennett, Gurdjieff and Castaneda." Yes, I tried my hand at JG Bennett, too, a couple of years ago, getting the books imported from New Mexico. Can't say I got very far. Yet.
MusicBrainz entry for Vol 1 (Radiophonics)
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