Let The Power Fall is the only full album of Frippertronics released
during the original vinyl era and within two years of the original tour of shops/offices/restaurants
et al that acted as venues for the concerts.
With minimal
promotion as the tour got underway, especially in North America, the shows
quickly sold out. For many attending the effect of the music as it slowly
unfolded was profound and deeply moving, and something which Fripp himself
experienced. Speaking to Melody Maker’s Lynden Barber in 1981, Fripp argued
that Frippertronics gave him a way of working that put him in intimate contact
with an audience, something that had been increasingly impossible in the
conventional band set-up. “You can't play Frippertronics and coast. It's never
that safe. It's almost an excuse to put me in a situation where one has the
audience, performer, and music, and in a certain kind of way something remarkable
can happen. And that has happened to me, and it's not possible in a group.
Frippertronics is the most enjoyable means of playing I've ever found. Of all
the tours I've done over 12 years, the only one I can look back on without
being revolted or feeling grubby is the Frippertronics tour of 1979, the most
crushingly hard work I've ever done.”
Released
in April 1981 just weeks after the sole album by The League of Gentlemen, Let The Power Fall was the final solo
album by Robert Fripp of that period, with the band that would become the next
incarnation of King Crimson preparing to enter Basing Street studios in May.
Unavailable in any format for many
years the CD reissue also features three additional tracks discovered as part of the archive work for the Exposures multi-disc boxed set – a single edit of 1984 and two mixes of another track given the same
name at the time of mixing and all three previously unreleased on individual CD.
