Intuitive Music

Robert Fripp

Born in 16th May 1946 in Wimbourne, UK, Robert Fripp is one of the most talented and innovative guitarists and composers of the last decades. He is also told for being the most technically skilled rock guitarist ever, whose personal image is usually associated with the peculiarity that he always plays live sitting on a chair.

Robert Fripp started playing guitar at the age of eleven and took lessons for about a year at the School of Music in Corse Mellon, with Kathleen Gartell, a piano teacher. He later took lessons from the local guitarist Don Strike and later from the guitarist Tony Alton, who was also teaching Greg Lake. During his teenage years, he played in hotel dance bands while studying economics. In 1967, Robert Fripp joined the band of bassist Peter Giles and drummer Michael Giles, which was named Giles, Giles and Fripp, releasing the album “The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles, and Fripp” in 1968. The forthcoming split of the band gave birth to Robert Fripp’s lifetime project, King Crimson, which was originally formed in 1968 featuring Michael Giles (drums), Greg Lake (vocals), Ian McDonald (winds, vibes) and Pete Sinfield (lyrics and light show). That same year, King Crimson debuted at the Speakeasy club in London, where they astonished the city music scene with their impressive combination of rock, avant-garde, jazz and classical music. Their legendary debut album “In the Court of the Crimson King” (1969) was probably the most influencial progressive rock album in the history and one of the most innovative and creative works ever recorded, on which the Who’s Pete Townsend described as an “uncanny masterpiece”.

Robert Fripp

“In the Court of the Crimson King” was followed by numerous personnel changes in the band during the 70’s, always leaded by the constant supervision of Robert Fripp. After the release of the studio albums “In the Wake of Poseidon” (1970), “Lizard” (1970) and “Islands” (1971) the long-term tandem created by Fripp and the lyricist Pete Sinfield broke due to the increasing incompatibilities in the method of work that started during the production of the “Lizard” album. Robert Fripp explained to the New Musical Express magazine in January 1972: “I suppose that the thing to say is that I felt the creative relationship between us had finished. I’d ceased to believe in Pete … It got to the point where I didn’t feel that by working together we’d improve on anything we’d already done.”

In 1971 Robert Fripp embarked in the production of one of the most curious projects ever: the pianist Keith Tippet’s project Centipede. This consisted in a big band ensemble of artists to record live an experimental avant-garde double album. The lineup featured nothing less than Keith Tippet (piano and musical director), Julie Tippet (vocals), members of Soft Machine Robert Wyatt (drums), Elton Dean (sax), Nick Evans (trombone) and Mark Charig (cornet), members of King Crimson Ian MacDonald (winds) and Boz Burrell (vocals), and members of Nucleus Karl Jenkins (oboe), Ian Carr (trumpet), John Marshall (drums), Brian Smith (flutes) and Jeff Clyne (bass). The result is an avant-garde symphony in 4 parts of free jazz forms and contemporary harmonies. Keith Tippet, as well as members from Soft Machine, appeared on King Crimson’s “Lizard” album the year before, which is the most jazz oriented album from the band. Robert Fripp also collaborated as a producer in the following Keith Tippett’s improvisational jazz album “Blueprint”, released in 1972, “Couple in Spirit” (1988) with Julie Tippett, and “66 Shades Of Lipstick” (1990) featuring Andy Sheppard. The relationship between Fripp and the Canterbury scene followed with the production that same year of the “Matching Mole’s Little Record”, the project of Robert Wyatt.

Fripp and Eno

In 1973, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno joined together in 1973 to work on a system based in the manipulation of tape machines to create delays, this being the introduction of loop techniques and ambient works in the world of popular music. The duo recorded with this system the albums “No Pussyfooting” (1973) and “Evening Star” (1975). Fripp & Eno were probably the first British rock artists to enter the world of avant-garde music. The whole concept was an experimentation based on a system invented by Eno of long echoes creating feedback witha Revox tape recorder. The results was as brilliant as they idea and the whole album was possibly the birth of the “loopâ€? music as well as the later ambient music. The system created by Robert Fripp for this work was baptized as “Frippertronics” and was later used during his solo career.

