King Crimson

King Crimson burst onto the 1969 scene armed with a “new” instrument, the mellotron, which allowed them to simulate the sound of an orchestra. Relying on this technical innovation, the band emphasized the neo-classical tendencies of Nice, Moody Blues, and Procol Harum while simultaneously absorbing the influences of psychedelic music. This gave birth to a style that was fabled, majestic, medieval, and exotic, unprecedented in its scope. Although it departed from the highly emotional format of rock and roll, the genre invented by King Crimson was still charged with emotion, more on the side of romantic “pathos” than delinquent fury. The band would go on to remain a beacon for progressive rock, particularly the jazz-rock variant, and Robert Fripp would emerge as one of the sharpest minds in rock music.

Guitarist Robert Fripp and drummer Mike Giles met in Giles Giles & Fripp, who released The Cheerful Insanity Of (Dream, 1968). The following year, they formed a quartet with bassist and vocalist Greg Lake and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who alternated between saxophone and keyboards. The “fifth” member of the band was lyricist Pete Sinfield, responsible for the grandiose and slightly grotesque texts.

In The Court Of The Crimson King (Island, 1969) remains one of the greatest masterpieces of progressive rock of all time, and the one that best represents its “romantic” current. The epitome of their romantic phase is the sublime vision/hallucination of In The Court Of The Crimson King, a suite-ballet that fuses medieval folk, Renaissance song, jazz-rock, psychedelic music, and classical symphonism in a fantastical flight of imagination.
King Crimson performed an almost alchemical synthesis of classical music, jazz, and rock (three elements well represented by the three lead instruments: mellotron, saxophone, and guitar). Magniloquence was actually a detail; the salient fact lay in their ability to merge such different traditions. The band’s technique shone in the almost delirious chromaticism of the compositions, where the instruments seemed to compete to decorate with ever-stronger colors. Fripp’s calligraphic guitar style paired magnificently with McDonald’s electronic bursts, Lake’s graceful accompaniment, and Giles’ martial pacing.
The true introduction to the band’s fairy-tale universe, however, is I Talk To The Wind, a delicate ballad accompanied by oboe and vibraphone reverberations. The first great symphonic masterpiece is Epitaph, which opens with a majestic swell of mellotron, immediately reduced to a martial and melancholic whisper; in its solemn, classical-like progression, in its apocalyptic crescendo, and in the meticulous arrangement of every sequence, the King Crimson trademark is recognizable. A meticulous timbral-rhythmic architecture, cell upon sound cell, supported their delicate folk melodies.
The masterpiece within the masterpiece was actually Moonchild, a long suite and the least linear track. Here, the gothic atmospheres of the other pieces are set in a futuristic scenario: the subdued, android-like refrain sinks into a swamp of dissonant sounds and percussive noise.
21st Century Schizoid Man seems almost out of place, as it attacks with symphonic syncopation and a distorted slogan before launching into a furious jam (with a suggestive guitar frenzy and ferocious sax bursts).

Following the first album, the band released In The Wake Of Poseydon (1970), which simply deepened the “mythological” aspect of the first album with even more grandiose sound effects. The group had also expanded to six members with the addition of two jazz musicians: Mel Collins on winds and Keith Tippett on keyboards. The result was a suggestive and baroque fresco blending surrealism and gothic, particularly in the three long suites: Pictures of a City, another neurotic jazz-rock piece in the style of 21st Century Schizoid Man; In the Wake of Poseidon, another threatening and classical-style suite in the manner of Crimson King; and The Devil's Triangle, a cryptic and depressed instrumental. The album even gave the band their most accessible single (Cat Food).

While Poseydon had simply been a repetition of the themes from the first album, Lizard (1970) instead began the progression toward an increasingly abstract and less melodic sound. Lake (who had moved on to EL&P) was replaced by Gordon Haskell, and McDonald had also left the band (he would form the Foreigner). The album was even more pretentious than the first two, and it was also plagued by convoluted, disjointed, glacial, and cerebral structures, closer to classical music and jazz than to rock and roll. Here, King Crimson are, for all intents and purposes, a chamber ensemble.
Cirkus is the least cerebral and most emotional track, but the fusion is particularly unsettling and imposing in the vast melodic fantasy of Lizard, which gives the album its title. Its first movement, Prince Rupert Awakes, signals the transition from the old pompous style to a new, subtle, and mysterious style. The second movement, The Peacock's Tale, is a sonata for piano, oboe, and trombone. The third, The Battle of Glass Tears, is an almost cacophonic nightmare.

