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Rating: “Radical Action (to Unseat The Hold of Monkey Mind)” is a triple live album (3cd + 1Br and, in the Limited ed., + 2Dvd), which collects performances from the 2015 tour, across the UK, Canada, and Japan, focusing on the December 19 show, held in Takamatsu, the capital of Kagawa Prefecture. King Crimson, aka Robert Fripp, a guitarist and composer for whom it is appropriate to use the adjective “genius,” has aligned musicians and performers of great value, starting with the unusual combination of three drummers: Gavin Harrison (formerly of Incognito and Porcupine Tree), Bill Rieflin (formerly of Ministry and Swans, here occasionally also on keyboards), and Pat Mastelotto (formerly of Mr. Mister, in the “project” since “Vroom” and “Thrak”). The voice, as well as the second guitar, is Jakko Jakszyk (formerly of Level 42, also on flute here). Then there is the faithful bassist Tony Levin (also on stick, a stable member since “Discipline”) and the returned Mel Collins on woodwinds (saxophones and flute, active from “In The Wake of Poseidon” to “Islands” and also in Camel).
Fripp and his affiliates, on this occasion, write a beautiful page of historiography. As for history, they had already made it.
King Crimson, more than a band, are indeed a way of making and understanding music, a paradigm, a top event of Progressive Rock (English and not). In the seventies, they transcended the canons of Rock, above, below, and sideways, with their Jazz, Progressive and free sound experimentation (with elements of classical and avant-garde), constructing majestic, granite, vertiginous, visionary, pictorial, hyperreal sound architectures, gradually estranging themselves from psychic automatism and the unconscious to reveal, beyond the schemes of time and space, the mysterious, arcane, and noisy sides of the universe. “In The Court of the Crimson King” is a watershed, epochal album. Lark’s Tongues In Aspic and Red are authentic masterpieces. “In The Wake of Poseidon”, “Lizard”, “Islands” and “Starless And Bible Black” are marvelous in their suggestive and metamorphic poetics. In the eighties, they reinvented themselves alongside New Wave, combining experimentalism with melody, with electro-funky sounds, cerebral guitar interplays, and recurring minimalism. The essential output was “Discipline”. In the nineties and the 2000s, they resumed their course between calligraphism, technicality, power, emphasis/abuse of their hard side, with less inspiration but unchanged rigor. The albums do not match the beauty and glories of the past.
This concert, in a period heavily inflated by “live crimson” releases, presents itself as interesting and in the form of a “Virtual Live Studio”, where our musicians were captured in their performance, between expertise and art, in high fidelity. The subsequent exclusion of the audience, during mixing, provides new perspectives on the songs and assigns each listener their personal way of enjoying them. After all, experience teaches that it can't be otherwise: at Crimson concerts, two things are heard: the silence of the world and them playing. Once again, the virtuosity and perfectionism of Fripp emerge. His sonic science, calculated, precise, is not antiseptic, nor devoid of heart and soul; it is mastery out of time, certainly far from contemporaneity. Personally, in music, the creative moment is what fascinates me the most. With Fripp, however, it goes hand in hand with execution. One is the mirror of the other, no longer recognizing themselves as different or separate. A moving mirror. If the Beatles made the recording studio a new instrument, Fripp made live performances a new recording studio.
Thus, in strong hues, the Euclidean geometry applied to sounds by Fripp and associates sends glows. The musical algebra punctuates the notes, in clusters, distilling them into images and evoking essential passions. The gestures, extended in sounds, are never out of place, in voids, in fullness, in dynamic contrasts, in marked breaks between song and improvisation, replicating the original complex score in all its arrangement richness and all the elegance of the interlaces.
The listener is led by the hand until breathless, moved, to the point of feeling to “overcome the resistance of monkey mind”. The regality of making music, the radicality of gestures, and the evident chromatism.
Here, auditory pleasure is at its highest levels, mystical and all-encompassing. The execution is so faithful and crystalline that with every chord, every note, “frame by frame”, one wonders if what will happen immediately after is exactly what one expects and desires.
The setlist is fitting for the massive presence of classics from the golden age, '69-'74, interspersed with various unreleased tracks, not superfluous, but honest and dignified, like “Radical Action”, “ I” and “II”, the abundant drum sections, and, also due to the sparse appearance of pieces related to the 1990-2010 two-decade. Pity, instead, for the total exclusion of the eighties period, however “collected” and “coagulated,” in some way, in the new track titled “Meltdown” (certainly citationist, but affable). The singing of Jakko Jakszyk, for his part, does not withstand the comparison with Greg Lake, in the super classics of the early hours, nor with Wetton from “Red,” lacking the epic and lyricism of one, the nonchalance and magnetism of the other; nevertheless, Jakszyk expresses himself at his best in the new tracks and surpasses himself in “Peace.” The music is splendid and enveloping: “Red”, “One More Red Nightmare” are gripping and knotty. Then served are “Larks' Tongues in Aspic”, the finest of Jazz Rock, squandered easy money, reaching the heights of lyricism with “Epitaph” (martial and epic), “Starless” (universal), and “Peace” (earthly and inner); finally, we grasp the apotheosis of abrasive guitarism, dissonances and exasperated tempo changes, in 12/8, of “21st Century Schizoid Man”.
There is no mannerism, but the pleasure of listening to the philological reissue, live, of incomparable tracks, untouched by time, that traverse the history of music and have become part of personal and collective events. In the introductory lines, Fripp slyly insinuates that “if live sound does not faithfully render the sound produced by the instruments, neither can studio recording do so”, so the execution becomes a gesture joined with sound, in an intense, throbbing, indispensable measure, chromatism nourished by flashes and expectations. Wisdom is understanding things as they are, but in love. And one only understands what one loves.
The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournaments begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king.
Traduzione.
Le catene arrugginite di prigionie lunari
Vengono fatte a pezzi dal Sole.
Io cammino lungo un sentiero, gli orizzonti cambiano.
Il torneo è iniziato.
Il pifferaio purpureo suona il suo motivo.
Il coro morbidamente canta
Tre ninnananne in una lingua antica,
Per la corte del Re Cremisi.
(Peter Sinfield)
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