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Exposures
by John Kelman
Between the impact of the COVID pandemic since 2020, and in the eight year-long tenure of King Crimson's final lineup, which toured between 2014 and 2021, there's been a lot revealed about its sole remaining founding member, guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp. Since 2012, the more than five-decade history of King Crimson, live and in the studio, has been painstakingly and exhaustively documented in a series of large multimedia box sets and smaller, more price-friendly editions of key material, often ...
read moreKing Crimson: Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021
by John Kelman
You probably know the old adage about assumptions. After seeing the current (slightly fluid) King Crimson lineup twice every time the perennially groundbreaking group made it to North American shores since 2014, with no Canadian dates available in 2021 and the COVID Delta variant running rampant across the United States, the decision was made to forego traveling south to the USA to catch the band. After all, with the band touring, for the first time, on double bills with the ...
read moreKing Crimson: The Complete 1969 Recordings
by John Kelman
There will, inevitably, exist some cynics who will dispute the first comment about King Crimson's long-awaited The Complete 1969 Recordings box set, but it's difficult to imagine it being anything but the plain truth. This is, indeed, the definitive final word on the band's first lineup, collecting multiple versions of its earth-shattering 1969 Island Records debut, In the Court of the Crimson King: An Observation by King Crimson (from this point on, attributed to its current label, Panegyric), alongside sonically ...
read moreKing Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (50th Anniversary)
by John Kelman
The passage of time is often defined by both forward motion and a growing collection of memories past; it's also measured by significant milestones that are either realized at the time or in subsequent years. At a recent Royal/Celebration Package event prior to King Crimson's Théâtre St-Denis performance in Montréal, Canada, guitarist and only remaining group co-founder, Robert Fripp, asked the question that he's queried more than once, in various forums: “Can music change the world?" While the ...
read moreHeaven & Earth: Live and in the Studio 1997-2008
by John Kelman
Yet another year, yet another characteristically detailed and chronologically contextualized King Crimson mega-box set. Except that 2019 is no typical year. And Heaven & Earth is no typical King Crimson box set. While Heaven & Earth: Live and in the Studio 1997-2008 completes (well, almost) the series of box sets documenting King Crimson's original commercial recordings (and so much more), it's far from the group's first (or only) release to go along with the current three-drummer ...
read moreKing Crimson: Meltdown (Live in Mexico City)
by John Kelman
Something happened to King Crimson between June 28, 2017 in Chicago, IL and the band's five-night run from July 14 to 19 (with a night off on the 17th), that same year, in Mexico City. Both engagements were exceptional, with the Chicago performance captured on Official Bootleg: Live In Chicago, June 28th, 2017 (DGM Live, 2017), and now, with Meltdown (Live in Mexico City) serving as an audio and video document of the best performances from those five Mexican nights ...
read moreTravis & Fripp: Between the Silence
by John Kelman
Having reformed in 2013 with its distinctive three-drummer frontline and hitting the road for the first time in over a decade the following year, King Crimson's guitarist/keyboardist and only remaining original member Robert Fripp is another example of a musician in his senior years maintaining a more active schedule than, perhaps, at any other time in his career. With the group gigging extensively every year since, Fripp has also been busy, between tours, overseeing a growing catalog of live audio ...
read moreKing Crimson: Live In Vienna, December 1st, 2016 (UK Edition)
by John Kelman
Another year, another live King Crimson set? True, perhaps. But since reforming in a slightly shifting but conceptually constant form in 2013 to begin touring in the fall of the following year, the band's forward-looking, ever-growing repertoire of new music and revisitation of old music (from across its nearly half century career) made new again has been documented solely through live recordings. It's entirely appropriate, in fact, given the band's only remaining co-founder, guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp's longtime assertion that Crimson's ...
read moreKing Crimson: Sailors' Tales 1970-1972
by John Kelman
If it's a fundamental truth that adversity can sometimes bring the absolute best, creatively speaking, out of music and the people who make it, then the roughly 23 months following the release of King Crimson's classic 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King (Island)--and, after a single North American tour, the breakup of its first lineup--could always be argued as producing some of the group's very best. This, despite a revolving-door lineup and, even, significant doubts and frustration ...
read moreOn (and Off) The Road
by John Kelman
Sometimes the best music--and some of the best bands--are those that come from the most difficult of births. When King Crimson co-founder/guitarist Robert Fripp had the idea for a new band after dissolving the last incarnation of the '70s-era Crimson lineups seven years prior, it was a completely new concept and, with the exception of returning drummer Bill Bruford, a totally revised lineup. Gone were the mellotrons and symphonic leanings of old. In their place: technological advancements including ...
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