After completing the first round of concerts with a revived King Crimson starting in May 1981, Fripp headed over to the USA where he began a week-long residency at Washington Square United Methodist Church on 135 W Fourth Street in New York. Built in 1860, the church had historically been home to many congregations but in more recent years had become the venue for groups such as the Black Panthers, Gay Men’s Health Crisis and numerous arts organisations.
The series of Frippertronics concerts were held in aid of a Soho-based theatre group and they find the
guitarist using his technique of slowly building the music from the ground up, step by step. It’s an approach
which demonstrates how the addition or subtraction of a single note can change the entire mood of a piece
as we move in the space of a few bars from an atmosphere of pensive anticipation to one of yearning hope.
In an interview with the Melody Maker published just weeks before these concerts, Fripp was asked why
he continued to perform Frippertronics concerts. “It gives me a way of working with intimate contact with
members of an audience...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.”
The Washington Square Church performances represent some of the finest recorded examples of the
Frippertronics series. Unlike other such recordings where the loops are on tape in the DGM archive but the
solos require painstaking matching of existing audience recordings and bootlegs to those loops to complete
the picture, the solos for these shows were actually recorded but not labelled as to which solos matched
which loops. The matched pairs only became possible when DGM audio engineer Alex R. Mundy realised
that the loops had been picked up, at microscopic audio levels, by the guitar pick-ups playing the solos,
allowing for identification. David Singleton was then able to mix and produce the resulting audio.
The music played more than rewards such efforts as, culled from the shows, (more complete versions
appear on the “Exposures” boxed set), Fripp appears to explore every sonic avenue available to him as a
guitar player – mesmerising loops, overlaid with beautiful solos, fast running ‘Frame by Frame’ style lines
against a looped background, powerful ‘Scary Monsters’ type guitar noises and more besides.
This is the Frippertronics album that should have come out in 1982. The forty years that have passed have
done nothing to diminish the power of the music. The material appears on both discs with the DVD
offering the audio in hi-res stereo and DTS Surround Sound, the nature of the loops lending themselves
ideally to this method of production.
