King Crimson - At the Court of the Crimson King

PROLOGUE

I started playing the charkitarra at eleven, in 1957, just a few days before Christmas. I had absolutely no ear for music, not even the slightest sense of rhythm. It would have been impossible to imagine anyone less musically gifted than me. When you're that lacking in musical gifts, you're forced to start reflecting and asking yourself questions about the nature of sound. What is it that stops you from telling one note apart from another? Which parts of the organism respond to the different components of music? Where are the barriers and the blockages? What can you do to get rid of them?

Robert Fripp is a strange character. Strange and unique in a rock world that, at least at the time of his musical formation, grew out of a cultural and lifestyle humus indissolubly tied to a certain teddy-boy rebelliousness, then sex and groupies, drugs galore, fast cars, Harley Davidsons and hellish road trips, Jack Kerouac and the doors of perception, transgression and conformity. The emergence of youth as an autonomous entity in thought, in manners, in dress, in rituals, in (ir)responsibility had a soundtrack that was beautiful, overwhelming and moving. But soundtracks, as we know, sometimes lose their force and vigor once detached from the images: decontextualize them and you're left holding nothing. And then everyone grows old, and after a while enthusiasm alone isn't enough. Robert Fripp is one of those figures who saved rock from itself, but in doing so they had to walk it toward senescence and, slowly, imperceptibly, kill it. Because Robert Fripp, make no mistake, is fully a rock musician — he has the approach, the rhythm, the impact, the commercial appeal. But he rejects its outlook. "My deliberate declaration, in 1969, that rock could appeal to the head as well as the feet caused a kind of passionate explosion and was considered heretical." But what does this pompous bourgeois provincial want? Why complicate something as fundamentally simple as rock? The answer is perhaps self-evident: because Fripp (though, to be clear, he's certainly not the only one) is a musician who uses the forms of rock as a language, as a vehicle, not a kid who becomes a musician to express himself in the language of his own generational, cultural and emotional tribe and thus becomes a rock musician.

The shift in perspective is Copernican: it's rock's shift from expression to art, which as such speaks to future generations as much as to its contemporaries, and requires discipline (a key word for Fripp's music) and structure.

ACT ONE

After some negligible musical experiences, a move to London in 1967, and an equally negligible record with the Giles brothers ("Giles, Giles and Fripp, The Cheerful Insanity of..."), in 1969 he formed King Crimson together with brothers Michael and Peter Giles and wind player Ian McDonald. With Peter Giles later replaced by Greg Lake — who would go on to Emerson, Lake and Palmer — the line-up for the debut album was complete.

The band kept up a frenetic live schedule with original material that would feed into their debut and, in part, into the follow-up, and on October 10, 1969, In The Court Of The Crimson King was released — in a sense, the founding act of what would later be known as the progressive genre. As the posthumous box set Epitaph would later well attest, compared to their live work the album is more orderly and rational, less explosive.

In The Court Of The Crimson King is a beautiful, epoch-making record. Perhaps more epoch-making than beautiful. Five tracks, hugely famous among fans of the genre and well beyond. A blistering start with the delirium of "21st Century Schizoid Man", with Lake's filtered voice declaiming Sinfield's apocalyptic lyrics over a guitar riff, followed by a long instrumental break with guitar and sax chasing each other in a fugue-like progression before the main theme returns. A harsh, frenetic track that skirts the edge of improvisation without ever quite touching it. Then a startling change of mood with Ian McDonald's "I Talk To The Wind", a deeply sweet melody with an antique, Renaissance flavor, enriched by two gorgeous breaks in which the flute carries a touching melodic theme. Then the unsettling epic grandeur of "Epitaph" and of the title track, with the mellotron constantly cutting in to unmoor the songs from their physicality, and in between, "Moonchild", a track built entirely on tenuous instrumental minimalism, with an initial delicate melody that soon crumbles into a long improvisation bordering on silence. Every track springs from brilliant initial ideas that are hugely amplified with instrumental impact as much as dramatic tension. The Moody Blues had already used the mellotron, the Nice had already toyed with classical ambitions, Procol Harum, among others, had already stretched songs out; but next to In The Court Of The Crimson King all of that fades like a timid prologue. It's the deliberate, studied, conscious crossing of the Rubicon into a new genre — and it is so not merely, or even mainly, for what's played on it or how it's played, but also for what it codifies, for the aesthetic and cultural thinking, and for the ambitions it reveals.

