"Meanwhile, 'Exposure' isn't just a title, it's what the record demands."
Nick Kent, NME.
Reading through some of the press clippings at the time of Exposure's release in 1979, you can tell how surprised and wrong-footed reviewers of the day were by this album.[endtease] Anyone expecting it to be an extension of King Crimson was in for a shock and that included fans as well.
Writing in the NME, Nick Kent saw the album as bringing together different components to fashion something genuinely different. "Simply put 'Exposure' approaches alternative musical contexts, pairings and experiments with a maturity and dexterity that only a dedicated musician could display."
Michael Watts for the Melody Maker celebrated Fripp's quirky sense humour as being integral to the record, concluding "Exposure…reveal(s) more of Fripp's personality than any record has achieved before."
Of his time in New York, Fripp told New Hi-Fi Sound's Mark Prendergast: "In America there was no star trip. People would come up to you on the street and ask you if you were working and, if not, invite you to play. It was magic. I had a flat on the Bowery; I'd walk out and Richard Lloyd of Television would generally be staggering by whatever time it was. There was this incredible openness. The Johnny Blitz benefit at CBGB's was a wonderful event. Chris Stein, you know — 'We're doing a benefit for Johnny Blitz; got involved in a knife fight; needs some lawyers' fee; do you want to play with us?' It was as easy as that. It was a remarkable flowering."
It was from this kind of environment that Fripp's first solo album emerged. A stream-of-conscious musical autobiography, Exposure stood out from the prog-rock crowd he'd often been associated with. Bridging the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds of old-school musical technique and post-punk attitude, Exposure is one savagely beautiful blast of an album that sounds as safety-pin sharp now as it did back then.
"It's the Sergeant Pepper of avant punk." – The Wire
Sid Smith
Whitley Bay, May 2006
