Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician JUNE/JULY 1980 - by Michael Shore

ROBERT FRIPP: GOD SAVE THE QUEEN/UNDER HEAVY MANNERS / DARYL HALL: SACRED SONGS

Robert Fripp's new solo album proves that for a guy who's been talking a lot about a rapidly approaching apocalypse, the importance of rhythms and body music in what's to come, and how wonderful the raw vitality of the New Wave is, he just can't help being cerebral, mysterious and oblique.

In announcing his "Drive to 1981" last year, Fripp mentioned an album of "Frippertronics" and one of "Discotronics" to be released through 1980 and 1981. Now we have one side of each on this disc: God Save The Queen is the Frippertronics side, Under Heavy Manners presents the Discotronics. Both have been heard before: the former on the Fripp & Eno No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, the latter on Exposure, the title tune of Fripp's first solo LP (also on Peter Gabriel's second solo LP). Frippertronics consists of guitar and tape-loop meditations: Fripp feeds simple melodic lines and fragments from his Les Paul into a loop running continuously between two reel-to-reel decks. Through an admirably ingenious balancing of simplicity and intricacy, stasis and motion, Fripp builds hovering, swaying bodies of textured sound' music that's hypnotic, sensual, evanescent, seductive. The actual physical route of the tape loop itself, along with Fripp's intuitively timed note placements on the loop, makes for a curiously undulating rhythm, and an ambience best described as undersea. While strikingly beautiful, and veering in range from pastoral reticence to crowded virulence, Frippertronics is a flexibly functional music: you can pay attention to it, ignore it, react to it depending on your mood. The three Frippertronic exercises here are all fine examples of the technique. My only complaint is that Fripp's guitar solos on top of the loops were left off: the inspired, incendiary pithiness of a typical Fripp solo would be a welcome addition to almost any kind of music.

Discotronics incorporates a relentlessly metronomic disco pulse into the tape-loop drone, and while one might think this would make the music more forceful and direct, it's actually just as ambient as Frippertronics. Whether Fripp has missed the point of disco or just made it completely his own I can't decide, but this is danceable only in a detached way. Again, reactions can vary: overall I find the mix of the seesawing Frippertronics and inexorable swish/thump rhythm more heady than visceral. The title cut of Under Heavy Manners starts with Fripp paraphrasing Taps," the rhythm kicking in, and an hysterical David Byrne - "Trumpets! I can hear trumpets!" - proceeding to phonetically mangle a series of socio/political/theo/philosophical "isms". Byrne also invokes "Urizel" (Blake's Urizen, the personification of pure intellect?), announces that he can hear bells and declares zombie-like, "I am resplendent in divergence." Yes, it's funny and off-the-wall, but if it's supposed to be a parable of the inevitable decline of Western Rationality or something it'll have to be less inscrutable for most of us to figure that out. And if the apocalypse is coming, who's going to have the time? Anyway, the title cut is the less ambient part of Discotronics, due mainly to Byrne's attention-grabbing dementia: the rest of the side is purely instrumental, more ambient. Yes, this is an intriguing, enjoyable album. But it's not possessed of the urgency I expected. Maybe it's just not rock 'n' roll.

I have no doubts about Sacred Songs, the "solo" album by Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates) that RCA mysteriously held in the can for two and a half years. Though RCA has never come up with a coherent reason for the delay (and there's been no explanation for its sudden release), apparently they felt the album was too experimental, or that association with Fripp's name and tactics would be detrimental to Hall's artistic (read: commercial) development. Bullshit: Hall's material here is the most emotionally profound and resonant I can remember him producing, and his singing is possessed of a raw vitality, yes, an urgency, I've never felt so strongly. Gone is the slick soul gloss that always pigeonholed Hall & Oates, replaced by a sound every bit as eclectic and accessible. Yet the album takes many a significant, yet unprepossessing, chance.

Essentially, Sacred Songs is a collaboration featuring heavy contributions from Fripp as producer and guitarist. What it all comes down to is a more intense, direct strain of Hall's typical pop which is periodically interrupted, disrupted, complemented and fleshed out by Fripp's otherworldly guitar and Frippertronics. Fripp's numinosity creeps up on Hall's empiricism, then slips away, leaving an indelible mark. It's like Abbey Road meets Terry Riley - and it works. No need to go into details, it's a uniformly wonderful album, but I will mention that Fripp takes a couple of overpowering solos, that NYCNY may be the best Big Apple-inspired rock song ever, and that the denouement achieved between Fripp's voluptuous tape-loops and Hall's heartrending vocal on Without Tears is nothing short of breathtaking. Finally, this is not just another (to me, better) side of Daryl Hall. It also proves that Robert Fripp, one of the most intelligent and important people in rock today, works best when he works with someone else. As Fripp himself has said, "The music of the '80s will be the music of collaboration." Here it is: check it out.