Ambitions that, in my view, cannot be reduced to a mere blending of rock with classical music, as certain coarse-grained critics have claimed for decades, but rather lie in creating an approach that is mental and ideal before it is compositional — one that breaks away from rock's old trajectories as a visceral, emotional, generational, political form of music, one that merely serves the playing-out of tired rituals of baffling artistic conformism; trajectories of rock as a music of artistic ghettoization, loudly shouted but in truth negligible and irrelevant.

In The Court Of The Crimson King marks the beginning of a revolutionary attempt to turn rock into an art form, one in which meaning would be inherent to the aesthetic pursuit itself, where there would be no context or background but only pure form, discipline and the crystallization of beauty as a primal category. In that sense — or at least partly in that sense — we should look for the way progressive rock refracted classical music back onto itself. King Crimson's debut was the debut of a successful failure, because in retrospect we might say the attempt ultimately failed from a general lack of courage and vision, and what would rise from the smoking wreckage would no longer be rock, but either its caricature or its spectral image.

An epoch-defining record, caught between grandeur, emphasis and a deep unease, built on rock-solid melodic structure, powerful, delicate, hyper-rational yet also full of impetus and storm, In The Court Of The Crimson King fully embraces the impact and spatial cyclicality of rock — and here lies its most obvious limitation — by refusing to reject the boundaries of rock's expressive spectrum.

The following year came In The Wake Of Poseidon. Mc Donald left (a talent, a shooting star and a mystery of progressive rock), replaced by singer Gordon Haskell, wind player Mel Collins and the great jazz pianist Keith Tippett, who would go on to play an important and underrated role in the band's later evolution. The line-up was unstable and restless. Side one dutifully retreads the debut's side one, opening with a riff-driven track building to a central crescendo, followed by a ballad — splendid here too ("Cadence And Cascade") — and a mellotron-driven psychodrama. The similarities end there.

Side two essentially consists of two tracks: an extremely clever fake jazzy jam built on a cabaret-style little tune ("Cat Food"), and an unsettling, powerful martial crescendo built around the core of Holst's "Mars", with the mellotron opening up into what feels like infinity. And while the debut had been a choral, collective project, this follow-up is an album dominated by the figure of Fripp. "A great record and a disappointing one", as has rightly been said, because although the music on it is excellent, it lacks the same visionary force and the same sense of wonder as the debut.

The band's instability grew worse: the Giles brothers left, and Lake departed for good. Fripp brought in players from the frenetic English jazz scene (alongside Tippett: Charig, Miller and Evans). Out of this precariousness would come the two absolute masterpieces of King Crimson, and of progressive rock as a whole.

The first is called Lizard, also released in 1970. The break with the two previous records is sharp and disorienting: the influence of the English art-jazz scene is plain in the mood of the pieces, if not exactly in the compositions themselves. Where the early albums worked by piling ever more structure onto simple, primal melodic cores, here — even though Lizard is scattered with brilliant melodic ideas — the focus shifts to disorienting arrangements, overloaded with hooks, chords, callbacks and counterpoints, with wide stretches of seemingly free-form progressive jazz. Where epic sweep and lyricism once prevailed, now it's crooked, sharp, ironic melodies that float atop a myriad of brilliant instrumental ideas. The result gives the record something unsettling, alienating, unstable. The first half of the album is paradigmatic in this sense, with Fripp on acoustic guitar drifting detached in counterpoint to Haskell's dazed vocal line on the opening "Cirkus", followed by sax and mellotron solos in a masterfully constructed track. Then comes the languid "Indoor Games", full of constant jazz punctuation, followed by the sarcastic "Happy Family", with filtered vocals and instruments chasing and crossing each other in a lunar jam. Side one closes with the achingly sweet "Lady Of The Dancing Water", a touching madrigal for flute and acoustic guitar with a beautiful Sinfield lyric — perhaps the most sentimental song Fripp ever wrote.

