Berlin And Aylesbury Reviewed

Our thanks to guestbook regular Davidly who was went to the trouble of translating a review of King Crimson that originally appeared in Berliner Zeitung. David writes "Here is my translation of what I find to be the, uh, germane part of Christian Schlütter’s review of Berlin, evening number one, from Berliner Zeitung (it’s a rough translation, but much better than Google).

Straightaway the deeper meaning of the armada of drums reveals itself. Robert Fripp, the guitar and keyboard playing co-founder and only remaining founder of King Crimson, has a penchant for repetition, most often modest arpeggios or pentatonic scales that he plays relentlessly in succession on the guitar, varied slightly with each passage. Out of this arises rhythmically and harmonically complex structures, sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, that grind and translate the material into festoons of sound. Through this incessant repetition, Fripp liberates the differences. This occurs in nothing less than ideal fashion in the pieces "Larks’ Tongues in Aspic" and "Fracture".

Now, the polyrhythmic coordination of the three drummers propels this subversive mechanism further ahead: They strengthen the already twisted, seldom in 4/4 Fripply created compositions. In short, Robert Fripp has with his new percussion heavy lineup of King Crimson — already the eighth in the band’s history — collected an ensemble with which he can demonstrate his minimalist compositional principle in analytical clarity.

Meanwhile, here's a review of the second night at Aylesbury to take a look at.