King Crimson

King Crimson is a British musical group founded by guitarist Robert Fripp and drummer Michael Giles in 1968. Their musical style has typically been categorised as rock and roll, progressive rock and math rock. Though its membership has fluctuated considerably during its lifetime, the band continues to perform and record music. The name King Crimson was coined by Peter Sinfield as a synonym for Beelzebub, prince of demons; according to Fripp, Beelzebub is an anglicised form of the Arabic phrase "B'il Sabab", meaning "the man with an aim".http://www.songsouponsea.com/Promenade/Metaphysical.html

Music

Fripp, as noted, has described King Crimson as "a way of doing things", and also as "an experiment in organising anarchy". Over a period of 35 years, and many changes in membership, configuration, and instrumentation, King Crimson has maintained a kind of constancy in its musical vision rare among long-lived bands.

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Influences

The music of King Crimson was obviously grounded to some extent in the rock of the 1960s, and especially the acid rock and psychedelic music movements. The first King Crimson frequently played Donovan Leitch's Get Thy Bearings, and were known to play The Beatles's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Related Topics:
Acid rock - Psychedelic music - Donovan - The Beatles

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However, where bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones played more sophisticated forms of American rock, Crimson attempted to "Europeanise" what had previously been an essentially American form of music. To a great extent, they stripped away the blues-based foundation of rock music and replaced it with a foundation based in the modern European symphonic tradition. Though they cast a wide net, two names in particular seem to have had a powerful influence on Crimson's music.

Related Topics:
Rolling Stones - Blues

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Gustav Holst is the more obvious of the two on the surface. The first incarnation of King Crimson played the Mars section of Holst's suite The Planets as a regular part of their live set. The influence of Béla Bartók is subtler, but has been referred to many times by Fripp and other band members, and seems more pervasively present in the band's overall musical repertoire. As a result of this influence, their first album is frequently viewed as the nominal starting point of the symphonic rock or progressive rock movements.

Related Topics:
Gustav Holst - The Planets - Béla Bartók - Symphonic rock - Progressive rock

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Musical themes

Fans have two equal and opposite complaints about each new album or incarnation of the band: either they say that it's nothing like the King Crimson they know and love, or they say that it's exactly like what has gone before, and nothing new has been added. The apparent contradiction can be resolved by understanding that, while King Crimson constantly creates new sounds and new pieces, several themes remain constant from the earliest versions of the band to the present.

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The most obvious of these themes is composition by the use of a gradually building rhythmic motif. The Holst Mars that the first King Crimson played is a clear example of this, a complex pulse in 5/8 time with strings and winds — or, as played by King Crimson, mellotron — playing a skirling melody above. This piece transformed into "The Devil's Triangle" on the In the Wake of Poseidon album, and was followed by many other forms, from "The Talking Drum" in 1973 all the way to "Dangerous Curves" in 2003.

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A second theme that has remained constant throughout the career of King Crimson is an instrumental piece, often embedded as a break in a song, in which the band plays a passage of a rhythmic complexity that would almost challenge a group of classically trained musicians working with a conductor. King Crimson's single best-known song, "21st Century Schizoid Man", is an early example of this. Their series of pieces collectively titled Larks' Tongues in Aspic (also including pieces of similar intent, "Thrak" and "Level Five") go deeper into polyrhythmic complexity, delving into rhythms that wander into and out of general synchronisation with each other--to the point where the listener is frequently unable to even count the main measure beats--yet through polyrhythm synchronisation all 'finish' together. (Occasionally these pieces fail onstage; Fripp refers to these failures as "train wrecks".) Perhaps the apex of rhythmic complexity in the King Crimson repertoire was the trilogy of early 1980s albums, which contained gamelan-like rhythmic layers, and continual staccato patterns overlaying each other (a case-in-point being "Neal And Jack And Me" from Beat).

Related Topics:
21st Century Schizoid Man - Polyrhythm

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Other themes harder to document clearly include the composition of insanely difficult passages for individual instruments (especially Fripp's guitar ?notably "Fracture" on Starless and Bible Black); pieces with a loud, aggressive sound not unlike heavy metal music; and the jarring juxtaposition of pretty tunes and ballads with weird, often dissonant, noises.

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Improvisation

From the very first, King Crimson performances featured improvisations, in which the music can, and frequently does, go anywhere. Improvisations can be imbedded in composed pieces, like 21st Century Schizoid Man or Thrak, but most Crimson performances over the years have included at least one stand-alone improvisation, where the band simply started playing and took the music wherever it went, sometimes including passages of improvised silence (as Bill Bruford's contribution to the improvised Trio). The earliest example of an unambiguously improvising King Crimson on record is the spacious, oft-criticised (as self indulgent) extended middle-section of Moonchild from the first album, in which the composed parts act as bookends to the improv.

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Unlike most jazz and rock improvisation or jamming, these sessions are rarely in any sense blues-based. They vary so much in sound that King Crimson has been able to release several albums consisting entirely of improvised music. Occasionally, particular improvised pieces will be performed in different forms at different shows, becoming more and more refined and eventually appearing on official studio releases (the most recent example being Power to Believe III, which originally existed as the stage improv Deception of the Thrush)

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