Just before the concert — and, to be confessed, before I fully developed the above analogy — I mentioned to one of the folks attending with me that King Crimson engages in “the molecular deconstruction of musical form.”
This was only half an observation, to be honest, because the other activity King Crimson engages in is the molecular reconstruction of form.
The form—the body of compositions, which is the singular vehicle whereby its fans have for years known the band—the musicians encounter night after night is repeatedly taken apart and put back together in the moment, with a spontaneity that exceeds the demands and the laws of the form itself.
This dynamic is a different enterprise than the static form which fans perennially expect; for example, 21st Century Schizoid Man, the standard encore song. Compositions like this exist, to all appearances, frozen in time: well-worn, fraught with age and baggage. Yet the song (and the listener) benefit the most when hearing the piece as though it were newborn in this moment—which it in fact is. Only our habitual parts, which are generally more powerful than we realize, ever assume otherwise.
Let me speak a bit more about this exercise of form. One of the songs performed on Saturday night, Easy Money, began by sticking rigorously enough to the form proposed by the composition. Musical compositions are very analogous to a daily routine or discipline; let’s think of it in monastic terms: a set of intelligent repetitive actions meant to focus us so that we can make a sound (excuse the pun) effort from within ourselves. My friend Sylvia March has a poster in her kitchen of the Zen master Suzuki Roshi, bearing a quote that says:
if we lose the spirit of repetition, our practice will become difficult.
We need, in other words, an intelligent form that we commit ourselves too. In the case of King Crimson, the compositions offer that form.
Just as in any other inner discipline, the idea of the form is to make a complete commitment to it in such a way that it offers the opportunity to exceed its own value. The form itself creates that opportunity, because there could be no reach beyond if it didn’t exist in the first place; yet it’s only from that place which intentionally constrains that any reaching can take place. An irony, perhaps, to consent to be bound through strict limits in order to discover the potential for freedom, but there’s no other way to begin. Robert, at the beginning of the VIP talk, pointed out that it is always from this perpetual re-beginning that everything takes place.
The idea of being bound through limits in order to seek freedom is, metaphysically speaking, the fundamental nature of the universe itself. Attempting to engage and mirror such action within the context of a musical composition on stage may seem too prosaic and trivial. Yet it touches on that same sacred action that Robert brought up before the concert. There’s nothing overinflated about the idea, though it may sound so to the uninitiated.
After seeing the first two concerts in this series (for me) of three in 2017, I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on the performances by listening to various albums, both studio and live, in order to take in a wider range of new impressions of the band and its work.
We human beings enjoy thinking of ourselves as special and apart from creation and its lawful requirements, but they’re inescapable. This means that any enterprise – whether it’s scrubbing a floor or playing ”prog-rock” music (I’d argue KC is not prog-rock but a different beast entirely) – inevitably expresses the cause-and-effect of lawful existence in ways that we may not be immediately aware of. Hence, as Robert sits down to write a composition, or the band plays it—or as I myself write this and that piece—there are aspects to the creation and emergence of that kraeft that may not be immediately evident to us as we participate.
In the case of King Crimson, the music manages to bring an aural and physical intensity that expresses universal law through a mutable music form. I’ve had this same impression of the Gurdjieff movements, especially through the formal performance of the New York Gurdjieff Foundation’s movements members two years ago. In both the movements and in the musical expression of King Crimson as an organic unit, we see and hear the action of law on man. Some may object to this potentially heretical (to Gurdjieff pupils) comparison, because the forms are quite different, but at their core they’re both examining the same thing. The fact that King Crimson is a mostly musical, not physical, form of expression allows it to investigate a different set of questions.
Now, I’ve never spoken to Robert about this, so I don’t know what his opinions and observations about his own musical exercises are. I can only offer my impressions of them. I wrote down a few notes during the concert, one of which seems particularly correct to me.
“Combining surprisingly, rapturously melodic pieces with sheer intentional mayhem. Yet not mayhem in any traditional sense of the word: dismemberment of the body. What is dismembered are our notions of what music is, or ought to be: in this molecular deconstruction of sound, something new emerges. The band is re-creating and discovering harmony where none should by right exist.”
This impression of an absolute and satisfying harmony emerging from a complex construction of dissident elements is something that continues to fascinate me in KC’s music. It speaks of potentials we don’t really see in life; of a possibility of a whole life being created from elements that, on the surface of things, ought not to fit together well or make sense to us. And, indeed, much of life is like that; it consists, like the chord progressions of King Crimson, of unlikely elements who don’t make the most familiar bedfellows.
These life-elements defy routine prediction; and they collide with each other with an intensity and potential illogic. Yet they quickly find their relationship to one another; and as they do so, they immediately express an emergent form that becomes a greater thing than the individual parts. What might have been cacophony discovers unity; what might have been unpleasing becomes a food that unexpectedly satisfies.
As a member of the audience, I have no inherent right to expect that anything will be pleasing in the first place – although I may come with that demand. Yet I discover that it’s my job to see and hear what is, not what I want it to be. The impressions are powerful: and they leave no room for my opinions in the end. They become a part of me. I’m now responsible for this tiny corner of the universe and what it has produced. The privilege lies in being a beneficiary of the enormous work and precise intelligence that has gone into creating and presenting this material.
Well, this review has gone on long enough; and having written it, I sense it’s not quite like the usual review of a concert. Yet King Crimson is not your usual band; and the work it’s doing demands, in my opinion, a new and different kind of examination that moves beyond the ordinary — just as the music does.
and God close to your heart.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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