Robert Fripp resurrected King Crimson from it’s ashes in 1974 with a completely new line-up which included drummer Bill Bruford from Yes and bassist John Wetton from Uriah Heep to record, along with other eventual members, the albums “Lark’s Tongues in Aspic” (1973), “Starless and Bible Black” (1974) and “Red” (1974). “Red” featured the band as a trio formed by Fripp, Wetton and Bruford and it was a pioneering work of advanced and progressive alternative rock that later influenced generations of industrial artists, and indie punk rockers, including Nine Inch Nails and Tool. Sadly, the band didn’t earn any money by touring and the band was forced to split up.

After “Red” King Crimson split again in 1974. Robert Fripp collaborated in Brian Eno’s debut album “Here Come the Warm Jets” (1974) and later in the forthcoming albums “Another Green World” (1975) and “Music for Films” (1976), “Before and After Science” (1978) and “Nerve Net” (1992). During this period, Robert Fripp moved away from the music industry to investigate in different self-realization methods, including G. I. Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way.

Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel

Between 1977 and 1980 Fripp worked in the first three solo albums of the singer Peter Gabriel, all of them featuring bass and stick player Tony Levin who would become a member of the later incarnations of King Crimson. The involvement of Robert Fripp in Peter Gabriel’s was more intense in the second album of the artist, released in 1978, which was produced by the guitarist. Robert Fripp brought a crude dark sound that could be compared with the first works from Neu! and Can. Two tracks from this album were also recorded by Robert Fripp in his debut solo album “Exposure” (1979): “Here Comes the Flood” and “Exposure”. The song “Here Comes the Flood” precisely was based upon the ideas of scientist John Bennett, who was preventing to the world a few decades ago about the forthcoming ecological disasters derived from the global warming. Robert Fripp would later describe his experience in the studio as a “very demoralizing and depressing experience” after his constant confrontation with producer Bob Ezrin. During the tour following to Gabriel’s album, Robert Fripp accompanied the singer with the condition of performing sitting offstage, hidden behind the P.A. system. He was actually introduced to the audience as “Dusty Rhodes”.

In 1977, Robert Fripp travelled to Berlin to join Brian Eno for the sessions of David Bowie’s album “Heroes” (1977). After the German adventure, Fripp moved to New York, where he played live and jammed in clubs like the CBGB with numerous artists from the new wave and punk scene such including B52’s, the Screamers, the Ramones and Iggy Pop.

During his stay in New York, Robert Fripp also contributed to several live performances and albums, including Talking Heads’ “Talking Heads” (1977) and Blondie’s “Parallel Lines” (1978) and “Atomic” (1980). In 1980, Fripp collaborated with Buster Jones, Paul Duskin, and David Byrne of Talking Heads to produce the solo album “God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners” featuring two differenced projects; Frippertronics on the A side featured his loop oriented work and which was originally going to be entitled “Music for Sports”; Discotronics on the B side included a cocktail of Frippertronics and high-speed disco music. Also a year later, he was part of the collaborative album by Brian Eno and David Byrne “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts”.

Also, in New York Fripp started working in his first solo album “Exposure”, released in 1979, which featured the contributions from a wonderful set of musicians musicians, including Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Peter Hammill of Van Der Graaf Generator, Phil Collins, Tony Levin, Terre Roche, Jerry Marotta, and Daryl Hall. The abum in fact was originally conceived as the third part of Peter Gabriel’s album “2″ and Daryl Hall’s solo album “Sacred Songs” and it features a wonderful collection of contemporary and eclectic rock pieces that range from the post-punk aggressive energy of “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette”, “Disengage”, “NY3″ and “I May Not Had Enough of Me But” to the Crimsonian progressive heavy rock structures of “Breathless” and “Haaden Two”, to the beautiful ballads of “North Star” and “Mary”, and to the ambient atmospheres of “Water” and “Urban Landscape”. The album was followed by a solo tour between April and September 1979, consisting on Robert Fripp playing Frippertronics at restaurants, record shops, offices, canteens, museums, clubs, cinemas, and TV studios. This was the guitarist’s attitude fruit of his disagreement with the state of the socio-political system, as he remarked in the liner notes of a later album: “My belief is that all political activity directed towards changing the means of working is ineffective without a change in our way of working, and that this is essentially personal. If we change our way of doing things, structural change necessarily follows. If we wish for this personal change we need discipline, and the only effective discipline is self-discipline. External discipline, i.e., control, the normal direction of authoritarian agencies, generates an at least equal reaction.”

