Robert Fripp's Diary

Bredonborough.

17.13

Rising 07.00.

Morning reading, thinking and writing.

I Advance Masked – Before & After - Day Thirteen c. 12.00…

Onto a quiet street. Within our small high street supermarket, not a great sense of social distancing. Today, all the staff are wearing gloves.

I prepared lunch, and it was very tasty. A cup of tea down the garden and watering.

An enquiry from the Team of GC translators…

Q: "Noticing is the outcome of an alert and engaged attention."
We don´t have a word in spanish for “engaged”. Engaged: committed? or centred?

RF: Either focused or centered convey the sense.

PS Noticing is beyond our control. It is a creative moment that appears to come to us, from outside of us, almost as a gift.

So, what may we do to make this more likely? because noticing comes to us even when we are completely asleep.

We practice presence. Noticing is a more-likely outcome when we are present.
How are we present?

By cultivating alertness, open-ness, and volitional attention.
In practice, this begins with developing sensation.

So, back to “engaged”. In this sense, perhaps...

Noticing is AN outcome of an alert and AVAILABLE attention.

Thank you, and to all the translators. You sharpen my thinking.

(Part Two)
RF Press Conference with European Journalists
Sanctuary Board Room, Olympia, London
Wednesday 5^th. February, 2003 @ 11.00

Q: You’re often described as a gentle and quiet man and yet you play a kind of music which is very heavy, often ferocious, often very loud. Do you see a paradox in that, or where does that come from?

RF: Ideas escape those who nominally seem to be responsible for them, if the ideas have any value.

So am I a quiet, private man? Well, fairly obviously. Is there anything exciting about me? Nothing whatsoever, as you yourself can judge from this table. There is nothing exciting about me. One of the most exciting things for me is I’m going to see my wife this evening. I mean, front page, FRIPP VISITS WIFE. My Wife is currently in Canterbury. She’s on tour with Calamity Jane.

When I returned from Madrid last Saturday - because of the snow I was sent to Gatwick instead of Heathrow – I drove home and did a little shopping. Then I unpacked and went down to my local pub, thirty yards from where I live. I bought a pint of cider, sat in a little corner, a little nook by the fireplace, and drunk it all on my own. And I was so happy. And then my wife came home and I was happier still. This is excitement. (Laughs).

Q: Talking about balance, when I was listening to the record, it sounds like a typical King Crimson record to me. If I listen to the details, it becomes a totally different record, a totally new record and there’s such a nice balance of these two extremes, of these two aspects of King Crimson.

RF: I agree.

Q: Was this on purpose?

RF: It wasn’t an accident. The quick answer is yes, the form is most important. For me the form is critically important.

When the album arrived from Nashville in England at the end of July (2002), it wasn’t a King Crimson record. It was an Adrian, Robert, Pat and Trey record, engineered by Machine. And it was a good album and it’s 90% of what you hear now. But it wasn’t King Crimson. It was the remaining 10% which was added in the main by David Singleton, my partner at DGM and in ToneProbe, who was editing and mastering. We had late nights, late nights - editing, compiling and mastering and then mastering again. And while we were doing this, the late night sessions in DGM SoundWorld were interspersed with telephone calls to the Sanctuary lawyer doing the deal.

So the form as it is now was not an accident, nor was it a given.

Q: So what were those ten percent that changed from that normal King Crimson record to what there is now?

RF: If you looked at this building from the outside, it would be a building. If you came inside and there was no furniture and decorations, you’d say it’s a building. Once the building is built, what goes on inside, like furniture and what you have on the wall, is relatively less but it does determine that this is the Sanctuary building, as opposed to a building. The final 10% is that.

Q: So is David Singleton a member of King Crimson?

RF: Are you a member of King Crimson, David?

DS: No, I am not.

RF: David is not a member of King Crimson. However, what I will say for David - he has actually heard more of recorded King Crimson music, archives and albums, than any man on earth including me. David, for example, spent four months editing, listening, editing and compiling the live tapes from 1969 that went into the four volumes of the Epitaph box. That was hard. And that was only 1969. Wait ‘til we hit 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and then onwards...

