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.

The sev­en­ties, am I right….?

Not that I can claim to have expe­ri­enced it first­hand. But if I could have been a wit­ness to any peri­od in pop his­to­ry it would have been the decade in which exper­i­men­tal fusion move­ments invad­ed rock and roll. There was Miles Davis and his pro­tegees, of course. But there was much more besides: The Wail­ers’ fusion of rock, reg­gae, and soul; Fela Kuti’s fusion of Ghana­ian high life, James Brown funk, and Niger­ian jazz; Ryuchi Sakamoto’s fusion of indige­nous, clas­si­cal, and elec­tron­ic dance music….

Few of these influ­en­tial inter­na­tion­al artists became wide­ly known among U.S. audi­ences at the time, but we have their music to thank for some of the most inter­est­ing direc­tions post-punk and New Wave bands would take.

One of the most influ­en­tial artists of the sev­en­ties, the recent­ly depart­ed Flo­ri­an Schnei­der, who resem­bled an office man­ag­er at a Ger­man Dun­der-Mif­flin, was tru­ly an unlike­ly char­ac­ter for major inter­na­tion­al star­dom. And yet the mild-man­nered flautist from Düs­sel­dorf co-found­ed one of the most famous exper­i­men­tal fusion bands of all time with class­mate Ralf Hüt­ter.

I’m talk­ing about Kraftwerk, of course, though the label “fusion” may not espe­cial­ly come to mind when think­ing of the robot­ic Ger­man funk of the band’s major eight­ies’ releas­es. But Kraftwerk first emerged from the psych-blues-jazz-con­cep­tu­al-elec­tron­ic hybrid of the so-called “krautrock” scene, a some­what deri­sive label applied to bands like Pop­ul Vuh, Tan­ger­ine Dream, Can, and Neu!, one of the most obscure­ly influ­en­tial bands of the decade, and one whose two members—guitarist Michael Rother and drum­mer Klaus Dinger—played in an ear­ly ver­sion of Kraftwerk. “We had no father fig­ures,” says Hüt­ter. “We were part of this ’68 move­ment, where sud­den­ly there were pos­si­bil­i­ties, and we per­formed at hap­pen­ings and art sit­u­a­tions.”

For a brief time, in fact, Kraftwerk con­sist­ed only of Rother, Dinger, and Flo­ri­an Schnei­der on the flute. They made one appear­ance in this con­fig­u­ra­tion on the Ger­man TV pro­gram Beat Club. See them at the top play “Rück­stoss-Gon­do­liere.” No, it’s not at all like “Auto­bahn,” although syn­the­siz­ers were always cen­tral to the band’s sound. It’s a lot more like Pink Floyd, and they look the part. To what might we com­pare the sound of the band’s first TV appear­ance, above, live at Rock­palast in 1970? Hüt­ter, look­ing like a Ramone, plays some sort of key­tar-like synth that sounds like a dying goose; Dinger shows off his strict-yet-funky, now world-famous “motorik” beat; and Schnei­der lays down some very heavy flute grooves.

Rother and Dinger took these exper­i­ments and turned them into what David Bowie would call “the sound of the eight­ies.” He might have said the same of Kraftwerk, who heav­i­ly influ­enced Bowie, espe­cial­ly after Schnei­der and Hüt­ter adopt­ed their tongue-in-cheek businessmen/technician per­son­ae, inspired by po-faced artists Gilbert & George. Kraftwerk brought a dead­pan sense of humor to New Wave that was adopt­ed by every eight­ies syn­th­pop star from Gary Numan to Depeche Mode to New Order, whose “Blue Mon­day” was part­ly inspired by “Ura­ni­um” from 1975’s Radio-Activ­i­ty. This is a strange, tran­si­tion­al album, and one per­haps most often cit­ed by oth­er musi­cians inspired by Kraftwerk. It was their fifth album, but only the first in which they went ful­ly elec­tron­ic, and fea­tured mem­bers Karl Bar­tos and Wolf­gang Flür, who would com­plete the clas­sic line­up of the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies.

As you can see in the “Radioac­tiv­i­ty” video fur­ther up, they have not become robots just yet. These are clear­ly humans, still a lit­tle loose and shag­gy around the edges. (If Hütter’s deliv­ery, hair­cut, and the band’s sound in gen­er­al, make you think of Joy Divi­sion’s Ian Curtis—he was a huge fan.) How sil­ly were Kraftwerk’s lat­er con­cepts? Tremen­dous­ly sil­ly. But so too was Radio-Activ­i­ty, an album full of pun­ning banal­i­ties and geeky astro­physics ref­er­ences. By the time of The Man-Machine, Schnei­der and Hüt­ter had so com­mit­ted to their roles that we might almost, for a moment, believe the fan-made video above is a “rare pilot for the uncom­mis­sioned Kraftwerk sit­com, ‘Ralf and Flo­ri­an.’” The sin­gle “Das Mod­el,” below, has a bit more of a 70s Cabaret feel to it. And maybe a bit more danc­ing than we’re used to see­ing from Kraftwerk.