The pulsating fragments of Moonchild had paved the way for an experimental mannerism that culminated in Formentera Lady, the tour de force of Islands (1971). Sailor's Tale (featuring one of the most famous guitar solos in prog-rock) and Islands are abstract ballads wandering aimlessly in a harmonic universe worthy of Dali’s paintings. King Crimson had become the negation of rock music, for better or worse.

Meanwhile, the lineup continued to change due to Fripp’s tyrannical character, and eventually the guitarist found himself alone. He did not miss the opportunity and refounded King Crimson on bases more jazz than rock, surrounding himself with the talents of Bill Bruford (drums, ex-Yes), John Wetton (bass, ex-Family), and David Cross (violin). The sound of Lark's Tongues In Aspic (1973), at once harsh and fluid, skewed and geometric, cerebral and violent, represents another major achievement, even though it lost all the pathos of the early King Crimson. Lark's Tongues In Aspic is one of the most exemplary suites of Fripp’s career, while Book Of Saturday and Easy Money are gag-songs among the best in the repertoire. Fripp emerged as the inventor of one of the most distinctive and influential guitar styles.

This "creative" quartet then recorded Starless And Bible Black (1974), which contains two relatively simple rock songs (The Great Deceiver and Lament), the ballad The Night Watch, and two long jams of tense and incoherent fusion, Starless And Bible Black and the perpetuum mobile of Fracture (based on the whole-tone scale).

Having lost David Cross, King Crimson were practically a trio (Fripp, Bruford, and Wetton) on Red (1974), the most original album in the direction of that violent and abrasive instrumental sound, featuring hammering nightmares like Red, fragmented deliriums like Providence, and cosmic outbursts like Starless, tracks as adventurous as they are challenging.

Compact (EG, 1986) is an anthology of King Crimson.

At this point, Fripp, either satiated or disgusted, decided to retire King Crimson and embark on a solo career. But first, he collaborated on two albums by Brian Eno, the excellent No Pussyfooting (EG, 1973) and the inferior Evening Star (EG, 1975), where he was able to unleash the avant-garde energy that had always been restrained in King Crimson. Eno developed a tape-delay system that allowed Fripp to improvise over loops created by his guitar.

After spending some years meditating (literally, in a yoga spiritual retreat) and moving to New York, Fripp decided to scale down the aspect he was most known for (his guitar style) and instead focus on a new art: deconstructing the pop song. Fripp openly criticizes the old "dinosaur" civilization of rock music (supergroups with very limited intelligence) and praises the small, independent, and intelligent mobile units of the new wave. It is no coincidence that he quickly became a guiding figure for the new wave.

His first solo album, Exposure (EG, 1979 - Panegyric, 2006), featuring vocalists such as Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall, and Pete Hammill, relies primarily on the "frippertronics" technique (based on tape loops), targeting muzak and disco music from a post-modern perspective. The concept is still rooted in Eno's tape loops, but taken so far—and across all fronts of rock consumerism—that it sometimes brushes against orchestral-like electronic string music and sometimes evokes synthesized guitar pieces.
The album is autobiographical, but what matters most is its structure: a heterogeneous mosaic of short tracks overloaded with references: the epileptic boogie of You Burn Me Up I'm A Cigarette, the pop of North Star, the paroxysmal and disjointed heavy metal of Disengage, the emphatic art-rock of You May Not Have Had Enough, the futuristic cacophony of NY3, the exotic, disoriented trance/dance of Exposure, the ambient lied of Water, and the "Barrettian" psychedelic cadence of Chicago. The quantity of "genres" mashed together in these metaphors—both serious and profoundly dry—recalls Burroughs' experiments with texts.

On God Save The Queen (EG, 1980), divided into a side of "frippertronics" and a side of "discotronics," stand out the thirteen pyrotechnic minutes of Zero Of The Signified (later retitled God Save The King), where the conception of a dance/trance combining physicality and meditation is most evident, and where the tone of his guitar finds its definitive form: a soft, sinuous, sensual, and spiritual sound increasingly resembling a synth.

