Heterophonic music, different music information
When it comes to progressive rock, there are always fans who compare King Crimson with Pink Floyd. In my opinion, it's as awkward as comparing Zhou Shu and Márquez who is better, whether the origin of modern civilization is Athens or Shaoshan.
One of them is biased towards jazz and the other is biased towards Bruce, although they are both gods, they can open a gap of tens of millions in popularity and sales.
Miraculously, although Klimson has fallen far behind in terms of traffic, it still affects a large number of musicians who are much better known than them. Kurt Cobain, for example, lists "Red" as one of his favorite albums; The Tool sees them as an important driving force for the transformation of avant-garde metal; From progressive rock pioneers Yes and Genesis, to math rock bands like Battles and The Jesus Lizard, and even Kanye, all of them are staunch Klimson fans.
Well, where does this demonic nature of Krimson come from? It started 53 years ago.
World War I fame
In London 53 years ago, almost every musician was talking about Klimson, to the point where everything white was black ink compared to them, and everything that could not be said would be desperate. They were only a few months after being formed under the name King Crimson, and have not yet released their albums, and strangely, the predecessor band Giles, Giles & Fripp disbanded within a year of its formation, and the records sold in shambles.
1969年的King Crimsom：Ian McDonald 、 Michael Giles 、 Peter Sinfield 、 Greg Lake 和 Robert Fripp
It all started with the fact that they got the favor of the Big Band Rolling Stones, which led them to appear as a warm-up band in London's Hyde Park free live with 500,000 spectators, and the drowning of Rolling Stone founder Brian Jones two months ago also caused a surge in the live audience, inadvertently contributing to the huge audience chassis of Klimson.
It was July 5, 1969, and the band performed for the first time ever. They mix rock, jazz, classical and psychedelic to create twisted, heavy avant-garde and unfathomable music.
The great avant-garde rock began its grandeur.
When the famous song "21st Century Schizoid Man" played, thousands of hippies were dumbfounded.
The show was not only a landmark moment of the '60s, but also a proclamation of Klimson's presence on the international stage. Jimi Hendrix, the ever-ranked guitar god, praised them as the best band in the world, and music magazines featured them strongly, and Crimson became popular.
Later, the hippies got out, and the psychedelic rock era crumbled and ended helplessly. Avant-garde rock, hard rock, and even heavy metal have appeared on the historical stage after that. Klimson abandoned blues almost a decade before the British New Wave of heavy metal bands and worked tirelessly for the complexities and virtuosity of classical music and serious jazz. After de-bluesizing, heavy metal bands became faster, purer and more violent.
Klimson's lineup has been very variable over the years, and the small half musicians of the British former cradle have joined Crimson, perhaps because of this, Klimson has been on the road to innovation.
The only constant member is the mushroom god Robert Fripp.
Many of his personality traits don't match the "rock star" of the mainstream narrative: flat-headed, sitting and playing the piano, silent and restrained, completely focused on his instrument.
Because he sits and plays the piano forever, he is jokingly called a mushroom. Even when he was invited as a special guest of G3, he sat in the shadow of the stage and concentrated on playing, not minding himself being a supporting role. For this reason, he repeatedly derided himself that mushrooms are a symbol of strong vitality. Yes, Fripp is strong enough. First, it is powerful, and it has not stopped for more than 50 years; The second is strong, many musicians can not bear his arbitrariness after joining and leave quickly, but it also has the attraction to let some musicians return.
Fripp collected Giles, Giles & Fripp remnants and led the formation of the first generation of Crimson on January 13, 1969. As a band of the 60s, born in the psychedelic rock era, Klimson is undoubtedly anti-war, and their band name King Crimson refers to the warlike king, probably alluding to the US President LBJ, who was obsessed with expanding the Vietnam War at the time.
On October 10, 1969, three months after the Hyde Park performance, the debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, was released, subtitled An Observation by King Crimson. Just two months later, on December 16, the first generation of Klimson disbanded and has since embarked on a long journey of musician change. Although they have only released 13 albums in their 50-plus years of history, they have straddled the broadest genres in progressive rock.
Album-oriented
The following is album-oriented, while commenting on the album, briefly sort out the development process of the band.
In the Court of the Crimson King
(1969; Island)
This is the most famous cover in the history of progressive rock. Barry Godber painted the distorted face. For years, people have speculated about what these eyes see, maybe the atrocities of the Vietnam War, maybe just a hallucination of a young man full of LSD and paranoia. Unfortunately, Goldberg died just four months after the album's release, at the age of 24, and it seems that the mystery disappeared with him. Fripp said of the cover that the face is the schizophrenic in the album's first track, "21st Century Schizoid Man", and the internal image is the name of the person in the album's title, Crimson King, and if you cover the bottom half of the smiling face on the inside page, you will find that these eyes reveal an indescribable sadness.