Robert Fripp at the Frippertronics

Robert Fripp’s idea of the self-discipline and the convention, under John Bennett’s influence, that small independent, mobile, and intelligent units can self-develop and then communicate each other to create an evolutive net were later discussed by philosophers, sociologists and scientists in the forthcoming years, and it was the focus of Robert Fripp’s later activities. Influenced by the works of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, Robert Fripp made contact with the British mathematician, scientist and philosopher John G. Bennett (1897-1974), who studied the ideas of Gurdjieff and refined them. Fripp described his encounter with the philosopher in his online diary at DGM website: “When I found Bennett in July 1974, the top of my head blew off”.

After this encounter, in 1974, Robert Fripp decided to break up King Crimson and entered for a 10 month period the American Society for Continuous Education (ASCE) Sherborne institute in Claymont Court, West Virginia, in order to get introduced into the Fourth Way. Fripp described his experience this way: “There was no hierarchical structure. Every day we had classes in cosmology, psychology, meditation, physical exercises. Of course, the teaching of Gorgiev’s moves was very important. We also learned some manual crafts and languages such as Japanese. Life in general was very hard, but the experience was very valuable to me. Readers interested in these schools may write to Bennett and Gurdjieff and read their works. Life in school was for me both physically painful and spiritually terrifying. During the 10 months I spent there, 20% of the students had to leave the school and 3 winded up in an asylum. It took me a whole year to readapt. Only recently have I reintegrated everyday life, I think. Life in school was cold, physically and morally. The kind of cold that freezes the soul. I didn’t think I could play there, so I hadn’t brought any instrument with me. Some people had brought guitars and I played. There was a concert about once a month. I played at 3 of those concerts. Peter and his wife came to the second one. By the way, Peter Gabriel and his family came several times to visit me.” (Best magazine, January 1979).

Later, Robert Fripp was named to the Board of Directors of ASCE and elected president. In 1987, Fripp produced the Elan Sicroff’s album “Journey to Inaccessible Places” which featured compositions by Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Fripp also learnt about the Alexander Technique, a method that works to change movement habits in everyday activities for improving ease and freedom of movement, balance, support and coordination, created by the actor F.M. Alexander around 1896. Supported by the Alexander Technique’s method, Robert Fripp developed a technique for guitarists and musicians during the 80’s called Guitar Craft, based in the relationship between the musician, the instrument, and the music. The method also involves the use of a new standard tuning for the guitar created by Robert Fripp which has been used in all the Guitar Craft related works. Consequently, in 1985 a series of Guitar Craft seminars started taking place worldwide, when Fripp was offered a teaching position at the ASCE. As a result of the seminars a performance group called The League of Crafty Guitarists was created, which has released several albums since 198- including “The League of Crafty Guitarists Live” (1986) and “Intergalactic Boogie Express: Live in Europe” (1995).

Due to his increasing interest in the explorative possibilities of dance music, Robert Fripp continued working with dance patterns in his following album “The League of Gentlemen” (1981) for which he created the band The League of Gentlemen with singer Sara Lee, keyboardist Barry Andrews and drummer Johnny Toobad. With this ensemble he would also release the album “Good Save the King” in 1985. A live album recorded in 1980 was released ten years under the title of “Thrang Thrang Gozinbulx”.

After a new Frippertronics album, “Let the Power Fall”, in 1981 Robert Fripp resurrected, again, King Crimson. As he has often stated “King Crimson is, as always, more a way of doing things. When there is nothing to be done, nothing is done: Crimson disappears. When there is music to be played, Crimson reappears. If all of life were this simple”.

