Evensong

Again, the Question   December 5, 2006
Written by BillKent

What is most marvelous, and valid, about Mr. Fripp’s Soundscapes is that they contain within them an inquiry into how it is possible to make music, given the time, place, audience expectations, performer’s expectations and other factors leading to the moment at which the music happens. This question isn’t trivial. While, for some, the creation of art is easy, or necessary, or an expression of passion or merely a blessed event, it is, for professionals, a part of an on-going practice that rarely leads where the practioner wishes to go. At its best, the practice of art reveals things to the artist about himself, and his relationship with his world, that he would not find any other way. At its worst, the practice of art becomes a terribly unreliable and frequently unrewarding way to acquire sustinance, "make money," change one’s status and, perhaps, affect the "hopeless rutting" that Mr. Fripp supposedly experienced in his youth that, the tale of which, as Dr. Watson said of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures with the Giant Rat of Sumatra, "the world is not yet prepared." We don’t get any of this in Soundscapes. We don’t get a demonstration of musical ability, craft, skill or chops. We don’t get an artist showing us how "good" he can be. Mr. Fripp knows enough about music theory to produce hours of sweet, lush sheets of sound that could be used as mood, background or ambient music. He could also provide enough dissonance to disturb us far more than any of us would wish. That he has the ability to act intentionally in an improvisational event becomes even more remarkable when you consider that , beyond the promise of a start and a finish, Soundscapes are not intentional.  Neither are they completely random: the artist and his audience are not merely victims of chance, trial or error. Rather Soundscapes are the opportunity to let an answer arise to that barely voiced question: how is music possible? How is it welcomed into the world? How can we  part of its process without harming it? How can we accept every reason, many of them worthwhile, rational and astute, to never to make art again, and yet persist in making it? The answer Mr. Fripp finds is always different and distinct to the time and place at which each Soundscape was born. And yet, as distinct as the answer can be, it has a continual relevance. This makes listening, and, therefore "owning" the recordings, an opportunity for further exploration, especially with Soundscapes such as these, when it seems that we are not so much listening to recorded music, as much as we are listening to sounds within ourselves, that have always existed, in some inexplicable way, and are only now being revealed by one man’s patient curiosity.
--Bill Kent 

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