The League Of Gentlemen (1981), on the other hand, is a collection of instrumental jokes and tricks for the eponymous dance band: the vaudeville-like Heptapara..., the beachy dance of Inductive Reasoning, the surreal minimalism of Dislocated, the resonant scales of HG Wells, and the overwhelming crescendo of Trap. Compared to Exposure, it is a detour: Fripp dissects music into "manners," beyond "genres," and applies his academic abstraction to them.

Let The Power Fall (EG, 1981) is a demonstration of frippertronics. The six (long) tracks are titled 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989.

After the heights of classic psychedelia, the jazz-rock binge, and the avant-garde ambitions, Fripp thus converts to the new intelligentsia of "independent" music. Philosopher, mystic, sociologist, musicologist, Fripp channels the various facets of his personality into an austere musical discipline.

Surprisingly, Fripp then resurrects the corpse of King Crimson. The new lineup features the multi-percussionist dragon Bill Bruford, the inventive psychedelic guitar of Adrian Belew, and the titanically jazzy bass of Tony Levin. The electro-funk bricolage of Discipline (WB, 1981 - Discipline, 2006) derives from the Eno-Byrne album and the New York new wave in general: cerebral dance music, minimalism, alienation, ethnic gags. The schizophrenia of the group lies in the fact that on one hand it produces accessible dance music (the usual play of melodic counterpoints and rhythmic cycles), while on the other hand it returns (mostly with instrumental tracks) to the experimental harshness of the second King Crimson (the mystical-galactic Sheltering Sky perhaps represents Fripp’s absolute peak in this direction).
The importance of the ensemble lies rather in the revolutionary techniques applied to their respective instruments. As fluid and incisive as their sounds are, they are "treated" to shift emphasis toward traditionally neglected possibilities. In this sense, Belew’s "mimic" guitar and Levin’s "percussive" bass represent the most sensational achievements. Fripp and Belew together form the most disoriented guitar duo ever to confront a rock group, a "mobile and intelligent" sarabande of animal guitars, onomatopoeic guitars, pneumatic guitars, industrial guitars, and digital guitars. The symmetry and balance achieved by this cool, collective music (far outside the usual conventions) open the door to a new concept of a rock ensemble. Frame by Frame, Thela Hun Ginjeet, Elephant Talk, Discipline are no longer rock music, even though the format remains that of rock music.

Beat (EG, 1982), a tribute to the "beat generation," also incorporates electronics and world music (Requiem), hard rock (Two Hands), and flirts with pop (Heartbeat, Neal And Jack And Me, Waiting Man), while Three Of A Perfect Pair (EG, 1983), mostly instrumental, including Lark's Tongues In Aspic Part III, concludes the trilogy of the new King Crimson. The group disbands. Frame By Frame (Caroline, 1991) is a four-CD box set that samples King Crimson's career up to 1984.

Meanwhile, Fripp experiments with two albums in collaboration with guitarist Andy Summers of the Police, I Advance Masked (A&M, 1982) and Bewitched (A&M, 1984), in a cybernetic disco-music style, entirely instrumental and pentatonic, where the synthesized phrasing of the two guitars over a metronomic rhythm gives rise to singularly schizoid ballets.

After marrying the singer Toyah Wilcox, Fripp recorded with her The Lady Or The Tiger (EG, 1986), employing 16 guitarists that he called the "leage of crafty guitarists". The couple also played with Sunday All Over The World that recorded Kneeling At The Shrine (EG, 1991).

Fripp resurrected the King Crimson moniker for the EP Vroom (Discipline, 1994) and the album Thrak (Virgin, 1995). The line-up included Levin, Belew, Brudford, guitarist Trey Gunn and drummer Pat Mastelotto. It is Belew who steals the show in the numerous pop-songs (Dinosaur, People, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, Walking On Air, One Time). The instrumentals Vroom and Thrak display the usual brainy Fripp-esque fantasy, but little of consequence.

THRaKaTTaK (1996) contains eight improvisations.

