Following on from the previous evening’s performance at Wimborne Minster, Travis & Fripp decamp to Broad Chalke. Around 50 or so people gratefully exchanged the sweltering heat outdoors for All Saints’ cool stone walls and lofty wooden rafters.
Working in a productive mixture of agreed areas (such as a key or a “feel”) and complete improvisation, the performance is a delicately tightrope walk between two worlds.
Perhaps due to differences of venues, times and the occasion (this was ostensibly a fund-raiser for the local school), the music seemed lighter in tone compared to the more sombre mood struck the previous evening. That said, the appearance of soprano saxophone is almost unbearably poignant on the slowly unfurling interior travelogue of In a Field of Green
Route 23 offers a more oblique insight into their practice as notes and runs move away from each other, in cautious elliptical orbits. The Offering presents a game in three sections: writhing solo flute figures which gradually coalesce into to slow snaking loops; clipped guitar chords, and then the final section wherein Fripp unleashes some patented angular side-swipe soloing.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in this series of concerts was the inclusion of Moonchild. More of a meditation on the main theme than a cover version of the KC original.Fripp’s conversion of a single note into a soaring stratospheric-bound whistle hurtling into the blue at around 4.50 may well be reason enough to grab this gig.
Long term listeners of the Churchscape series will be especially interested in how Theo’s presence alters and enhances the End of Time themes which bring this concert to a spellbinding conclusion.
