Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician OCTOBER 1979 - by Chip Stern

ROBERT FRIPP: EXPOSURE

Fripp, like Eno, is committed to new music using an electronic medium, but their approach is an intuitive triumph of humanism over technology. Exposure is an idiosyncratic rock masterpiece, an aural collage and musical puzzle pockmarked with black holes of pain and mystery than can engulf interpretation. Yet Exposure is amply endowed with the vestments of mass appeal as Fripp balances his incurably arty tendencies with personal transfigurations of rock music. Fripp is trying to define a new genre: informed by the new wave's elliptical irony and primitive emotional directness; conversant in the various streams of contemporary experimental music; reconciling the formal aspirations of art rock with the chain-saw textures of heavy metal. Fripp's heavy metal dances are more in the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra than that of Ted Nugent and Van Halen, but his music indulges in neither bloated virtuosity nor loutish, jism-headed sexism. Fripp eschews the role of soloist as individuality gives way to a group concept; Fripp orchestrates and channels the talents of his collaborators, unearthing heretofore unknown veins of gold in drummer Michael Walden and vocalist Daryl Hall, and providing suitable settings for singers Peter Ha mmill and Terre Roche; Fripp's guitar is employed as conceptual glue in the tightly composed songs, and his textural flourishes (like the skysaw guitar on Chicago and the oceanic Frippertronics motifs that occur throughout tne album) can be likened to Les Paul's earlier developments in electronics. The lyrics of Fripp and poetess-therapist Joanna Walton portray people in a state of extremis and entropy - there is an overwhelming sense of mass psychosis. Odd-metered power chord excursions represent the manic constraints of society, while bittersweet ballads release tension and illustrate the transience of relationships. Fripp's aural cut-up techniques might put-off listeners, but there are enough musical peaks (like Terre Roche's tsamuri feminist war whoops on the disco-mysterioso title tune, and the sheer terror of NY3) on Exposure to offer hope for alternative directions in rock.