Side two contains the (false) suite "Lizard", opening with "Prince Rupert Awake", a beautiful, open melody sung by a not-yet-famous Jon Anderson, which soon frays into "Bolero-Peacock's Tale", enchanting with a poignant oboe melody from which a complex horn arrangement unfolds. Then comes the third part, "The Battle Of Glass Tears", with Haskell reappearing in an icy, alien incantation, followed by blasts of mellotron decompressing a furiously "free-form" section, before closing with the three futuristic minutes of "Big Top", built around a looming bass note with Fripp's spectral, suspended chords.

Lizard is a unique, complex, extremely refined album, of enormous compositional and emotional depth — a record that reveals itself in its details, listen after listen, and for that reason is, in its own way, fragile, and in some sense alien even to the mainstream of progressive rock itself.

After Lizard, a work that could have powered an entire career on its own, King Crimson — ever more unstable and precarious — pulled off an incredible feat: they made an even better record. It's called Islands, released in 1971. Boz replaced Haskell on vocals, while the line-up of guest jazz musicians remained unchanged.

Islands shares its predecessor's refinement and sophistication, but it is at the same time less cold and mannered, with moments of tremendous musical pathos that would be hard to match — and which King Crimson (and Fripp) would never reach again.

"Formentera Lady" opens as a melancholy, dark ballad, with Keith Tippett on piano and Mel Collins on flute chasing each other in a pensive mood, before giving way to a long, remarkably evocative closing section, where a bassline anchors to the ground a swirl of spectral voices (there's even a soprano), with a sad, nervous sax wandering restlessly. It's a song that feels somehow spatial despite being entirely acoustic, with an unreal atmosphere that edges close, in a way, to forms of contemporary classical music. Then comes a long, vibrant, building solo from Fripp ("Sailor's Tale") and the deeply sad, estranging "The Letters".

Side two opens with "Ladies Of The Road", Fripp's own highly personal take on how to write a song "in the style of the Beatles" while still making it unmistakably King Crimson; closing the record, with an abrupt shift in mood, come "Song Of The Gulls", a gorgeous classical piece for strings and oboe, and the lengthy "Island" — in my view the most beautiful song Fripp ever wrote, set moreover to a beautiful Sinfield lyric, a melancholy, lyrical, touching piece with exquisite, unforgettable piano flourishes from Tippett and a liberating finale, with the mellotron accompanying a spine-tingling cornet solo.

Taken together, Lizard and Islands are unique works, unequalled in the history of rock. A highly personal opinion, of course. Yes, because that's still what we're dealing with here, after all, because within their dizzying formal otherness, the vestiges of rock remain in the background — stripped bare, disembodied, sublimated, but still present.

After Islands, the first phase of King Crimson comes to a close with the tail end of the live album Earthbound, a negligible record, almost deliberately badly produced and terribly recorded.

The band broke up, and for a while King Crimson looked like a group that had been buried for good.

ACT TWO

In 1973 Larks’ Tongues In Aspic comes out. Fripp has essentially formed another group, with different musicians, a different philosophy, and an approach that's miles away from the band's early days. Only his presence justifies the survival of the name. The King has summoned Bill Bruford on drums, a defector from Yes, John Wetton on bass, ex-Family, violinist David Cross, who replaces the sax as second solo voice, and Jaime Muir on percussion, who will leave shortly after.

This line-up will define the whole second phase of the group, up until 1975. Bruford and Wetton, who also acts as vocalist, form a powerful, rock-solid and restless rhythm section with huge sonic impact, yet at the same time creative and modern, blending well with Cross's nervy, elegiac violin and with Fripp's guitar, which takes on a different approach to the instrument, almost entirely abandoning acoustic tones in favor of harsh, cutting, dry, geometric sounds and whirling scales. Then there's Muir, used as a terrorist agent of percussive disorder, who will leave after Larks’ Tongues In Aspic and of whom, as far as I know, no live recordings exist.

