Exposures exposed

exposures1.jpg

This colossal collection turned up yesterday. I’m still working my way through its contents: 25 CDs, 3 DVDs and 4 blu-rays; the CDs all run for at least 70 minutes each so these alone provide about 30 hours of music. The box covers three phases of Robert Fripp’s “Drive to 1981”: his debut solo album, Exposure; his Frippertronics guitar recordings, both live and in the studio; and his short-lived New-Wave dance band The League Of Gentleman. All cult stuff in this house, obviously, you don’t buy 32 discs on a whim.

exposures2.jpg

The original vinyl. Looks like I’ll have to hold on to my LoG album (see below).

Exposure is present here in multiple versions which might seem like overkill but it’s an unusual album that was compromised from the outset by record company interference. Fripp’s original intention in 1977 was for it to be released simultaneously with two connected albums, the others being Peter Gabriel II and Sacred Songs by Daryl Hall; songs from Exposure appear in different versions on the other albums, Gabriel and Hall both sing on Exposure, and Fripp produces all three works. The problem with this ambitious scheme is that Daryl Hall was subject to greater commercial pressure from his record company than were Fripp or Gabriel; RCA not only shelved the “uncommercial” Sacred Songs for three years but they also refused to let Hall sing on all the songs Fripp had planned with him for Exposure. Record company refusals also put a stop to a planned version of I Feel Love which would have been sung by Debbie Harry. In order to rescue the album several of the Hall songs were redone with new lyrics and new performances by Terre Roche and Peter Hammill, all of which has led to the contents of the album being fluid enough to sustain the various mixes which Fripp calls “Editions”. On this new set you get early drafts with extended mixes of the Frippertronic sequences, all the alternate takes including Daryl Hall’s original vocals, and a new “Fourth Edition” mixed by Steven Wilson which was much better than I expected. Wilson has had a parallel career in recent years remixing many well-known albums from the 1970s, not always to their benefit. I’ve been listening to this album for over 40 years yet the new mix contains things I’d never heard before, as well as being heavier and punchier than it’s sounded in the past.

exposures3.jpg

Frippertronics explained.

But the real highlight for me here is all the Frippertronics material. I’ve always liked this period of Fripp’s career which was essentially a guitar-driven equivalent of Brian Eno’s ambient music, developing the process begun on the (No Pussyfooting) and Evening Star albums. Or it was in its “pure” form… “Applied Frippertronics” was the term given to the familiar Revox-looped guitar tones when used as a backing for disco-inspired instrumentals, and even a rather plodding and eccentric song, Under Heavy Manners, sung by David Byrne. In addition to copious recordings of pure Frippertronics there are also more of the applied variety in this set than I ever expected to hear.

There’s no point attempting a proper review of all this material, I’ll leave that to others. But there are a few surprising omissions worth noting. The original release of the self-titled League Of Gentleman album was framed by about 6 minutes of tape collage, Indiscreet I, II & III, made from Fripp’s recordings of friends and colleagues. These vanished from the cut-down CD release of the album in 1985, and they haven’t returned here. Also absent are similar taped moments that were mixed into the original versions of Cognitive Dissonance, HG Wells and Trap plus three shorter tracks, Pareto Optimum I, Pareto Optimum II and Ochre, all of which were tape-loop pieces with an organ as the instrument. I bought the League Of Gentleman album when it was released so it feels incomplete without the shorter musical pieces and the “indiscretions”. The omission of the latter is thrown into further relief by the proximity of Exposure which contains similar taped voices (Brian Eno, Fripp’s mother, the ubiquitous JG Bennett) scattered between the songs, yet all of these have been present in every release of the album. Worst of all, since it’s always been a favourite song, is the absence of Danielle Dax’s vocal from the new mix of Minor Man. The original sounds like this.

ltpf.jpg

Another omission is this list of principles which appeared on the back of the Let The Power Fall album and also on a postcard inside the album. It’s not really essential to appreciation of the music but it was a statement of Fripp’s philosophy in the late 1970s, and his concern with being a “small, mobile, intelligent unit” working in opposition to those he termed “dinosaurs”, ie: the big record companies like RCA who were often working against the best interests of their artists. The booklet inside the Exposures box reproduces all the artwork from the original albums plus the artist photos that appeared as postcards with some of the releases but not this item. Even if Fripp no longer agrees with its sentiments it would at least seem historically relevant.

