Though several tracks are taken from a series of dates in the USA in June 2005 (New York, Massachusetts, Huntington) there are also performances dating from 1995 (the solemn Midnight Blue taken from A Blessing Of Tears), 1997 (On My Mother’s Birthday and 2001. In light of this, Love Cannot Bear feels akin to an audio documentary spanning Fripp’s many years of patient inquiry into the possibilities of soundscapes and its related activities.
Love Cannot Bear offers a guided tour to those places of reflection where soundscapes emerge; places of mourning, quietude, foreboding, lamentation. As Fripp explains in his sleeve notes “Affirmations, statements & declarations of faith that the creation is benevolent (despite all evidence to the contrary) are, in these Soundscape settings, mainly diatonic. As such, they are often easier listening than the atonal, polytonal & chromatic music of other Soundscape areas.”
The immediacy of “making a lot of noise with one guitar” as Fripp has disarmingly described his soundscaping, is tempered on the piquant Easter Sunday, (recorded in 1983), with dazzling runs on acoustic guitar which subsequently echoed and extended by old-school Frippertronics sustained soloing. It acts as bridge between the old analogue world and the embracing of digital technology that gives voice to the Soundscape project.
Elsewhere, the title track has lyrics voiced by Fripp processed through a vocoder effect overdubbed in Nashville in 2002 onto a Soundscape recorded in the atrium of New York’s World Financial Centre in 2001.
Elsewhere, Requiem, emerges from the dark caution of uncertainty into a spiraling bliss of conviction and joy. There’s a compositional depth here that shows Fripp grappling with something mysterious and ineffable. Enigma Variations might have also been an apt title had someone not gotten there first, and like the ninth variation from Edward Elgar’s famous suite, this is music blessed with a stirring, intense emotional charge.
Throughout, there’s a sense of soundscapes as part of a personal and long-standing interrogation of how one small man engages with big (but terminally unhip) ideas as vast and far-reaching as aspiration, redemption, forgiveness. The language may be glacially symphonic and slow-moving but it is always moving.
11 November 2024
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