If we had left King Crimson as a band embodying rock's surreal antithesis, the group we meet again on Larks’ Tongues In Aspic reclaims rock's language and spatiality, but interprets it in a free and original way, in a thrilling dialogue between disorder and structure, between free-form chaos and jazz-rock freedom on one side and squared-off riffs on the other.

This dichotomy is, in reality, mostly a retrospective analysis. Let me explain better: the second-phase King Crimson are essentially a live band, one that reaches full realization in that dimension, in the clash-and-meeting between an improvisational soul and a soul of strong formal rigidity, between abstraction and hardness, between impact and lyricism. The first album by this line-up, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, is wrongly considered a great record, but in any case it can only be seen that way if one is unaware of the mostly posthumous live recordings documenting the band's live impact, next to which the studio take is a pale, powerless copy.

The impact of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic is nonetheless explosive. The album includes three instrumentals (“Larks’ Tongues In Aspic” pt. 1 and 2, placed at the beginning and end, and “The Talking Drum”) and three sung tracks (“Book Of Saturday”, “Exiles” and “Easy Money”).

The opening with the first part of the title track is already a statement of the group's style, starting with delicate noise-making courtesy of Muir that resolves into a dark, suspended violin chord, which heralds Fripp's entrance as he threads a series of guitar passages, now frenetic, now almost hard-rock, with the rhythm section in full epileptic fit, wandering into jazzy territory; Cross's violin then closes the track in more lyrical, though still dark, tones. Already from this first track the gulf separating them from the Islands line-up looks unbridgeable: first of all King Crimson have partly become a guitar-oriented band, and the overall sound is shaped by the musicians' remarkable technical skill, far superior to that of previous line-ups. Menacing, dark tones prevail, with near-hard-rock drifts that fray into instrumental eclecticism, the true central and “progressive” element, with constant, unexpected rhythmic and melodic shifts, and a rhythm section that rises to a creative role with strong echoes, at least as a general approach, of jazz-rock.

Even more evident in this sense is the second part of the title track, with Fripp building the whole piece on simple guitar riffs launched in progression and gradually expanded by countless instrumental inserts up to the final explosion. In “Talking Drum” a hypnotic, building rhythmic base provides the backdrop to a vaguely Eastern-sounding melodic line held by Cross and doubled by Fripp's piercing guitar. The sung tracks are more disappointing: the brief “Book Of Saturday” unsuccessfully attempts a lyricism better achieved on earlier records, “Easy Money” is striking for the banality of its melody, saved only by Fripp's acrobatics (far more engaging live, anyway), while the melancholy “Exiles” comes off better, with gorgeous violin breaks from Cross.

An album I find somewhat overrated, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic nonetheless proves to be an important step, as the mold for a new sound that would herald further developments and, above all, still sounds modern today. While the songs from the group's first phase, heard today, whatever one's judgment, clearly belong, even to a casual listener, to a bygone era, the same can't be said of the tracks on Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, particularly the instrumentals, poised as they are between the thesis of a harsh, direct rock and the antithesis of its negation into an intellectualism — typical of Crimson in all their past and future incarnations — that breaks not only the formulas but also the mood and the target audience. At this stage, the band's music certainly starts from recovering a visceral rock energy, which is then subjected to decomposition and a conscious, deliberate restructuring on purely rational grounds.

The following year Starless And Bible Black comes out, without Muir. An album that follows in its predecessor's footsteps, but with greater clarity. Side one includes no fewer than six tracks, with two absolute instrumental gems, “We’ll Let You Know”, a great fake-improvisation with Wetton's rumbling bass, and the extraordinary “Trio”, five touching minutes of delicate sonic aphorisms. Then “The Mincer”, with Fripp delighting us with his trademark alienated breaks backed by mellotron; then the splendid “The Night Watch”, with a Fripp solo that will become a benchmark, the opening “The Great Deceiver”, with Fripp rehearsing the frantic scales he'll overuse all too much in the future, and the usual attempt at a melodic song with “Lament”. Overall, the band seems to touch, with greater awareness and refinement, an abstract and undefined dimension only hinted at on the previous record. Proof of this is the 9-minute title track that opens side two: a long, delirious, hyper-descriptive, unsettling existential jam, which serves as a prelude to the closing 11 minutes of “Fracture”, which fully picks up the thread of “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part 1”.

