King Crimson, part I

I’ve been meaning to write a review of a King Crimson concert ever since 2017; and the time is now upon me, after seeing the September 21 performance at Radio City Music Hall.

 I was fortunate, through the kindness of Mr. Fripp himself, to attend the VIP session before the concert. During the session, Robert gave a brief but succinct summation of what interests him about the music he writes and plays, and the band that plays it. According to this speech-in-the-moment moment, his chief interest centers around Presence: both the Presence of the music itself and of the band members. Robert alluded to, in his talk, the need to approach both the playing of and listening to the music from a sense of this Presence. 

He cast the performance venue as a sacred space in which the opportunity for this Presence exists; and he reminded us of the importance of the audience in receiving the music in order for the unifying circle of Presence to be completed. There is, in other words, a demand on any audience to receive the music that’s played with the respect due to it, taking into account both the form and the effort of the musicians themselves… and if this happens, a special kind of inner and outer unity may ensue.

This brief summary can’t possibly do justice to all he said. From the questions and answers that followed, however, it was possible that few, if any, in the audience ( VIP or otherwise) of necessity share this question of Presence, the notable center of gravity in both Robert’s compositions and the band’s effort. 

This inadvertently illustrates how obscure the question of Being is to the average person. The terror of the situation, if there is one, is how thoroughly and absolutely this question is overlooked— both in ordinary life, and in King Crimson concerts.  

I approached the concert from a different point of view last Saturday. I’ve always liked King Crimson; this is how my interest in the band started out, and it developed before I ever heard of Gurdjieff. Yet on Saturday night I decided that I’d approach the music from the point of view not of how I liked it, but where I was in myself and what was happening. I wished for a certain distance from myself, paradoxically engendered by coming closer to myself.

The inner premise, in other words: King Crimson is not here to be liked or disliked. It represents an organic effort which should be appreciated—insofar as possible within a subjective world— objectively. That is to say, it doesn’t matter how I feel about King Crimson; my responsibility and my duty in encountering this band and the man whose work supervises its creative activity is to appreciate it in the sense of simply taking it in for what it is.

It may seem odd to propose that one approach a creative venue and then hypothesize, from the outset, that one shouldn’t care how one feels about it. Yet in the world of Gurdjieff ideas, the world of ordinary feeling — of like and dislike — is a casual, entirely untrustworthy place, only meaningful relative to real feeling, which is a feeling of that selfsame sacred quality Robert brought up in his talk before the show. 

That can be trusted.

So how do I properly honor the effort and the intelligence that goes into such a performance?

King Crimson is not an ordinary rock band. The music is demanding, as Tony Levin pointed out later in the VIP talk. This is part of what attracts him to it. Yet it isn’t just demanding; in this band, one senses an organism every time it plays. It’s a living thing, with every member creating a part of its body: heart, lungs, bones, kidneys, and, I suppose – Robert will hopefully forgive me — even bowels and their inevitable byproducts. (Nothing can exist without such a lawful element.)

Extending this analogy, the action of this organic body begins as the musicians “consume” and “digest” each composition. In doing so, they breathe in and out, they encounter all the disparate elements of the composition, they incorporate those elements into their bodies, build a structure out of them, and eliminate the waste. This is to be done, mind you, as consciously as possible, and not individual by individual, but collectively, where all of the molecular structures of the music — the intervals, the silences between notes, and the notes themselves — are ingested, exchanged, digested, and eliminated as one moves on to the next moment. This produces an entire body of Being.

 That body of Being  is the ”band”—the living musical event—folks refer to as King Crimson. This creature is, quite literally, a metaphysical entity, because its Being emerges as an energetic creature projected through the flow of time—gathering itself together to rehearse, the inward breath, and executing performances, an outward breath. King Crimson is a living thing; and while we don’t necessarily identify enterprises of this kind as creatures, under the medieval nomenclature of creature as anything existing in creation (think Meister Eckhart), it certainly qualifies. 

It’s the unity of it as an entity that becomes of interest, because this is what creates the organism that invites us into its work.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.