David Singleton's Diary

Music into Muzak

A little background. For about five years Robert and I have been discussing creating a "music director’s guide to King Crimson": the catalogue reduced to about one hundred thirty-second money shots, allowing anyone unfamiliar with King Crimson (which is probably most of the music directors working today) to get an overview of the excitements on offer. The need for such a guide has been thrown into sharp relief by our involvement with Kanye West’s track "Power" (or King Crimson’s track "Power" viewed in an alternative light). This was not a major hit, and we have received virtually no income from conventional sales, but it has consistently high useage and revenue from licensing, whether movies, adverts or TV shows. Viewed from that perspective, the mainstream industry has moved from a point where the majority of revenue comes from sales to one where it now comes from licensing. So in our attempts to feed the King Crimson beast, we need to keep up and open ourselves to that world. Not forgetting the equally important non-monetary reason that this is an important way of keeping the music alive and introducing it to new ears. Hence the need for a "music director’s guide". And for five years we have tried to farm it out to willing souls - as THIS WAS A JOB I DID NOT WANT!

So unsurprisingly in a world where if you define very carefully what you don’t want you usually get it, I have spent the last two weeks making that guide. I called the finished article "The King Crimson Colour Chart" - because it was exactly like staring at some Rembrandt masterpiece and reducing it to nothing more than colour shades ie. in that corner, there is a nice shade of green, we will add that to our colour chart. And to make matters worse, you have no idea what kind of room. mood, or type of colour the decorator wants. In looking at the painting, you are deliberately overlooking the whole, or any artistic intent. Reducing music to muzak. A perfect example might be the power riff in Larks Part One. This doesn’t occur for maybe three minutes or so, a perfect example of why such a guide is needed. But once it is taken out of context, it is suddenly too short. It now needs to repeat (a challenging editing task without making it dull). So you are now changing the intent behind the music. And that is true of virtually every sample you choose.

So an interesting professional and technical challenge, while musically horrible. And I suspect 90% of the colours lovingly added to my colour chart are of no practical use whatsoever. It’s just that I don’t know which ones. It is now in the hands of Tom and Adrian at the licensing department at UMG who I met last Thursday. We shall see.