The following album, Red, comes out that same year, 1974, with the band essentially already broken up. As is characteristic of the band, instability is directly proportional to creativity, and “Red” is no exception, being, in my view, the true masterpiece of King Crimson's second phase. The album is credited to a trio (Fripp, Wetton, Bruford), with Cross appearing as a guest alongside the returning McDonald, Collins, Miller and Charig. The opening title track will become a classic, both because it's still a concert highlight to this day and, above all, because the squared-off guitar barrage it's built on will serve as a model for many later efforts, even in much more recent years. The following “Fallen Angel”, with some echoes of the bygone days of “In The Wake Of Poseidon”, and “One More Red Nightmare” are by far the best songs this line-up ever wrote, the former melodic and epic, the latter more neurotic, seemingly built instrumentally to showcase Bruford's great skill and sensitivity. Then, eight minutes of centerless improvisation, the stuff of live shows (“Providence”), and finally the apotheosis of “Starless”: an unforgettable melodic line from Fripp over a mellotron backdrop alternates with Wetton's booming, melancholy voice over sax interjections; then a relentless, minimal guitar chord climbs endlessly into a furious jam that, at the peak of tension, releases into a reprise of the original melodic line, with Wetton's thunderous bass hitting you right in the gut. Twelve masterful minutes, surely among King Crimson's finest achievements.

In general, Red is a relatively more direct, less eclectic and tortuous album than its predecessors, but what's lost in complexity is more than made up for by wonderfully inspired songwriting, with peaks of exhilarating power and lyricism.

In 1975 the USA live album comes out, and for a few years nothing more will be heard of King Crimson. Not so for Fripp, who had already dabbled in electronics with Brian Eno (“No Pussyfooting”) and would build on that for guitar-looping experiments (the famous frippertronics, which would become a benchmark, on “Let The Power Fall”), the collaborations with Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Daryl Hall (“Sacred Songs”), and a splendid solo album in 1979 (“Exposure”). Fripp as a sought-after guitarist and producer as well as the “mastermind” of rock, perfectly at ease amid the looming new wave and the “oblique strategies” theorized by Eno, Fripp “in the marketplace without being subject to its rules”, Fripp with two eyes on the future and a great past never disowned nor betrayed.

ACT THREE

All of this, however, falls outside the scope of this brief account, and as far as we're concerned we'll find King Crimson again, surprisingly, seven years after Red, in 1981, with Discipline. A lot has changed. Of the old line-up only Bruford survives, a drummer as much of the '60s as of the 2000s, joined, besides Fripp, by Tony Levin on bass and Chapman Stick, still far from being the highly sought-after session man he is today, as well as Adrian Belew on second guitar. Because one thing immediately strikes the eye and the ear: after the horns and the violin, Fripp has decided to use a second guitar as a second harmonic voice.

The focus of Discipline lies entirely in this primal choice. The record, in fact, is built entirely on the interplay between Fripp and Belew — sometimes in unison, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes phase-aligned, sometimes out of phase — creating a kind of hypnotic guitar minimalism. The comeback album is nonetheless worthy of the band's name, with a gorgeous sentimental slow number in "Matte Kudasai", great exercises in guitar style ("Elephant Talk", "Frame By Frame"), furious digressions ("Indiscipline"), ingenious constructions built on tribal rhythms ("Thela Hun Ginjeet"), and spectral spaces ("The Sheltering Sky"). The pathos and the instrumental and emotional epic sweep of the earlier King Crimson are almost entirely absent, but what remains is a great sonic refinement, paired with an icy, constitutive discipline. Discipline gives us a new, modern band, far from a leftover act but rather one well suited to intelligent market niches — a band that has left the Seventies behind, perfectly at ease with the disillusionment and synthesis of the smarter side of the Eighties, perfectly attuned to moving past the rock epic and aesthetic of the previous decade, without giving up its own artistic prerogatives. The musicians' technical ability is, if anything, even greater, and this allows for an expressiveness that is direct and intelligible, yet also highly refined both in the rhythm section — never so central to the band's balance, swinging between jazz-rock and mock tribalism — and in the unprecedented guitar work, built on a load-bearing minimalism over which Belew's onomatopoeic noise-making (on "Elephant Talk") and Fripp's taut, vibrating digressions ("The Sheltering Sky") are layered.