The new King Crimson project, which was originally going to be called Discipline, featuring again Bill Bruford on drums plus the new members guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew from Talking Heads, David Bowie and Frank Zappa, and bassist Tony Levin from Peter Gabriel and John Lennon. The result was one of the most innovative and powerful unities in the history of rock music, which revolutionized the music map with a contemporary fusion of new wave, progressive, avant-garde and pre-electronica. The combination of Bill Bruford’s brand new electronic drums combined by the powerful, organic and precise basses of Tony Levin on the stick and the post-new wave syncopated rhythms (highly influenced by Talking Heads) and melodic charm added to Robert Fripp’s surgically frantic guitars created an unique style that was never heard before. With this formula, the band released three essential albums: “Discipline” (1981), “The Beat” (1982) and “Three Of A Perfect Pair” (1984). The three of them were produced using the same type of combination of tracks, which included a selection of pop/dance oriented tracks (“Waiting Man”, “Sleepless”), pop ballads (“Mate Kudasai”, “Two Hands”), and a modern revision of the classical King Crimson long-length dark and experimental instrumentals (“Discipline”, “Requiem”, “Industry” and “Lark Tongues In Aspic III”). In 1984, after having gained more attention and recognition in the media and industry that during the whole of it’s former career, King Crimson split again.

Robert Fripp also started a collaborative project in 1982 with other all-time creative and inventive guitarists, Andy Summers of The Police, to whom he had influenced on the trio’s last studio album “Synchronicity” (1983). Both guitarists released the albums “I Advance Masked” (1982), where they played all the instruments, and “Bewitched” (1984), produced by Summers and featuring the collaboration of other musicians.

On 16th May, 1986 Robert Fripp married the singer and actress Toyah Willcox, who was one a significant artists from the British punk and new wave scene and got popular for her acting roll in the movie “Quadrophenia” (1979). In 1986, Fripp and Toyah released the collaboration album “The Lady or the Tiger” and he later collaborated in her solo albums “Desire” (1981), “Prostitute” (1988) and “Ophelia’s Shadow” (1991). Later in 1991, they also formed the project Sunday All Over the World, featuring drummer Paul Beavis, and the later member of King Crimson, the stick player Trey Gunn, releasing the album “Kneeling At the Shrine”.

In 1993, Robert Fripp started a collaborative work with the singer from the legendary new wave band Japan David Sylvian, recording the albums “The First Day” (1993) and “Damage” (1994), which feature some of the most exuberant Fripp guitar playing. Fripp had already worked for Sylvian in the singer’s solo album “Gone To Earth” in 1986. A second project born out of the Guitar Craft seminaries was born in 1944: the California Guitar Trio, who were former members of The League of Crafty Guitarists. The trio included Paul Richards from Salt Lake City, Utah, Bert Lams from Brussels, Belgium, and Hideyo Moriya from Tokyo, releasing the album “The Bridge Between”.

Also in 1993, Robert Fripp took part in the album project FFWD (Fripp, Fehlmann, Weston and Duncan) along with Alex Paterson and Kris Weston from the ambient band The Orb and Thomas Fehlmann. This was not the only incursion of Fripp in the new generation of electronic ambient artists. He also collaborated in The Orb’s album “Cydonia” (2001) and Thomas Fehlmann’s “one to three. Overflow; ninenine / nd.” (1999). In 1999, he also collaborated playing guitars in Future Sound of London’s ambient double album “Lifeformsâ€?.

In 1994, Robert Fripp revisited the Frippertronics loop technique and improved it with the new digital technology to start a series of new ambient works under the name and genre of Soundscapes. These recordings include the albums “1999 Soundscapes: Live in Argentina” (1994), “A Blessing of Tears” (1995), “Radiophonics” (1995), “That Which Passes” (1996), “November Suite” (1997), “Pie Jesu” (1997), “The Gates of Paradise” (1998) and “Lightness: Music for the Marble Palace” (1998).

