King Crimson
Starless and Bible Black

There are different reasons that generally drive me to write about an album. Sometimes it's that emotion I can still feel when I discover some album I've never heard before, whether old or new, that manages to surprise, amaze, and astonish me. Other times, it's the memory of past listens that are somehow linked to stories or emotions worth telling.

My relationship with "Starless And Bible Black" is instead on another level of values, being the album that has most contributed to developing my way of perceiving music over the last twenty years.

Back then, in the early nineties, I didn't imagine that the production of "Starless..." was so peculiar, with studio pieces alternating with improvisations and others recorded live. No liner notes to elucidate such a genesis, but only the credits of each track attributed to the various musicians, as in normal compositions.

Those who claim that "Starless..." is the weak point of the trilogy from King Crimson's magic period often emphasize that the production was carelessly managed by Fripp, creating a disjointed album. Indeed, Jamie's absence is felt, and perhaps some tracks were designed to give more space to David Cross's violin, but let's try to put ourselves in Fripp's shoes and make some speculations.

We are after the release of a masterpiece like "Larks' Tongue In Aspic", Jamie leaves and takes away much more than just a musical contribution, Fripp is fully aware of having one of the most extraordinary bands ever in his hands, which has no rivals live in terms of cohesion, power, and creativity, one of the few that can improvise without resorting to jazz or avant-garde schemes, and so he decides to place live pieces into an album that isn't live. Perhaps he wanted to share those magical moments with his fans, or maybe he feared losing that magic moment without knowing when he would have the chance to publish that material.

The fact is that "Starless..." entered my life a few years after I discovered progressive rock, and paradoxically, it contributed to distancing me from the genre; rather, it was an initiation into new musical forms like Rock in Opposition, Avant-Rock, and improvisation.

The memory I hold of the difficulty in reading and understanding some tracks and the subsequent great emotions that came to repay the effort is still vivid. Magnificent and timeless compositions like "Fracture", which when recorded live reveal surprising little details (which refined production might call defects or smudges), or the challenge contained in the mysterious crescendo of the 221 improvised seconds of "We'll Let You Know", are still very much alive within me because they marked a transitional moment that at the time led me to believe I could decipher all the music I couldn't yet understand.

Then time showed how relative that was; if I achieved great success with Soft Machine's "Third", the same can't be said for Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew", which remains always indecipherable and devoid of emotions to my ears, just to cite two famous albums as examples.

Another consideration, which I believe has a foundation even if not everyone may agree, is that if King Crimson and Genesis are equally the two highest expressions of progressive, in qualitative terms the differences are enormous. If Genesis is probably the most followed and most imitated model of progressive, King Crimson is rarely taken as a model, and in "Starless..." they are at the peak of antithesis. Who has truly developed their own musical style convincingly based on the work of the Crimson Kings from the period in question?

Many consider "Red" the highest point of the trilogy, yet I can't share this opinion. Those who have been enchanted by the incredible and unattainable performances in the live box set that, not coincidentally, is titled "The Great Deceiver", have surely perceived that the compositions on "Red", are nothing but extracts of improvisations subsequently redefined and arranged in the studio, depriving them of that spontaneous rawness present in their genesis and completing them with elements present in the early King Crimson.

So I leave you to your reflections, remembering that what I have written is solely the result of my experience and my way of perceiving this so controversial and elusive art that is music, and how naivety and stubbornness, in some cases, allow us to face challenges that with knowledge we might have avoided, judging and discarding a priori something that instead could have proven invaluable.