The second album by this lineup, Beat, does even better, with two searing instrumentals ("Sartori In Tangier" and, above all, the lunar "Requiem", a kind of jazz-tinged delirium) that are worth the price of the record on their own, a successful attempt at a single complete with video ("Heartbeat"), and the urban madness of "Neurotica", a fitting soundtrack for an Easton Ellis story.

When the third installment, Three Of A Perfect Pair, came out in 1984, many cried scandal over the pop-dance rhythms of tracks like the title track and "Sleepless". With hindsight, those criticisms seem especially unfair. Three Of A Perfect Pair is a fine record, and if it is pop, it's dazed, intelligent pop, metabolized and filtered through a detached, alienating perspective. Perhaps those who criticized the album forgot that, alongside the lighter tracks, it also contains the ambient exercise in filtered bass and existential guitar of "Nuages", as well as the unsettling improvisations of "No Warnings" and "Industry", and finally "Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part 3", whose title already says it all.

Three Of A Perfect Pair marks a break from the two previous records, which were far more homogeneous works, both in their pursuit of catchy melodies and in their return to an improvisational abstraction that harks back to Starless And Bible Black, making it at once the most accessible and the most introverted and difficult work of this incarnation of the band.

But a question lingers beneath the surface: is this progressive rock? "I don't know and I don't care" might be the answer from many, Fripp included, probably. But we are bound to certain conventions, at least linguistically, and we believe an answer can and should be given: yes, without a doubt, the ambitions and structure of the albums from this phase onward are inherently progressive.

Three Of A Perfect Pair was followed by a long silence, broken musically by Fripp's collaboration with David Sylvian ("The First Day" and the subsequent live album "Damage") and by the records produced through Fripp's own guitar school ("The League Of Crafty Guitarist").

ACT FOUR

In 1995, preceded by the EP Vroom, a new album unexpectedly arrived: Thrak. This time the band's lineup hadn't undergone revolutions: Trey Gunn on stick and Pat Mastelotto on drums were added to the Fripp-Belew-Levin-Bruford quartet. Fripp dubbed this lineup the "double trio". The band returned after 11 years, and Thrak received positive reviews. Those reviews were perhaps positive partly due to a distortion caused by the long wait. The continuity with the Discipline-era band is evident, though with some clear differences. First of all, the dialogues and the guitar interplay between Fripp and Belew are markedly reduced, in favor of a more direct, less eclectic, at times harder approach. Then, a measured use of electronics begins to appear, while the rhythm section is clearly scaled back, now sounding much more "normalized" and less creative. Often, too, the band indulges in harsh, schematic riffs and digressions bordering on a hard-rock approach, almost as if trying to recover a visceral quality and a search for impact more akin to the band's 1973-75 period than to what came after, while carefully avoiding the redundant, chiaroscuro-heavy stylistic approach typical of that era. But beyond these considerations, what really doesn't work are the songs themselves: tired rehashes of Red ("Vroom", "Vroom Vrooom"), aggression masking tracks that are hardly irresistible ("Sex Sleep Eat Dream", "Dinosaur"), pointless experimental gestures, shadows of times past ("B-Boom", "Thrak"), improbable disco-funk ("People"), superfluous electronic cameos ("Radio" 1 and 2). What remain are two slow tracks, both successful: "Walking On Air", in which Belew revives certain 1950s atmospheres, and the more unsettling "One Time", along with the two brief "Inner Garden" 1 and 2, by far the most successful things on the record.