David is my business partner at DGM. We have a 50/50 relationship. Not 51/49. If we don’t agree on something, it doesn’t happen.

Q: When you said that King Crimson was more a way of doing things than just a band, do you refer just to the style or a way of thinking?

RF: And the way of feeling and the way of acting.

If you look at one small aspect of how we live our life, you’ll find that generally another small aspect of how we live our life is actually the same. You look at a third small thing, and how we behave in life, it will have the same imprint as the first two. And then perhaps we might come to the conclusion that all the small things of our life are actually our life.

In Guitar Craft what we say is how you hold the pick is how you live your life. So, that’s how you hold the guitar pick (demonstrates). Of the maybe 1300 or 1400 people that have come into Guitar Craft, there are maybe two other hands that have yet approximated to this (demonstrates the right hand position of readiness). Generally when people come in, their wrists are like this (demonstrates a position of collapse). There, if I presented you with that wrist, or with this (demonstrates a wrist with tension) would you respond to that as a difference in attitude, for example? Here is a young man’s wrist holding his pick and about to hit a string on this guitar (demonstrates an aggressive wrist position, locked in tension), and I go like that (releasing the tension in the wrist) I am asking him to release his world-view, how he thinks of his life, how he believes the world to be, and how he responds to living in the world.

So the question of simply moving a balance in his hand, his wrist and his thumb, to hold a pick, is actually taking on the whole of his life. And it is awful. It’s awful because of all the fixity, all the energy which is locked into the assumptions and the patterns... wrist after wrist. But, it’s real.

Q: You’re often described as a gentle and quiet man and yet you play a kind of music which is very heavy, often ferocious, often very loud. Do you see a paradox in that, or where does that come from?

RF: Ideas escape those who nominally seem to be responsible for them, if the ideas have any value.

So am I a quiet, private man? Well, fairly obviously. Is there anything exciting about me? Nothing whatsoever, as you yourself can judge from this table. There is nothing exciting about me. One of the most exciting things for me is I’m going to see my wife this evening. I mean, front page, FRIPP VISITS WIFE. My Wife is currently in Canterbury. She’s on tour with Calamity Jane.

When I returned from Madrid last Saturday - because of the snow I was sent to Gatwick instead of Heathrow – I drove home and did a little shopping. Then I unpacked and went down to my local pub, thirty yards from where I live. I bought a pint of cider, sat in a little corner, a little nook by the fireplace, and drunk it all on my own. And I was so happy. And then my wife came home and I was happier still. This is excitement.

Q: Talking about balance, when I was listening to the record, it sounds like a typical King Crimson record to me. If I listen to the details, it becomes a totally different record, a totally new record and there’s such a nice balance of these two extremes, of these two aspects of King Crimson.

RF: I agree.

Q: Was this on purpose?

RF: It wasn’t an accident. The quick answer is yes, the form is most important. For me the form is critically important.

When the album arrived from Nashville in England at the end of July (2002), it wasn’t a King Crimson record. It was an Adrian, Robert, Pat and Trey record, engineered by Machine. And it was a good album and it’s 90% of what you hear now. But it wasn’t King Crimson. It was the remaining 10% which was added in the main by David Singleton, my partner at DGM and in ToneProbe, who was editing and mastering. We had late nights, late nights - editing, compiling and mastering and then mastering again. And while we were doing this, the late night sessions in DGM SoundWorld were interspersed with telephone calls to the Sanctuary lawyer doing the deal.

So the form as it is now was not an accident, nor was it a given.

Q: So what were those ten percent that changed from that normal King Crimson record to what there is now?

RF: If you looked at this building from the outside, it would be a building. If you came inside and there was no furniture and decorations, you’d say it’s a building. Once the building is built, what goes on inside, like furniture and what you have on the wall, is relatively less but it does determine that this is the Sanctuary building, as opposed to a building. The final 10% is that.

Q: So is David Singleton a member of King Crimson?

