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In the meta-compositional attempt to transform a secondary effect — the lag due to the mechanical iteration of a sound coming from an electric instrument — into a standalone element of the composition, Terry Riley, along with his countless other analog divertissement, has rendered a great service to the musical environment of ambient music.
Indeed, the first to create chamber-music for electric guitar and Revox reel-to-reel recorders in a catatonic style were the renowned environmentalist duo Fripp-Eno, moved, in “(No pussyfooting)” of 1973, by the same enchantment with the hypnotic nature of the super-instrument that had inspired Riley’s unparalleled “A Rainbow in Curved Air”; then, two years later, using the same super-instrument as a meta-instrument (in “Evening Star”).
But, purity of purities, it’s Fripp-without-Eno who completes the process of disengaging the invention of the magistro minimalistarum from any other compositional scheme, taking the time-lagging gadget around between 1978 and 1981 — passing it off as nothing less than his own invention: the Frippertronics — to bars, pool halls, and recreational clubs for people amused by sonic stupefaction. The result of this monastic isolation is a divine precipitate of overdubs, whose value is entirely independent of the musician who operates them, since, left to its own reiterations, the meta-instrument — electric guitar + pair of reel-to-reel recorders — goes on, so to speak, on its own legs.
This outcome of the distillation of a secondary effect, exhibited here in diaphanous solitude, will crumble in Fripp's own hands, subsequently giving rise to glacial soundscapes, which, however, will no longer have the clarity of the original time-lag accumulator.
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