In 1993 David Sylvian and Robert Fripp released a single- Jean The Birdman- across two CDs with different B-sides on the pair. CD Two came with Endgame, a beautiful, understated acoustic song, and the ten minute and fourteen second wonder that is Earthbound/ Starblind. Effectively, it’s two songs stuck together. The first half is David singing over acoustic guitar, close and melodic with lyrics about magic and nature and a woman who is ‘giving me questions and quizzical looks/ She tears up my papers and burns all my books’, someone who has ‘been through this world before’. At four minutes seventeen seconds the second half starts, six minutes of Frippertronics, the conjuring of ambient guitar soundscapes. The first half is earthbound I guess and the second half is starblind.
This is very good indeed, a ten minute advance on a full album coming out in June, from the combined talents of The Grid and Robert Fripp. Back in 1992 Dave Ball and Richard Norris worked with Fripp with some of these recordings saw the light of day on the albums 456 and Evolver. Recently Richard rediscovered the tapes from the sessions which included unreleased material, unfinished and unmixed tracks. Some new synths and drums, FX and some technical jiggery- pokery were then added to Fripp’s ’92 soundscapes and voila!, a new album called Leviathan. Fire Tower is a ten minute treat, programmed beats, long tones and drones, bags of texture and atmosphere- something to sink into on a rainy day.
In 1985 Brian Eno recorded what could be his purest expression of ambient music, the sixty one minutes of Thursday Afternoon, a drifting, reflective piano piece, endless and unchanging. It seems to be as long as one of those Thursday afternoons we all experience as children where the rain keeps us indoors and there is nothing to do or the listlessness we feel as teenagers. An hour listening to this is time well spent- I suppose that’s a lesson we learn as kids and in our teens, that doing nothing requires a certain kind of resilience. Eno captures the essence of doing nothing, something we’ve returned to at points this year.
Eno’s 1973 album with Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting) was an experiment in tape delays and Fripp’s guitar playing, parts of which were then turned into loops, creating this dense, layered piece of work. Side two of the album was taken up with a track called Swastika Girls (named after a picture from a porn magazine) and is a far less tranquil and reflective affair, an eighteen minutoe long experiment in disconnected bursts of Fripp’s guitar and tape delay noises. Bowie and Iggy loved it apparently.
Bagging Area 