Isn't it a neat little coincidence, this cover picture of the Triffid Nebula appearing immediately below the unspecified constellation on the cover of Model 500's Deep Space? OK, please yourself.
As with yesterday's album, I got Islands for my birthday earlier this month, and includes a second disc — this time it's not blu-ray, but 5.1 surround sound on DVD — for audiophiles that I can't play. (Lord knows when, if ever, they're going to make a single player that will enable me to hear them all.)
But there the similarities end. I guess I need to preface this by saying that I'm not a hi-fi nerd, great music can sound great on AM radio, and some of my most moving experiences of music have come about when hearing it through the muffle of a car door on a busy street. I said I was a little disappointed by the experience of listening to A Treasure. Islands blew me away. I've only listened to the original album on CD, none of the bonus tracks, the Lossless 5.1 Surround, MLP Lossless Stereo (24/96) or PCM Stereo 2.0 (24/48) (!), but event the poor relation sounds quite astonishing.
Unlike the other albums I've got in Crimson's "40th Anniversary" reissue series, In the Court… and Red — I'd never heard Islands before. To be honest, I wasn't expecting a great deal of the music since the one song I do know well, Ladies of the Road from The Young Person's Guide, is one of my least favourite Crimson songs. But the Freak Zone played a few others from the album late last year, and they sounded OK coming out of the radio. They sound amazing coming out of my hi-fi. Recorded 40 years ago in a hurry, in a studio that by all accounts was not the top of the range, but every sound has a rich grain to it. A quick search suggests that I've only used the word "awesome" unironically twice in 2,032 posts on this site, so I'm going to push the boat out and use it a third time for Islands.
To quote one of Robert Fripp's maxims, "Any small unit committed to qualitative action can affect radical change on a scale outside its quantitative measure". These King Crimson reissues are of such quality I can imagine myself keeping on lapping them up long after I've given up on other CDs (which I hope I now have). Larks Tongues in Aspic in surround sound? That's going to blow my socks off.
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