The album's first four tracks, "21th Century Schizoid Man", "I Talk To The Wind", "Epitaph" and "Moonchild" are generally considered to be Klimson's understanding and stylistic exploration of heavy rock, folk, jazz and atonal music.
The real heavyweight hit is "21st Century Schizophrenia". Its mix of absurdly heavy riffs and intense saxophone passages, coupled with the best jazz drumbeat in rock and roll history, became the founding epic of progressive rock.
"Larks' Tongues In Aspic"
(1973; Island)
This is their 5th studio album and 4th lineup, as well as their second full reorganization of the band's direction. The three albums in the middle (In the Wake of Poseidon in 1970, Lizard, and Islands in 1971) were adapted in similar areas to the debut album, exploring the fabric of symphony in the context of jazz psychedelic rock, while also largely following the work of rising bands of the time, such as Yes, Genesis, and Emerson Lake & Palmer. "Lark Tongue in the Aspic" is the second time since the band's debut that it has surpassed its peers with Fripp's vision, replacing the entire lineup with their acclaimed mid-70s 5-piece line-up, with John Witton as bass and vocals, David Cross as violin and keyboard, Jamie Muir as auxiliary percussion, and drummer Bill Bruford Bruford left after Yes masterpiece to join in the pursuit of more challenging waters.
Next are the noisier and more mathematical masterpieces of jazz, rock and avant-garde music. The opening and closing tracks are the two parts of the title track, turning the 6 songs into 5 parts, from intense avant-garde heavy metal to noise, to vocal collage to dazzling and evil raw jazz rock, while the 4 vocal-led tracks in the middle are built around the lyrics and vocal parts switching equally between rude and passion, and the band's clever improvised instrumental breaks. It's a shame that the lineup only saw one album before the attrition, but in the current six songs, you can hear a refined unity. Muir's casual tapping adds a chaotic personality to the process, while Fripp and Witton take turns using straightforward basic rock or playing dirty heavy metal, with Cross tuning the tunes in the keyboards and violins to fit the tonality of the avant-garde. Brunford served the expert drumbeat of psychedelic jazz rock, and he was hailed as the best drummer of progressive rock history.
This is an elegant and powerful work, and has even been evaluated as surpassing its predecessors.
"Red"
(1974; Island)
By 1974's Red, the five-man cast that created The Lark Tongue in the Aspic had been reduced to three, and before the more improvised and live Starless and Bible Black, Muir turned to monastic life due to physical and mental exhaustion, and then the departure of David Cross, the last record of the period. Red is often considered one of the greatest progressive rock albums of all time. For example, the title track is a brilliant instrumental piece that shortens the previous instrumental madness on the lark's tongue to less than 6 minutes, creating an enduring track of heavily avant-garde rock instruments. Due to the lack of a violin, the two traditional songs, "Fallen Angel" and "One More Red Nightmare," take on a darker vibe, feeling as languid and vampire-like pallor as the cover itself, rendered in grim black and white with sharp contours. That sentiment carries over to Providence, an 8-minute riff from the band's clos era that shows a refined and emotionally dark version of their wild improvisation during the period, suggesting they learned something about unfiltered improvisation from the Moon Child period.
But the album ended with Starless, a serious contender for the greatest songs ever recorded by any band, and itself a masterpiece of fusion of almost all the band's ideas. There is a symphony implied by the opening of the Melotron electronic keyboard, the procedural fullness of the guitar, it seems more like a soundtrack to the movements of an actor on a dimly lit stage, than pure music, the strong inner reflection of Wyton's voice, in an evil world, seems to be the heart of an extremely evil person, and it all ends not only with the most precipitous instrument ever written, but also with the greatest drum performance of Bill Bruford's life, who is on a 13/8 pattern, Navigating multiple conflicting rhythmic lines, still trying to create a rhythm. There is an evil darkness throughout the album that is widespread across all of the band's work (which in itself is a key reason why they remain popular even as their peers have declined). This darkness is particularly evident in this incarnation, from Jamie Muir's Serpent of Chaos to the Satanic darkness of Red. The group doesn't seem to have forgotten the satanic associations of this color, and they pursue darkness in these songs, from murders in New York gang fights to images of planes falling and the eternal evil present in instruments.
Definitely one of the greatest albums of all time.
"Three of a Perfect Pair"
(1984; EG/Warner Bros.)
Hot 80s footage will be presented here. "Discipline" was Crimson's first record of the '80s and the first to show their regrouped lineup, which included Tony Levin, Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford and Fripp. The record showcases a prototype fusion of post-punk new waves, rhythmic lyrics, and a compact joint technical rhythmic pattern spread across all 4 instruments. However, there are some tracks on "Discipline" that make them uncomfortable. For example, "Elephant Talk" is a vibrant and joyful Talking Heads-style work (which is appropriate given Belu's participation in the group's recording and touring of Remain in Light), but the vocals turn into annoying gibberish after a few listens. Similarly, "Indiscipline" is tiresome, while "Thela Hun Ginjeet" is better in almost every live performance, except that the vocals are slightly different from the recorded version.
