Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.
• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.
• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.
• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.
• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.
• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.
• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.
• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.
• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff
Very hard to choose a favourite Crimso LP. I bought a job lot from I think Loot of all their albums up to and including Red at age 15. LTiA Pt.1 taught me that persevering with challenging (to my then ears) music was deeply rewarding. Loved the ’80s trilogy. Never managed to warm to the later reincarnations. Maybe one day. The exception would be the Projeckts CD which I love and wish had been pursued further. In conclusion, I’m unable to choose one album but can narrow down to three: Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and The Deception of the Thrush: A Beginners’ Guide to Projekcts. I thought the recent In The Court of the Crimson King film was very good, did you see it?
The run from Larks’ Tongues to Red has always been my favourite Crimson period. I’ve got the big DGM boxes devoted to all those albums (and USA which is incorporated into all the live stuff). Fripp did himself and musical history a great service by paying for all those concerts to be recorded properly. I never had a problem with Larks’ Tongues but then I’d been listening to massive amounts of Yes before discovering Crimson so prog moves were no problem, and the presence of Bill Bruford provided continuity.
I have an odd relationship with King Crimson: I revere portions of the discography to an obsessive degree but there are still some albums I don’t know at all. I was never much interested in the ones between the first album and Lark’s Tongues; I like Discipline a great deal but never cared very much for the albums that followed. After that I followed them up to the end of Belew’s involvement; the music is often great but I thought his lyrics were frequently terrible which tended to spoil things. Once again the live recordings are often better than the studio sets.
I’ve not seen the Crimson film, in part because of the above waxing and waning interest.