They were in on the joke, but also so musi­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly savvy they could update its premise every few years and shift pop music in new, weird­er, fun­nier, and more dance­able direc­tions. “Do you want to know what the eight­ies will sound like?” they asked in 1981. And there was Com­put­er World, which you can see the band per­form in part below in Nagoya, Japan. Schneider’s flute is nowhere to be seen, but his pen­chant for pen­e­trat­ing, repet­i­tive grooves and waves of weird syn­the­sized sounds still dri­ves the sound. Kraftwerk’s fusion of influ­ences evolved prin­ci­pal­ly through the part­ner­ship of Schnei­der and Hüt­ter, the Richards and Jag­ger of exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic pop.

Kraftwerk was not a band, Hüt­ter insist­ed, but a “mul­ti-media project.” Their onstage act was what Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield calls “cere­bral tech­nocrats” very much derived from their per­son­al­i­ties, espe­cial­ly Schnei­der’s, mag­ni­fied into per­for­mance art. “Kraftwerk is not a band,” Schnei­der said back in 1975. “It’s a con­cept. We call it ‘Die Men­schmas­chine,’ which means ‘the human machine.’ We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehi­cle for our ideas.” Yet those ideas, which Schnei­der tend­ed to express in cold­ly ana­lyt­ic terms, also pro­duced some of the most joy­ful­ly dance­able music ever made. That is the para­dox of Kraftwerk, and their genius, from Dinger’s motorik beats to the puls­ing synths built by Hüt­ter and Schnei­der. They tru­ly achieved a musi­cal syn­the­sis, one that hon­ored the human desire for groove and melody and the machine’s desire for inhu­man sounds and robot­ic pre­ci­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man First Graders in Adorable Card­board Robot Out­fits

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influ­en­tial Band Since the Bea­t­les

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Like every­one else in COVID-19 iso­la­tion, Juil­liard stu­dents are itch­ing to get out and play. For them, the desire is a lit­tle more of an imper­a­tive. With­out meet­ing and rehears­ing togeth­er, these ded­i­cat­ed artists at the begin­ning of their careers can’t hone their skills. “In nor­mal times,” writes Ben­jamin Sosland at the Juil­liard Jour­nal, “Juilliard’s halls are buzzing with col­lab­o­ra­tions: string quar­tets, jazz ensem­bles, and singers rehears­ing in prac­tice rooms on the fourth floor; dancers cre­at­ing new chore­og­ra­phy on the third floor; HP stu­dents embell­ish­ing bass lines togeth­er in Room 554, the main harp­si­chord stu­dio; actors doing ensem­ble work in the leg­endary Room 301.”

Social dis­tanc­ing has been a sac­ri­fice for these artists, but rather than give it up, they’ve made the best of things with the edit­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion just above, Bolero Juil­liard. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is a col­lage of indi­vid­ual per­for­mances, even though that’s exact­ly what we see before our eyes.

The move­ments are so well chore­o­graphed, the per­for­mances so pitch per­fect­ly timed, that we sus­pend our dis­be­lief. We do not hear the flubbed lines, missed cues, sour notes, and cracked jokes that must hap­pen at even the high­est lev­els of per­for­mance. But you too would put your best foot for­ward if you knew you’d be per­form­ing (in a sense) with such illus­tri­ous Juil­liard alum­ni as Yo-Yo Ma, Lau­ra Lin­ney, Pat­ti Lupone, and Itzhak Perl­man, all of whom make an appear­ance.

“Pro­posed by [Juil­liard] Pres­i­dent Dami­an Woet­zel and under the artis­tic lead­er­ship of chore­o­g­ra­ph­er… Lar­ry Keig­win,” Sosland reports, the vir­tu­al col­lab­o­ra­tion brings togeth­er “dancers, instru­men­tal­ists, singers, actors, and alum­ni” in a ver­sion of an in-per­son piece Keig­win has staged in 14 cities around the U.S. over the past sev­er­al years. Mau­rice Ravel’s Bolero is itself “a par­tic­u­lar­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive com­po­si­tion in that it pass­es the melod­ic theme through a series of solos,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal. “The sequen­tial per­for­mances high­light the dis­tinct tones and sounds of each instru­ment, whether it be a flute, vio­lin, or the anom­alous sax­o­phone.”

It is a piece that direct­ly express­es the expe­ri­ence of play­ing togeth­er in iso­la­tion, which is per­haps why the New York Phil­har­mon­ic also chose to play Bolero, togeth­er while apart in a video trib­ute to “the health­care work­ers on the front lines of the COVID-19 cri­sis.” With­out the intense chore­og­ra­phy and painstak­ing mon­tage effects of Bolero Juil­liard, the video doesn’t sus­tain the illu­sion that these musi­cians are actu­al­ly play­ing togeth­er, but close your eyes and you may imag­ine you’re in the audi­ence, lis­ten­ing to them from the stage instead of from their homes. It’s some­thing these musi­cians clear­ly do joy­ful­ly, out of grat­i­tude and love of their art… and also prob­a­bly because it’s how they’ll have to play togeth­er for the fore­see­able future.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 1930 Record­ing of Boléro, Con­duct­ed by Rav­el Him­self

Live Per­form­ers Now Stream­ing Shows, from their Homes to Yours: Neil Young, Cold­play, Broad­way Stars, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Operas & More

The Met Opera Stream­ing Free Operas Online to Get You Through COVID-19

Metal­li­ca Is Putting Free Con­certs Online: 6 Now Stream­ing, with More to Come

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness