The sixth in the series of Churchscapes performances saw Fripp playing beneath the enormous dome of Saint Paul’s cathedral[endtease] surrounded by shafts of sunlight and shoals of wandering visitors.
Yet somehow the vast scale of the building and its opulent grandeur was made startlingly intimate and intensely human in scale. Brimming with emotion, themes and motifs are gracefully layered before gradually dissolving into the air.
When they work, Soundscapes have an uncanny ability to occupy two entirely opposing concepts at once. In this instance one wonders how something so apparently delicate and ephemeral as this could also be as strong and as powerful as it is.
“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, and forgiveness. The language may be glacially symphonic and slow-moving, but it is always moving.”
Though written about the Love Cannot Bear album, these words could easily apply to Fripp’s concerts undertaken in the UK during June 2006 and to this particular performance.
