This for me is Fripp at his most hardcore. Unlike its sibling God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners, there is no relief from the looped beeps and drones. It's the first time that his signature spiritual-metaphysics-cum-commercial-etiquette becomes unavoidable — the manifesto and creed on the back of the record sit alongside dates for Fripp's 1979 tour of "restaurants, record shops, offices, canteens, museums, clubs, cinemas and TV studios" — and the music, at the time, was unlike anything else (including his mate, Brian Eno's contemporary ambient releases).
With time and a growing catalogue of these "soundscapes", Fripp has created a context that makes Let the Power Fall sound less extraordinary. Still, these relatively low-tech experiments in looping, with their glitchy collisions of tones and sudden pauses, manage to evoke a digital aesthetic, while, as mentioned previously, the sound became smoother and more "analogue" with the availability of complex digital gear.
In the early 1980s, while the music remained largely impenetrable, the manifesto about quantitative and qualitative action, structure and change was beguiling in that it felt only just beyond reach. An excerpt from the full version available (with added spelling mistakes) here:
III
- Qualitive action is not bound by number
- Any small unit committed to qualitative action can affect radical change on a scale outside its quantitative measure
- Quantative action works by violence and breeds reaction
- Qualitative action works works by example and invites reciprocation
- Reciprocation between independent structures is a framework of interacting units which is itself a structure
The themes of these descriptions/prescriptions continue right up to the present day: see Fripp's recent presentation on heroes. The language hints at consistent and rigorously thought-out schemas, but my experience in reflecting on them over the years is that more is less. Taken in small doses, they are helpfully suggestive. But if you want to discern the grander structure behind the gnomic pronouncements, first, you're going to need to invest a lot of time, and, second, you're either going to be disappointed by what you find or you're going to "go native" with a new terminology in a new language-game that's incommensurable with the way you used to think and talk about your life. When this blends into the kind of gnosticism that makes a virtue of being esoteric, I start to get twitchy.
I should know better than to indulge in analysis of the artists. Nevertheless… my own conclusion is that Fripp is blessed/cursed with an iron-willed self-discipline that would make the most ascetic monk look lily-livered. His aim at age eleven was to be the world's best guitarist and he locked himself away practising his instrument for years and years and years, refusing to be deflected by awkward realisations such as others having more natural talent than him (he says he was tone deaf with no sense of rhythm when he started). He has the kind of decision-making muscle that enables, or forces, him to commit totally to a chosen path — whether in his career or in his marriage — and then to be free forever of the doubt that all the rest of us experience… that we might have been wrong. Even when he's wrong, and he knows he's wrong, he doesn't waste energy fretting about it (the pun was an accident). Mind you, he does like cakes a lot.
I think a lot of Fripp's writings are a post-hoc justification for the way he is in the world. The teachings that he devours articulate things that he has always felt inuitively. There is nothing wrong about any of this: we all justify ourselves by presenting what we are as if it were what we should be; we all seek scaffolding to support what we feel to be true. But if you don't already have a praeternatural self-discipline, reading Fripp's manifestos isn't going to get you one.
I reckon I have an above-average self-discipline, and submit 1,705 daily blog posts as evidence in support of this claim, but I'm a couple of leagues below the guy who made this album.
"Now," as Fripp writes at the end of his sleeve note, "forget all this."
![]() Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm |
Comments