My answer to all those obsessed with strange time signatures - "all King Crimson music is in one", as in today's video from Philadelphia (one of my favourite of the evenings with Robert. We could choose any number of the questions from there).
Not surprisingly, despite what I said, I do know far more than I might wish to about the actual time signatures – partly because when you edit pieces with different parts cycling against each other, you do need to understand the internal workings. Although come to think of it, that’s not strictly true. During the recording of THRAK, I did an edit for Bill Bruford on the original longer version of B’Boom – and he was most impressed that I had found a spot where the two cycling time signatures both matched. I confessed that – exactly as I describe in the video with THRAK - I had simply listened to the combined rhythm.
And, if this is time-signature-confession-time, I am not always sure about the larger time signatures. I often hear them as smaller subsets. So rather than hearing something in thirteen (answers on a postcard please), I might hear three bars of three and a bar of four. Which puts me slightly in the Pat Mastelotto camp, who mentioned at a Royal Package, that he tends to reduce things to triangles and squares. It surprised me at the time, but if I were scoring the pieces without external knowledge, I might well have done the same thing.