Also in 1994, Robert Fripp re-formed King Crimson in a curious experiment called “double trio” that featured two drummers and two bass players. This way the new King Crimson included the lineup from 80’s (Bill Bruford, Tony Levin, Adrian Belew) on one hand and stick and warr guitar player Trey Gunn and drummer Pat Mastelotto in the other. The concept of the new King Crimson was to create two different units of work, called ProjeKct 1, ProjeKct 2 and ProjeKct 3, which could work separately as well as together. As a result ProjeKct 1 (R.Fripp, B. Bruford, T. Levin and T. Gunn) released the album “Live at the Jazz Cafe” (1999). ProjeKct 2 (R. Fripp, A. Belew and T. Gunn) released “Space Groove” (1998) and the live album “Live Groove” featuring Adrian Belew on V drums (yes, that’s right, and he is an amazing drum n’ bass percussionist). ProjeKct 3 (R. Fripp, T. Gunn, P. Mastelotto) released “Masque” (1999). Another project featuring A. Belew, R. Fripp, T. Gunn and P. Mastelotto was released in 2000 under the moniker of ProjeKct X entitled “Heaven and Earth”.

In 1997, Robert Fripp founded the Discipline Global Mobile (DMG) label with the purpose of helping music come into the world which would otherwise be unlikely to do, after a long period of legal battles between Fripp and his former record company EG records. The label releases the works of artists such as King Crimson, Peter Hammill, California Guitar Trio, Billy Nelson, and several King Crimson’s members.

Under the name of King Crimson the whole group of musicians released in 1995 the album “Thrak”, with a similar type of selection of songs than in the 80’s era but innovating the band’s sound with digital and futuristic atmospheres. The band toured the world as a 6 piece band. After this version of the band there was a period of hiatus. King Crimson was re-built in 2003 in a short of nature selective process, remaining Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto, releasing the album “The ConstruKtion of the Light” (2003) with an important switch in the sound of the band to alternative rock, and “The Power to Believe” (2003) featuring with Tony Levin instead of Trey Gunn.

In 2004, a new work in a new collaboration with Brian Eno was released on the Opal/DMG label, titled “The Equatorial Stars”. Apart from the projects mentioned before, Robert Fripp has also collaborated with other numerous artists. An uncomplete list of works includes Colin Scott’s “With Friends” (1971), Jeffrey Fayman, the acoustic feminist trio of sisters the Roches producing and playing in the albums “The Roches” (1979) and “Keep On Doing” (1982), Van Der Graaf Generator’s “H to He” (1970) and “Pawn Hearts” (1971), Peter Hammill’s “Fool’s Mate” (1972), Daryl Hall John Oates’ “Along the Red Ledge” (1978), violinist Walter Steding’s “Walter Steding” (1980), The Flying Lizards’ “Fourth Wall” (1981), Inga Humpe’s “Planet Oz” (1990), Maria Volk’s “Goldberg” (1991), David Cunningham’s “Water” (1992), The Grid’s “Four Five Six” (1992) and “Evolver” (1994), Iona’s “Beyond These Shores” (1993) and “Journey into The Morn” (1995) , Rimitti’s “Sidi Mansour” (1994), No-Man’s “Flowermouth” (1994), “Flowermix” (1995) and “Wild Opera” (1996), Camilla’s Little Secret’s “The Steps” (1994), John Wetton’s “Battle Lines” (1994), “ArkAngel” (1998) and “Sinister” (2001), Europa String Choir’s “The Starving Moon” (1995), Midge Ure’s “Breathe” (1996), Ten Seconds’ “Ten Seconds” (1996), Nicolai Dunger’s “Songs Wearing Clothes” (1996), David Cross’ “Exiles” (1997), Santos Luminosos’ “Metal Ambiente” (1998), Bass Communion’s “Bass Communion” (1998), Ellis, Beggs & Howard’s “The Lost Years” (1998 May), Bill Rieflin’s “Birth of a Giant” (1999), BPM&M’s “XtraKcts & ArtifaKcts” (2001), John Paul Jones’ “The Thunderthief” (2002), Craig Armstrong’s “As If To Nothing” (2002), Diego Souto’s “Amniotic Eyes 2.0″ (2002), Joe Satriani’s “Strange Beautiful Music” (2002), Steve Roach & Jeffrey Fayman’s “Trance Spirits” (2002), The Hellboys’ “Cha Cha With The Hellboys” (2004) and Nektar’s “Magic is a Child” (2005).