Kiel Auditorium St Louis

King Crimson fans are well-used to coping with the turgid sonics that comes baked into some audience recordings that find their way into the DGM archive. Although nearly unlistenable, we still savour the leaps in ambition, initiative, and inspiration that spring forth from players walking the tightrope between hazard and heroism. Some boots however defy attempts to restore even a sliver of life into their twitching form and this gig is one of them.

There are some interesting, if unintentional, byproducts of listening to a tape where the blunt force trauma of distortion crushes everything into a murky broth; David Cross’s elegiac violin in the ‘water section’ of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part One is wreathed in a halo of reverb, whose ghostly shimmer adds a kind of haunting melancholia. It’s oddly beautiful, like a memory of a summery tune only half-recalled on a winter’s eve.

It’s an unexpectedly lovely quality that attaches itself to Exiles. Even the improv, which for the most part sounds as clear as listening to braille, becomes transformed into a series of cathartic swells in volume, something to be felt rather than listened to.

All of this, however, is to find the silver lining in some very dark rumbling clouds indeed. Preserved and presented here for completeness, it’s one that only the most die-hard Crimhead collector will want.