Meanwhile, The Third of the Puppet is a perfect record, with the first half containing a more approachable post-punk/new wave/avant-garde fusion of the first two records, and the second half containing the band's most adventurous and metallic improvisations ever. The title track of the album is one of the finest pop structured music compositions of all time, characterized by a dense weaving of ever-changing ticks that dumped people a dozen streets long before Djent. "Sleepless" is a powerful song, and "Model Man" and "Man With An Open Heart" feature prominently in the avant-garde pop world, with catchy post-punk/new wave melodies blended with breathless avant-garde guitar work. Meanwhile, the second half, which is predominantly instrumental, explores the fusion of industrial music, noise, and heavy metal in the realm of free improvisation, a few years ahead of other major bands. Levin, Bello and Fripp all lived in New York in the late '70s and early '80s, all witnessing the rise of punk and the glittering edge of futuristic avant-garde. Their use of industrial and noisy material was not a fluke, but a nod to the profound artistic qualities produced by the underworld by avant-garde old artists, who continued on this record the suite "Lark Tongue in Aspic", characterized by psychedelic artistic metal representations that never lose their charm.
A jaw-dropping masterpiece.
"The Power to Believe"
(2003; DGM/Sanctuary)
Between this 2003 album and the two albums of "The Third Couple of Couples", it is not so much unimportant as it is an undesirable starting point. 1995's Thrak is a decade later addition to the '80s idea material, more powerful than commonly believed, but better for those already familiar. 2000's The Constru Kction of Light is avant-garde and cohesive even by the band's own standards, despite being composed of some of the most adventurous improvisations recorded by the band. Meanwhile, The Power of Faith is a perfect summary of the band's work, which is apt considering that as of 2019 it was also their last studio record. The album dates back to Wake Poseidon, with a suite of interlocking instruments repeated on the record at regular intervals acting as the vocal thread, with most recordings taking the noisy industrial art metal implied at the end of The Third Puppet and developing it into a perfect weapon.
Level Five, the fifth installment of the ongoing Suite of Lark Tongues in Aspic, is probably the most ferocious and ideal instrumental piece the band has ever produced, with layers of guitar sounds, all sounds of rattling steel and mechanical screams, and electronic drums synchronizing with deep evil Warr guitars and bass to create a terrifying artistic metal whirlwind. The complex variation of the '80s material still exists, and guitars often play juxtaposed chain patterns, but the band has learned how best to incorporate it into a firm background rhythm that makes the propulsion feel as tense as Meshuggah like a machine of destruction. Belu's voices in Facts of Life are twisted and screaming with real menace, while elsewhere in Eyes Wide Open their voices are sad and weeping, but all in cold blues and violets and blacks, not the warm sunny colors of the early years.
You can hear the symphony of their first 4 records, the prototype metal riffs of their 2nd record, the chain pattern and propulsion of their 3rd record, and the cybernetic futuristic art metal of their 4th record, all done by a band that had been over 30 years old at that time.
They deserve to be one of the greatest artists of all time.
Other recommendations
"Discipline 1981" is also worth listening to, with each capital listed as Klimson's best. Also, Thrak is worth saving, it's definitely their most commercial record, but even so, it's still wonderful. Finally, "In the Wake of Poseidon 1970" is just as exciting as the debut, and true fans will surely know the value of tracks like "The Devil's Triangle" and "Cat Food."
Advanced listening
Let's not talk about live releases and branch projects for now, and finally talk about their remaining 5 albums.
Lizard 1970 is a strange record that presents the band's only truly edgy epic, with a half-hour title track featuring Jon Anderson and lyrics about fairies or something.
Islands 1971 is a gentle and enjoyable record unlike the rest.
Starless and Bible Black 1974 is a wild listening experience consisting mostly of live improvisation, all of which show Klimson's manic passion for pursuing new ideas in the years leading up to Red.
"Beat 1982" is the most accessible record of the '80s, featuring both the best songwriting and the worst choreography of the period. But almost every song will be improved in future live performances.
Finally, The Construkction of Light 2000, itself more like a compilation of material and improvisation from a branch project, was more fully developed into an experimental incubator under the main team.
For the title of "avant-garde rock", Klimson not only embodies the definition of genre, but also makes a vivid interpretation of the word "avant-garde", and has been constantly breaking through, constantly exploring, and maintaining a forward-looking view since the 50s.
Walking in front of the times will be lonely, walking behind the times will be forgotten. And for Klimson, who was "held hostage to outer space by other-dimensional creatures" and roamed the music wormhole all year round, they are neither lonely nor forgotten.
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