Overall, Thrak is King Crimson's least successful album, not because it lacks interesting or even beautiful ideas, but because two categories previously inapplicable to the band creep in: mediocrity and predictability. Indeed, the mediocrity of some tracks cannot be disguised by the allure of the band's name, and, for the first time, the sound feels predictable even as it remains modern.

After Thrak, Fripp — who had founded his own record label, Discipline Global Mobile (DGM), in keeping with his sound, demystifying realism, whereby if art exists outside the rules of the market, it certainly doesn't exist outside the market altogether — began releasing a huge amount of material: posthumous live recordings (notably the box set Epitaph, featuring material from 1969), live recordings from the Thrak tour (B-Boom), live improvisation albums (THRaKaTTtaK) — a trend that continues to this day, following a logic that responds to obvious market needs, both economic (money is clearly not the devil's dung for Fripp) and strategic (keeping the band's name alive).

Against this backdrop, King Crimson reappeared in 2000 with a new album, The ConstruKction Of Light. Crimson returned as a quartet, with the usual Fripp and Belew joined by Mastelotto and Gunn. The album is certainly better than its predecessor: the dense, minimal guitar dialogue is clearly recovered (in this sense, it's closer to Discipline and Beat than to the previous record), interesting songs appear (the ironic cyber-blues of "Prozak Blues", the title track), with clear reprises of past themes ("Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part 4", "Fractured"). Yet some reservations remain. First of all, one misses Levin and especially Bruford — Mastelotto lacks their charisma, and there's an annoying overuse of electronic drums. Also, the record is very constructed, convoluted, extremely tense, but at times too frantic and narcissistic, with little to none of the feeling that still lingered even on Thrak, as if crushed beneath the whirling guitars. Then again, it's certainly less predictable and mediocre than its predecessor, but a category unprecedented for the band emerges: boredom. The ConstruKction Of Light is often a boring record: in its own way powerful, explosive, interesting, thoroughly modern, but also boring.

At this stage, critics viewed the band with a degree of condescension: wrongly considered too old for the mainstream press, King Crimson also proved too far outside the lines for the traditional progressive underground. The truth is that King Crimson, in this discussed and debatable phase, are as inherently progressive as ever, while at the same time charting a personal course based on a rigid structural discipline — and, in their own way, an influential one, as shown by bands of entirely different origin and inspiration such as Tool, Don Caballero, and Muse.

In 2003, after a wait of "only" three years, The Power To Believe was released. There was considerable anticipation surrounding the album; some who heard it in advance spoke explicitly of a masterpiece, mentioning a metal turn. The Power To Believe is not a masterpiece, nor is it really a metal record, yet it is by far the best album of the band's fourth phase. The lineup is unchanged from ConstruKction Of Light, but the sound is far more lucid and articulate, partly picking up the furious minimalism of that record (though without elevating it to a rigid methodology), and partly the attempt at alienated, off-kilter rock of Thrak, but this time backed by genuine unease and genuine inspiration. The album charts a hypothetical third way between the trends of the recent past, torn between compelling guitar spirals now harsh ("Level Five"), now minimal ("Elektrik"), between suburban delirium ("Facts Of Life"), strange melodicism ("Eyes Wide Open"), powerful progressions ("Dangerous Curves"), and elegiac abstractions ("The Power To Believe 2 & 3").

The Power To Believe is a record overloaded with searing, dark, technological tones, and seems to close the thread running through King Crimson since Discipline, standing as a work of synthesis between the hyper-structural refinements of the Eighties, the frippertronics, and the rigid, aggressive approach of the new lineup. A work of synthesis, and as such, we believe and hope, a work that in some sense closes a chapter. And after? Will the "rule of three albums" be honored, with a brand-new fifth phase opening after the fourth? And with which musicians? Or will Fripp decide to keep pushing forward with this band, and if so, with what new devices will he bring King Crimson back? And will they still be able to narrate the future, if nothing else, "their" future? In any case, we'll be standing on the riverbank, waiting for a miracle, or maybe just a good record.

Some of Fripp's quoted statements are taken from the book "King Crimson/Robert Fripp", edited by Paolo Bertrando, Arcana Editrice

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