Robert Fripp's "Exposure"

December 12, 2012 8:49 PM

Can I play you... um... some of the new things I've been doing, which I think could be commercial?

"You Burn Me Up, I'm A Cigarette"

"Breathless"

"Disengage"

"North Star"

"Chicago"

"NY3"

"Mary"

"Exposure"

"Hååden Two"

"Urban Landscape"

"I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me But I've Had Enough Of You"

"First Inaugural Address to the I.A.C.E. Sherborne House"/"Water Music I"/"Here Comes The Flood"/"Water Music II"/"Postscript"

posted by Egg Shen (12 comments total)

This and Daryl Hall's Sacred Songs are two of my favorites. Didn't know about the re-issue, I've been listening to my vinyl rip. Looks like it's only available from UK sellers on Amazon right now but I'll get it on order. Thanks!
posted by cosmac at 9:30 PM on December 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

Well, I haven't heard this in far too long.
posted by FelliniBlank at 10:35 PM on December 12, 2012

Don't forget to listen to The Roches from the same period.

And Joanna Walton as described by Fripp at the time:

Remarkable woman, she spent five years at Harvard doing philosophy and theology under Galbraith and all the Harvard heavies of the early sixties. Then left to become an actress, working quite a lot with Harvey Keitel. But when Harvey became successful and Joanna could have been, she in fact went to England and became a therapist, and founded a body called the Women's Free Arts Alliance. She moved to New York with me at the beginning of 1977, she's in fact a native New Yorker, and one level Exposure has to do with the kind of way a man and woman relate to each other in a contemporary situation, trying to be free of all the archetypes and so on. And how difficult that might be. So You Burn Me Up, I'm A Cigarette is my love song to Joanna. I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me, But I've Had Enough Of You, Chicago and North Star are her love songs to me. North Star, that point needed, that orientation needed in a relationship between man and woman.

All long before bloody Lockerbie.
posted by pracowity at 11:50 PM on December 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

I was in London just before this album came out. I had the amazing opportunity to see Fripp and about five 1/4 reel to reel recorders and a bunch of electronics perform at a record store there . The buttons handed out said "ambient accommodates", I still have that button and it was one of the coolest muscial experiences of my life.
posted by silsurf at 1:57 AM on December 13, 2012 [3 favorites]

One of my favourite albums, and one of very few where the nervy coolness of the cover perfectly reflects the music inside.
posted by Hogshead at 7:12 AM on December 13, 2012 [1 favorite]

Fripp, like Eno, shaped the way I listen to music. What is not listed here is the various treatments to Peter Gabriel's Here Comes The Flood. PG has been fiddling with this since 1977. From the Wiki "Gabriel felt that the album and especially the track "Here Comes the Flood" was over-produced. Sparser versions can be heard on Robert Fripp's Exposure, his appearance on Kate Bush's 1979 TV special and yet a third version on greatest hits compilation Shaking the Tree (1990)"
posted by Gungho at 7:25 AM on December 13, 2012

I prefer this version of Here Come's the Flood to any Peter Gabriel subsequently produced. I think the spoken prelude fading into the song with the Frippertronics (sic?) wiggling in and out sets a nice dramatic backdrop to the lyrics.

Thanks for reminding me of this. And don't forget Fripp's diary that periodically provides insights into his life/work today.
posted by incandissonance at 7:36 AM on December 13, 2012

I never really liked King Crimson, but got this out of the library on a whim after listening to the Roches' albums on repeat this spring. It's fascinating, and some of it is quite beautiful. Listening to it broke my brain and then put it back together in a more elegant manner.

Greil Marcus wrote a great essay about Fripp and Exposure that appears in his book Ranters & Crowd Pleasers.
posted by pxe2000 at 8:03 AM on December 13, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well Egg Shen you certainly know your audience, or will once we see who-all goes for the in-joke bait above the fold.

First, thanks, I was not aware of this remastering and re-release.

I still have the vinyl, wore the grooves out ages ago.

The LP has messages engraved in the runout groove on each side:
Side One: "The aim is freedom conscience and truth"
Side Two: "1981 is the year of the Fripp"

Of course, it turned out to be the year of the the return of King Crimson.

The follow-up, God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners had "New music is not a style, it is a quality" and "Art is the capacity to re-experience one's innocence". League of Gentlemen had "The next step is discipline".

Hard to explain today the impact this album had at that time. Fripp had been more or less out of action for over three years, at least out of sight. This album showed what he'd been doing, thinking, and listening to during the interregnum (1974 - 1981).

This Fripp that lived in NYC, employed lyric verite', worked with American pop stars, and wore short hair and contact lenses was a new kind of Fripp.

I'm told that the do given Fripp by "the famous Mary Lou Green" was intended to make his head look like a television set or as if he was on television (perhaps thus completing a late-1970s NYC triumvirate with Tom Verlaine's and David Byrne's bands).

"Water Music" -- bookending my favourite performance of "Here Comes The Flood" -- is one of my favourite performances of frippertronics. "Heavenly Music Corporation" was exploratory as (supposedly) Fripp's first encounter with looping; later frippertronics became a bit too precious. But the loops on this album seem like mature efforts in an appropriate context and still something relatively new.

The album was a rich source of 'wild' quotes that we found useful in a variety of musical contexts:

• If you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people -- this is no obstacle to work.
• It is that way in that that is the way that it is
• It is (im)possible to achieve the aim without suffering.
• Incredibly dismal pathetic chord sequence . . .
• It has none of the qualities of your work that I find interesting. Abandon it.
• More good advice could hardly be packed into one sentence than there is there.

And a bit of 'backward masking' courtesy of Monty Python: "One thing is fer sure, the sheep is not a creature of the air."

"So the whole story is completely untrue. A big hoax. Heh heh heh . . . "

big hoax. Heh heh heh . . .

big hoax. Heh heh heh . . .

posted by Herodios at 8:48 AM on December 13, 2012 [2 favorites]

Terre Roche's voices is so beautiful that it sounds nice even when she's screaming.
posted by Egg Shen at 10:39 AM on December 13, 2012

I was going to link to the clip of Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow on SNL doing the Roches' "The Married Men" but it has been removed from YouTube. Fripp is playing, but all you see of him is a bit of his Les Paul and maybe a glimpse of the Revoxes.
posted by in278s at 12:53 PM on December 13, 2012

Wow. Thanks for this. I bought an EP in the early 80's with about five songs on it and "Here comes the flood" was always one of my faves. Lost the EP somewhere along he way. Nice to hear it again.
posted by freakazoid at 6:32 PM on December 13, 2012