Robert Fripp Releases Free Ambient Music to Get You Through the Lockdown: Enjoy “Music for Quiet Moments”

King Crimson’s mas­ter gui­tarist Robert Fripp has had a career long rep­u­ta­tion as an auto­crat, and exact­ing, dif­fi­cult taskmas­ter. He’s named an album, a band, and a record com­pa­ny “Dis­ci­pline.” Drum­mer Bill Bru­ford once described him as an “an amal­gam of Stal­in, Gand­hi and the Mar­quis de Sade,” accord­ing to The Tele­graph.

But recent­ly, there’s been some activ­i­ty on Fripp’s social media that can only be described as “sil­ly.” In lock­down with his wife of 34 years, singer and actor Toy­ah Wilcox, we’ve seen them shim­my­ing to the Twist on East­er Sun­day:

They dressed up as bees and ran around their Worces­ter­shire gar­den:

And per­formed a bal­let with stuffed uni­corns set to Ravel’s Bolero:

Very sil­ly indeed. But there is some music being made dur­ing all this mad­ness, as can be heard at the top of this post.

Last Fri­day, Fripp dropped the first in a 50-track series, Music for Qui­et Moments. These ambi­ent pieces will be drawn from all dif­fer­ent years of the guitarist’s career, and will appear on most stream­ing plat­forms (includ­ing YouTube and Spo­ti­fy), one a week, every Fri­day.

“My own qui­et moments,” he says in a blog post announce­ment, “over fifty-one years of being a tour­ing play­er, have been most­ly in pub­lic places where, increas­ing­ly, a lay­er of noise has inten­tion­al­ly over­laid and sat­u­rat­ed the son­ic envi­ron­ment.” He con­tin­ues: “Some of these Sound­scapes are inward-look­ing, reflec­tive. Some move out­wards, with affir­ma­tion. Some go nowhere, sim­ply being where they are.”

David Sin­gle­ton, pro­duc­er and Fripp’s busi­ness part­ner, added “a year at home with­out tour­ing offers the chance to lis­ten for the first time in many cas­es to exist­ing live record­ings.”

The cov­er art for the first track fea­tures sculp­ture from Fripp’s gar­den by artist Althea Wynne. (You may not see it at first, but the sculp­ture is a take on Manet’s Le Déje­uner sur l’herbe.)

By the way, Fripp’s online diary is just as thor­ough and fas­ci­nat­ing as the man him­self, as well as reveal­ing the sop­py ol’ roman­tic when­ev­er he describes his wife. It’s very endearing…another word I bet you didn’t expect to pop up in this post.

As of this writ­ing, his lat­est entry offers a pre­view of Music for Qui­et Moments #2:

Qui­et Moments 2 is a son­ic med­i­ta­tion on dying, loss and accept­ing, dis­guised as loop­ing; so it is bet­ter equipped and able to go out and present itself in pub­lic; so more like­ly to escape the expec­ta­tion and qual­i­ty of atten­tion that would oth­er­wise under­mine the reflection/event were it for­mal­ly billed as Med­i­ta­tion On Loss, Griev­ing & An Accep­tance Of Suf­fer­ing As Both Nec­es­sary & Inevitable In The Human Con­di­tion.

Boy. That’s a show I’d avoid.

But it just might be what we need right now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Peter Gabriel’s First Solo Con­cert, Post-Gen­e­sis: Hear the Com­plete Audio Record­ing (1977)

Talk­ing Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

David Bowie’s “Heroes” Delight­ful­ly Per­formed by the Ukulele Orches­tra of Great Britain

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.