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November 06, 1981  |
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The Savoy Second House New York, NY |
Not a review, more like waking up from an intense dream May 24, 2012
Written by fermentedmusic
I felt a chill come up my back as I listened to this.
It does help (in the murkiness here and there) to know the tunes well over many years, but somehow the recording quality seems irrelevant. I had meant to give this a casual listen while working. I had to frequently drop what I was doing and let the music burn. Part of me wondered if the energy in it would relent, and it didn’t.
The ’81 Crimson is already among my favorite music ever, but these versions go beyond what I "know" of that music. The "Beat" songs sound almost like completely different material, wilder, more dreamy.
But maybe what struck me the most was what this show does to the meaning of the word "band". This is less like listening to 4 musicians, more like listening to a strange boisterous creature that keeps morphing into different shapes as it careens about. If I use the word "dances" instead of "careens", it would have to be like the Balinese masked Rangda and Barong. Each musician sounds electrified, simultaneously ready to hold down (and maybe even "improve") the foundation of the house and be ready to leap out of it into the sky, sometimes joining another musician who is doing the same. In fact, this happens in most of the songs (maybe most spectacularly in "Satori", "Indiscipline", and "The Sheltering Sky").
This music sounds new and ahead-of-its time even now, and that is mysteriously true of many musics that mean the most to me, whether ethnic or in the rock or jazz or electronic or classical or folk or whatever musical-cultural worlds.
Scary in the best sense, and as deep as it gets.
The audience are also a huge factor in making this gig what it is. (And they aren’t holding up cell phones, cameras, texting or staring at iPads.) It may be that a gig this explosive and creative is only possible before a great audience.
This show also gives a sense (as all great music does) of the endless creative possibilities inherent in music.
It seems silly to give this a "rating" in "stars", unless those star-shapes are furiously making mosaics around the screen and then catapulting off of it.
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