The other day I asked who said this – "I sat with Keith Tippett once and we found that our impression of colours was substantially the same. C major and A minor were both white for us, and D minor and D major were both green."
It was of course Robert Fripp. The snippet was lifted from this 1980 interview by Cynthia Rose in the late lamented Viz music magazine.
A Chat with Mr. Fripp
ROBERT FRIPP is a musician, theoretician, theologian and, as his colleague David Bowie (referred by Fripp as "Mr. B") points out, "probably the man with the best sense of humour in rock".
Like Bowie, Fripp "retired" at the height of an art-rock superstardom. Unlike Bowie, he was serious about it: he entered J.G. Bennett's International Academy for Continuous Education in Gloucestershire, with thoughts of becoming a priest. But by '76, he had been lured back to music through the continuous demand for his spectacular guitar-playing and production skills from friends like Peter Gabriel, Darryl Hall, the Roches, Blondie, David Bowie and Brian Eno.
He's produced two unique solo albums – 1978's Exposure and this spring's God Save The Queen, and he became the first mega-star over to perform in concert at a Pizza Express. Currently, Fripp is promoting God Save The Queen: an album for his patented 'Frippertronics' backed with a newer style of music, his 'Discotronics'. But will he play the Pizza Express again?
"No, not with rock and roll. It would interfere with people's digestion. It wouldn't improve the impulse buying of pizzas, either, because I sense this tour is going to be a very energetic, visceral experience. If one plays music for eating it implies certain responsibilities, which one must accept."
Recently, you published an essay ('The Abandonment of Centre in Stereo Mixing', Sound International, Feb '80) in which you talked about seeing sound in visual terms...
Well, it's how I've always worked.
Do you find other people working that way?
Ah – I don't know; people don't rush up and say, 'Hey I have to tell you that I mix in terms of abstract geometric shapes!' But I sometimes have conversations about such intriguing notions as keys in colour. I sat with Keith Tippett once and we found that our impression of colours was substantially the same. C major and A minor were both white for us, and D minor and D major were both green.
Your approach is to use only you intuition and what you define as intelligence: 'the capacity to make the right choice in a situation where there are no precedents' ... So how do you make decisions?
Divergent as opposed to convergent problem solution. Convergent problems are mechanistic problems open to mechanistic solutions like – uh, the tap falls off you sink and in comes a plumber, faced with a practical problem which he mechanistically solves, then leaves. A divergent problem would be 'what to do with the building industry' – or, the supply of spare parts for sinks. One would have to come up with a solution to these problems in a situation where one does not have enough information to make a rational choice; one would have to wing it! That is creative problem solution, that is the real world and that is the resolution of 'Under Heavy Manners', the key track to the new album.
This methodology is the key to the new album?
Well, take 'Under Heavy Manners', the track with vocals by David Byrne of Talking Heads. Heavy Manners is a kind of synonym for 1984 – in current street jargon it means police repression but it's in fact taken from Manley's Declaration of a State of Emergency in the West Indies in the '60's. and if we are under heavy manners, if that's the problem, what is the solution? I go through a lot of alternatives, then come up with the advice "Remain in hell without despair", the song presents a mind, having sifted through all these panaceas and at one point ending up in a scream (which on the lyric sheet contains 47 "a"s and one "h"; I instructed the printer specially.). There's tremendous conflict, then this piece of advice, then a reconciliation at the end: "I am resplendent in divergence."
David sings that three times...
Yes; David was there in the studio waiting to sing it and he said, What approach do you want me to take? and I said, Oh, what would you like to take? and he said "Country and Western". So I said, OK, I'd love it. And on the tape you can hear David's little snigger as he obviously thinks, Well now this guy really is a turkey! But I'm thinking of turning that phrase sung by David into a 20-minute piece, building up accompaniment around it. It's just that at the moment I'm working on a series of indiscretions – using people's voices recorded in private and public contexts, saying things which are indiscreet. One is, "Do you think Errol Flynn was Nazi spy?" Another is "Are young girls who love horses taken advantage of?" Fabulous! There's piles, but all very different; no one commits the same kind of indiscretion.
What do you call this sort of thing, Robert?
Metaphysical rock and roll which, although hilariously funny, HILARIOUSLY FUNNY, is also music to dance to. You have to approach it with the left foot firmly entrenched in humour and the right in a quite dedicated commitment to the project in hand. But of course if you move off your two feet you tend to unbalance and fall over. Walking, I've found, tends to involve two feet.
Tell a bit more about what the Frippertronics project is generating.
Well – Eno has been developing ambient video lately – video Muzak. And as Frippertronics is also an investigation of Muzak, I asked him to get together an exhibition for my Frippertronics concert at the Kitchen in the New York. I'd seen the first ambient video, where he put the camera outside the window of the house opposite and left in and the first movement was created by a bird that flew by – it was lovely!