RF: Are you a member of King Crimson, David?

DS: No, I am not.

RF: David is not a member of King Crimson. However, what I will say for David - he has actually heard more of recorded King Crimson music, archives and albums, than any man on earth including me. David, for example, spent four months editing, listening, editing and compiling the live tapes from 1969 that went into the four volumes of the Epitaph box. That was hard. And that was only 1969. Wait ‘til we hit 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and then onwards...

David is my business partner at DGM. We have a 50/50 relationship. Not 51/49. If we don’t agree on something, it doesn’t happen.

Q: When you said that King Crimson was more a way of doing things than just a band, do you refer just to the style or a way of thinking?

RF: And the way of feeling and the way of acting.

If you look at one small aspect of how we live our life, you’ll find that generally another small aspect of how we live our life is actually the same. You look at a third small thing, and how we behave in life, it will have the same imprint as the first two. And then perhaps we might come to the conclusion that all the small things of our life are actually our life.

In Guitar Craft what we say is how you hold the pick is how you live your life. So, that’s how you hold the guitar pick (demonstrates). Of the maybe 1300 or 1400 people that have come into Guitar Craft, there are maybe two other hands that have yet approximated to this (demonstrates the right hand position of readiness). Generally when people come in, their wrists are like this (demonstrates a position of collapse). There, if I presented you with that wrist, or with this (demonstrates a wrist with tension) would you respond to that as a difference in attitude, for example? Here is a young man’s wrist holding his pick and about to hit a string on this guitar (demonstrates an aggressive wrist position, locked in tension), and I go like that (releasing the tension in the wrist) I am asking him to release his world-view, how he thinks of his life, how he believes the world to be, and how he responds to living in the world.

So the question of simply moving a balance in his hand, his wrist and his thumb, to hold a pick, is actually taking on the whole of his life. And it is awful. It’s awful because of all the fixity, all the energy which is locked into the assumptions and the patterns... wrist after wrist. But, it’s real.

Q: Unfortunately my English is not good enough to translate a Dutch word which comes to mind, which is not threatening. In German you say, uwiegens, I don’t know which the English impression is, but what do you want to say with the cover? Is the relation with the cover of the album with the music? Because the cover has something threatening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_to_Believe

RF: It’s ominous.

Q: Yes, ominous, that’s the word.

RF: The piece of art was painted by PJ Crook. She is a personal friend my Wife met on a professional project, making a film of an English woman artist in the early nineteenth century called Rolinda Sharples. Rolinda was erased from history. She was a woman, you see. And she was an artist, so that really didn’t count as proper. So the programme was about how you have a leading woman artist, in early Victorian England, simply disappear from history. This is where we met Pam.

She painted this (Fin de Siecle) in 1999, which was two years ahead of The Event and has a strangely prophetic character. In terms of the issues under discussion on the album, if you want to put it like that, there is a relevance. The artwork spoke to me. I mentioned this to PJ when she came for dinner recently. Resonances which are out there in potential, and haven’t yet happened - artists’ antennae pick up on what they are. It doesn’t mean necessarily that this has to happen, but it means there is a tendency towards this. So the painting is prophetic, ominous and eerie.

Q: Eerie, that’s another nice word, but is there a connection with the music in your opinion?

RF: Yes.

Q: The threatening feel, the ominous feel it has, the music has it sometimes as well I think.

RF: Sometimes yes. Sometimes it’s addressing repercussions that may be in potential, or maybe actions that have already been taken. It fits with the album and the EP overall. The EP also has artwork by PJ, with different covers in America and Japan. In Japan the artwork is more tuned to Shoganai, in America it’s more tuned to Happy To What You Have To Be Happy With.

There was a King Crimson competition for someone to put a balloon in the mouth of the person watching the television on the artwork to the American EP. Can you remember the exact words, David?

DS: This King Crimson video sucks.

RF: Good! This King Crimson video sucks - which is wonderful! King Crimson videos are appalling. They are awful. They are wretched things. So we don’t do them anymore. There you go, much easier.