I think I’m done now with the big DGM boxes, and yet… If there was another one collecting all the studio and live recordings that Fripp recorded with David Sylvian in the 1990s I’d be tempted. The First Day album is one I like more than most of the King Crimson music from the same period, and the pair happened to play a version of Exposure (the song) on their tour. There’s at least one high-quality bootleg from that tour in existence, plus odd tracks that only appeared on EPs, so who knows what else might be in the archives. How about it, Mr Fripp?

Further reading/viewing:
Exposure promo video
Exposures contents list
The Exposure pages at Elephant Talk
Robert Fripp interviewed in Synapse magazine, 1979 [PDF]

Weekend links 620

varo

Premonition (1953) by Remedios Varo.

• “Classical mythology, Arcadian idylls, occult speculation, and an interest in cultural curiosities coexisted in the grotto, allowing for the playful exploration of a new tension emerging between Nature and Artifice.” Laura Tradii explores the artificial grottoes of the Renaissance and beyond.

• “Some of the symbols and signs seem like bridges to nowhere, and perhaps Nabokov was lovingly teasing our endless quest to find patterns and generate meaning.” David M. Rubin on writing a response to a Nabokov short story.

• New music: “KMRU & Aho Ssan erupt in post-apocalyptic extremity with Resurgence“. I did the layout for this latest release on the Subtext label but I still haven’t got round to updating my web pages so you’ll have to take my word for it.

• Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus “unleashes a level of eroticism that’s surprising for 1940s British cinema,” says Adam Scovell.

• “Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time.” Fiona Sturges reviews The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight.

• Between Hell and Paradise: paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and his followers at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

• At The Collector: Olivia Barrett on the Voodoo Queens of New Orleans.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Astronef Super.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 118 by Pan American.

TMP-01 Vintage Synth TV Series from Benge.

• Vale, A Year In The Country.

Premonition (1979) by Simple Minds | Premonition (1980) by Cabaret Voltaire | Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel) (1987) by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay

Weekend links 605

ufo.jpg

UFO Mk2 (1967), a poster for the UFO club by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English & Nigel Waymouth).

• Link of the week without a doubt is Yuka Fujii’s raw video footage of the sessions for David Sylvian’s solo debut, Brilliant Trees, which includes appearances by Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Czukay’s contribution to this and other albums in the 1980s included the use of a second-hand IBM Dictaphone, a machine which was often credited on album sleeves but seldom discussed in interviews beyond Czukay’s claims that it was a superior sound-sampling tool. You can see the mysterious “instrument” in this film and discover (at last!) more about the machine here. Big thanks to Colin for the tip!

• “Part of what makes watching it so compelling now is Berger’s fascinated immersion in the culture of images itself.” Olivia Laing on 50 years of Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

• At The Wire: David Toop on what happens when the performance of music is extended over long durations, from all night concerts to sacred rituals that last for weeks.

• At Bandcamp: Tony Rettman profiles Audion magazine and its editors, indefatigable Krautrock experts Alan & Steve Freeman.

• New music: W by Boris, a remix of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science by Arca, and a cover of King Crimson’s Red by Hedvig Mollestad.

• The latest exploration of psychedelic graphics by DJ Food is a collection of posters for London’s UFO Club.

• Wolf Moon: Nina MacLaughlin has some questions for our ancient satellite.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Frank’s Box: The Real Telephone to the Dead.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 731 by Anthea.

• At Strange Flowers: 22 books for 2022.

UFO (1970) by Guru Guru | UFO Over Paris (1978) by Steve Hillage | El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder

Weekend links 554

yokoo.jpg

Tadanori Yokoo Emphasizes Deliberate Misalignment in Contemporary Woodblock Series.

