After rehearsals in New York with John Wetton and Michael Walden in 1977 had finished, Robert Fripp continued to work on and refine material for what would become Exposure with Tony Levin and Jerry Marotta. Having worked with the pair previously with Peter Gabriel in both the studio and on stage the previous year, there’s an easy fluency between the players here. That could of course also be the result of the material here being more formed and developed than the previous Exposure rehearsals.
While some of these pieces are familiar we get to hear them in either their raw state such as the new-to-these-ears Slow Stomp, or, as in the case of You Burn Me Up, moving towards a finished form that’s instantly recognisable.
The two Chicagoish tracks presented here have the novelty of Fripp playing a surprisingly bluesy lick that would ultimately be lost by the time it came to record the album properly.
What’s also intriguing about this session is the presence of another ballad other than North Star. With the provisional and prosaic title of Ballad, if you close your eyes it could be springing from the fingers of Fripp in Brondesbury Road in the late 60s or even a contender for the Poseidon album.
The sound quality here is vastly superior to the Fripp/Wetton/Walden tapes and once again Alex Mundy has done us proud in bringing another aspect of the Exposure album to light.
