Holy shit. Jonathan Lethem wrote an essay about these two tracks a while ago and I've always been interested. It's two tracks, two sides of one LP.

The Heavenly Music Corporation is one side of pure ambient bliss. Eno's synth and fripp's guitar tease each other until they explode and then slowly fade out. I haven't been this absorbed in a track since i first heard the SYR series from sonic youth

Swastika Girls is a sort of electronic buildup. pretty tense and groovy. It's in and out like a martian siren. a little bit of serenity in the background at times, it is space music paranoia.

i'm DLing evening star right now, another fripp and eno collaboration. sometimes i think tis is my favorite type of music.

This album, imo, is better than eno's solo ambient work and most of Another Green World. I could change my mind though, and probably will. Though it seems like Fripp's guitar was made for Eno's collaboration and production.

C'mon people.

Not as good as some of Eno's ambient stuff, or his album with David Byrne.

You are flat out wrong. Those are great albums. This one is simply better.

how do you think a Crimson fan like me would react to this stuff?

apples and oranges. You might like it...but don't expect anything resembling a song. It's more ambient. Fripp's guitar lines are unmistakable. The frippertronics are in full gear.

To be honest, I've not heard that much king crimson. Just ITCOTKC

ok i'll give it a try - after all these years of knowing it existed.

woowowowowowwwoooooooo!

You need to get Red asap.

and Lark's Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black.

out of the two, which would be the better DL? I'm feeling adventurous tonight.

God this album is kicking my ass.

Again.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is good, but sometimes it's too african for me. I'm not the biggest fan of the world music scene.

in chronological order it's:
Lark's Tongues...
Starless
Red

Lark's is more textured than the two others because they had a mad percussionist with them for that album. i think Fripp himself wrote in The Great Deceiver box set liner notes that for that album, they wrote music that was a notch above their musical capabilities. it's still a passive/agressive, yet mesmerizing piece of work.

i'll always associate Starless and Bible Black with mescaline and blue cheese
beside that detail, it's KC in full power trio (+ a violinist) mayhem. the Great Deceiver and Fracture are classics, but they rip and swagger a lot more than on your usual 70s classics.

Red is the crowning achievement of this version of the band (the violin is gone by then). Red and Starless (the song) are definitive moments for the band. unfortunately, they broke up before the album was released and only reformed a few years later for something else totally (which would be after No Pussyfootin' and most of Fripp's early post-punk ventures).

my favorite of these 3 is Lark's Tongues in Aspic but if you're looking for a real good complement to these, get The Great Deceiver box set (3 cd's worth of live material from that era).

As you posted I just downloaded Red. Pretty intense so far, and I'm not even done with the title track yet.

Pitchfork knows what's up.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/r ... ening-star

Fripp & Eno:
No Pussyfooting / Evening Star
[Island / EG; 1973 / 1975; DGM; 2008]
Rating: 7.9 / 8.6

Brian Eno, Roxy Music's art-schooled keyboard and tech wizard, and Robert Fripp, King Crimson's mostly self-taught guitarist, convened in Eno's home studio in 1972. Both were conceptually inclined: Eno called himself a "non-musician," while Fripp claimed to be tone deaf and rhythmically impaired when he began playing. Both of them would go on to reinvent their chosen tools-- Eno the studio, Fripp the guitar (he would eventually devise his own standard tuning and picking techniques)-- to suit their unique talents and visions. The two LP-length collaborations they recorded in the 70s, now remastered and reissued by DGM, laid the groundwork for each musician's most iconic works.

One technique is central to both records: the use of two Revox reel-to-reel tape recorders as a primitive looping system, wherein sounds recorded to the first deck resurfaced unpredictably when the tape passed through the second deck. Eno and Fripp didn't pioneer this technique; Terry Riley, among others, had used it before. But Eno would master it in his Ambient albums, where it became an end unto itself, not a background. As Eno refined the technique for the studio, Fripp refined it for the stage in his "Frippertronic" performances, which prefigured the use of looping pedals among arty rock bands today. Even in these two early works-- 1973's No Pussyfooting and 1975's Evening Star-- we can begin to track the process's rapid evolution.

On No Pussyfooting (the parentheses that originally enclosed the title are dropped on the reissue), we hear Eno and Fripp discovering the process-- it was the very first thing they recorded together in this vein. The album bursts with a sense of spontaneity. "The Heavenly Music Corporation" sequence is raw and rambunctious, resolving in long deep waves of aggression, with Fripp's molten, fluent guitar leads putting his rock prowess on display. The effervescent "Swastika Girls" strikes a contrast. In fact, "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls" seem designed as opposites-- the former gooey, deep, and broadly rolling, the latter effervescent, high, and cramped with wiry spirals. Of course, these tracks lack the sophistication of Eno's later ambient work, where pristine clarity became his focus. Clutter and impulsiveness haunt the margins, especially on "Swastika Girls", and Fripp's leads seem to stand somewhat apart from Eno's manipulations on "Heavenly". But whatever Pussyfooting lacks in subtlety, it compensates for with sheer mojo.

Evening Star demonstrates how quickly Eno and Fripp evolved-- it's confidently serene where No Pussyfooting was brashly assertive, and bears a closer resemblance to the 2004 Eno/Fripp collaboration The Equatorial Stars. Fripp's guitar is less often recognizable as such; we frequently hear what resembles clouds of bowed strings drifting through each other. When it is recognizable, as on the title track, the guitar phrases seem deeply interwoven with the surrounding sounds rather than roaring over them. The album opens with a quartet of naturalistically themed pieces, evoking water, wind, and sky, before delving down with a six-track sequence called "An Index of Metals". Not only did Eno and Fripp hone their technique on Evening Star, they erected a thematic architecture, which was absent from No Pussyfooting and would be crucial to Eno's subsequent work.

The only disappointing thing about these reissues is the bonus content. There's none on Evening Star, and No Pussyfooting comes with a second disc of reversed and half-speed mixes. There's an historical precedent for this: Miscuing a tape, John Peel played tracks from No Pussyfooting backwards on his radio show (and it says a lot about this kind of music that only Eno noticed the error), while the slowed-down versions recreate the experience of playing the album, which was originally released on vinyl, at the wrong speed. That's cool, but would have made more sense on a commercial release in 1975. Now that listeners who want to hear music at different speeds can create the effect themselves in a matter of seconds, the bonus disc seems anachronistic.

In his review of The Equatorial Stars, Dominique Leone correctly downplayed the idea that anything was invented on these albums. As previously mentioned, the technique that informed them predated Eno and Fripp. And while Eno made great strides in building a theory of ambient music, the basic challenge-- to make music that took an evasive stance toward form and content-- wasn't new; many modernist composers had already been approaching it in a variety of ways. But art always evolves that way, with old ideas recombining into new forms, embodied in but not created by specific individuals. Eno and Fripp invented something more tangible than an abstract cultural movement here: They invented themselves, and a way of thinking about music that was not so much novel as perfectly of the moment, alive to its unique technological and conceptual possibilities. They irrevocably altered the course of art music in the process.

Seriously people. Someone please listen to this album.

I'll make it easy for you. Here's part of the heavenly music corporation. If you want it all, you have to either download or buy.