• Another week, another Paris Review essay on Leonora Carrington. This time it’s Olga Tokarczuk exploring eccentricity as feminism. At the same publication there’s more eccentricity in Lucy Scholes‘ feature about the neglected novels of Irene Handl, a woman best known for the characters she played in many British films and TV dramas. I’ve long been curious about Handl’s writing career so this was good to see.

• “The denial of our participation in the world, [Fisher] implies—the disavowal of our desire for iPhones even as we diligently think anti-capitalist thoughts—is incapacitating. It leads to a regressive utopianism that cannot envision going through capitalism, but only retreating or escaping from it, into a primitive past or fictional future.” Lola Seaton on the ghosts of Mark Fisher.

• More ghosts: Paranormal is the latest collection of spooky, atmospheric electronica from Grey Frequency, “an audio document exploring extraordinary phenomena which have challenged orthodox science, but which have also grown and evolved as part of contemporary culture and a wider folkloric landscape.”

• “Items billed as THE BEST EVER can stop us cold, and even cause us to take them for granted, never reassessing them, as we instead gesture, often without thought, to where they sit in the corner, under a halo and backdrop of blue ribbons.” Colin Fleming on Miles Davis and Kind Of Blue.

• “Diaboliques and Psycho both achieve something very rare: a perfect plot twist but an unspoilable movie,” says Milan Terlunen.

• Richard Kirk returns once more as “Cabaret Voltaire” with a new recording, Billion Dollar.

• Even more Leonora Carrington: some of the cards from her Tarot deck.

DJ Food on Zodiac Posters by Simboli Design, 1969.

Kodak Ghosts (1970) by Michael Chapman | Plight (The Spiralling Of Winter Ghosts) (1988) by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay | The Ghosts Of Animals (1995) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 443

gorey.jpg

• Yet more Gorey: Mark Dery’s biography of the artist prompted The New Yorker to unearth a piece of cover art that Edward Gorey submitted 25 years ago. In the same magazine Joan Acocella reviews Dery’s book and examines Gorey’s life and art. At Expanding Mind, Erik Davis talks with Mark Dery about Surrealism, the gay voice, Penny Dreadfuls, and the occult and Taoist influences in Gorey’s work.

Moving Through Old Daylight: Mark Fisher, Jim Jupp & Julian House of Ghost Box Recordings, and Iain Sinclair in conversation at the Roundhouse, Camden, London, 5 June 2010. Topics under discussion included Nigel Kneale, TC Lethbridge, John Foxx, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, alchemies of sound, the homogenisation of culture, imagining space and the impersistence of memory.

• “A radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos, reinventing the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar.” The Space Oracle by Ken Hollings.

There was a deliberate, almost prickly quality to Fisher’s writing and thinking that is rare nowadays, when criticism is more likely to involve open-minded rationalizing than steadfast refusal. He was not one to frolic in ambiguity or irony. “Just because something is current doesn’t mean it is new,” he writes in K-Punk, as he wonders if a time traveller from the nineties would find any contemporary music as radical as post-punk or jungle had once seemed to him. When everything is cheerfully “retro,” Fisher argued, we lose our grasp on history—and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything-goes embrace of “happy hybridities” is an empty gesture. “What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists,” he writes.

Hua Hsu on Mark Fisher’s K-Punk

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on The Wind Protect You (1946), a novel by Pat Murphy which Mark describes as a forgotten precursor of Watership Down.

• “At once tiny and huge: what is this feeling we call ‘sublime’?” Sandra Shapshay explores the Romantic aesthetic.

Dennis Cooper‘s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2018. Thanks again for the link here!

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 572 by Nastia, and FACT Mix 683 by Casino Versus Japan.

A Child’s Voice (1978) by David Thomson, an overlooked ghost story starring TP McKenna.

• Jean Cocteau’s Orphée returns from the underworld via BFI blu-ray next month.

Rated SAVX: The Savage Pencil Scratchbook

Orpheus (1967) by The Walker Brothers | Orpheus (1987) by David Sylvian | Overture To Orpheus (2003) by Colin Booth