Music Arcades: Robert Fripp: A Blessing of Tears (1995 Soundscapes - Volume Two

Lucy has long been a supporter of Fripp's soundscapes, so as she brought the Boy in for his bedtime bottle, she remarked how beautiful the music was. "It's rag!" chuckled the Boy. We have no idea where he got this slang from, or quite what it means. As well as a dismissive and pejorative sense of "tackiness", his use of it also conveys a deeper intent, something akin to "maya."

My own first anxiety stemmed from my inability to parse what's going on in the soundscapes: things like what elements are being looped, where the loop begins and ends, what's figure and what's ground, and whether it matters. I should have remembered Fred's advice from just a few weeks ago, and happily I was reminded of it by a comment in this Fripp diary entry, "It's incredible how the Music can touch everybody in a live context and you do not need any tools or intellectual keys to be touched."

The second anxiety comes from being unsure whether it's important to give the music close attention, or whether it's OK just to read a book and let the music do its work at a subconcsious level. Quickly though it becomes clear that both are possible, both desirable.

In fact, the best accompaniment I've discovered for listening to the CD is reading Fripp's sleeve notes. These explain that the tears in the title are shed in memoriam for the passing — and in gratitude for the life — of several women in his life, most prominently his mother. The notes are a gentle and personal reflection on dealing with life's challenges, the big ones and the small ones. This excerpt isn't typical, but it jumped out at me:

death is far more than mere inevitability: it makes a contribution to life which enables life to continue. At the completion of a life lived well, something of what has been acquired is returned to life and living things. Our contemporary culture seems to be the only culture in history which doubts that an individual consciousness, concentrated within one particular life, is an ongoigng and continuous action contained within the overall human consciousness.