Fripp then embarked in a collaboration with David Sylvian and, again, struck gold. The First Day (Virgin, 1993) and the live Damage (1994), containing the unreleased tracks Damage and The First Day, find a magical balance between Fripp's ambient loops and Sylvian's exotic pop. The former lines up David Sylvian (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Robert Fripp (guitar, tapes), Trey Gunn (Chapman stick, an electric guitar), Jerry Marotta (drums), Marc Anderson (percussion), Ingrid Chavez (vocals) and David Bottrill (sampling, percussion, programming). Except for the eight-minute Bringing Down The Light (a new-age style meditation which is a solo Fripp composition), all the tracks are credited to the trio of Sylvian, Fripp and Gunn. God's Monkey, Jean The Birdman and Brightness Falls are intriguing interludes, but the core of the album are the lengthier jams, that embody Sylvian's and Fripp's philosophy: the 10-minute Firepower, the 12-minute 20th Century Dreaming, that bridges heavy-metal magniloquence and gothic/cosmic atmosphere, the 17-minute Darshan, one of the peaks of Fripp's post-dance aesthetic, mildly inspired by the age of acid-house and an encyclopedic compendium of his "frippertronic" techniques.

Instead of reforming King Crimson, Fripp created a String Quintet (Trey Gunn and the acoustic California Guitar Trio plus himself) to record The Bridge Between (Discipline, 1993), an all-instrumental album. Most of the tracks are covers (three from Bach), with Fripp signing only the brief Blue and the 12-minute Threnody for Souls in Torment.

1999 (Discipline, 1994) was his Metal Machine Music, a symphony of harsh tones. Recorded in Argentina, it contains four lengthy jams: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002.

Alas, in the second half of the 1990s it became not only easy but even fashionable to release frequent albums culled from mediocre material. It also became fashionable to produce soothing, droning, atmospheric soundscapes out of manipulated guitar sounds. Fripp joined the wave with a deluge of albums that offer computer-manipulated soundscapes built from live performances of guitar, digital delay and harmonizer. Having converted to new-age spirituality, Fripp's intent was to compose transcendent ambient music and musique concrete, but in practice Fripp simply ripped off his fans with less than professional releases: A Blessing Of Tears (Discipline, 1995), Radiophonics (Discipline, 1996), That Which Passes (DGM, 1996), November Suite (DGM, 1997), all of them recorded live. The one outstanding album of the time was The Gates of Paradise (DGM, 1997), that included ambient suites.

This period hopefully ended with the Jeffrey Fayman collaboration A Temple In The Clouds (Projekt, 2000).

It is debatable who is the leader of King Crimson on The ConstruKction of Light (Virgin, 2000), nominally credited to Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Trey Gunn, Pat Mastelotto. Belew's pop overflows in Into The Frying Pan and Belew's surreal vision permeates The World's My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum. Fripp's ambitions derail tracks that basically revisit King Crimson's past, such as FraKCtured and Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part IV. The ConstruKCtion of Light is the new tour de force, but does not add much to the canon. And this King Crimson album, too, was preceded and followed by a deluge of live albums, notably The ProjeKcts (DGM, 1999), a 4 cd box-set.

A far more powerful sound surfaces on The Power To Believe (Sanctuary, 2003), the most electrifying album Fripp and Belew have cut in a while. Even better is the preceding EP with the longer version of Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With.

Then came another collaboration with Brian Eno, The Equatorial Stars (Opal, 2004).

Fripp's Love Cannot Bear (DGM, 2005) was another installment in the "soundscapes series".

The Great Deceiver (Virgin, 1992) is a four-disc box-set of King Crimson live performances. Starless (2014) is a box-set of 19 CDs, two DVDs and more of live material and unreleased material.

Greg Lake died in 2016. John Wetton died in 2017.

Gordon Haskell died in 2020 after releasing the solo albums Sail In My Boat (1969), It Is And It Isn't (1971), a collaboration with John Wetton, Serve at Room Temperature (1979), Hambledon Hill (1990), It's Just a Plot to Drive You Crazy (1992), Butterfly in China (1996), All In The Scheme Of Things (2000), Look Out (2001), Harry's Bar (2002), Shadows On The Wall (2002), The Lady Wants To Know (2004), One Day Soon (2010), and The Cat Who's Got The Cream (2020).

Pete Sinfield died in 2024 at the age of 80.