Saturday, March 19, 2011

Revisiting Claymont Court with the Crimson King

Upon the very first evening of my stay with Robert Fripp in 1985, he had all 21 of us students re tune our guitars to what he prescribed as “the new standard tuning’.

This tuning was completely foreign to every one of us. Suddenly, not one of us knew how to play the guitar. We had limited mobility since our fingers could still move but we didn’t know where to move them to! This required a new thought, a new approach, it leveled all of us off to the same expertise (that of non-expertise).

After a few nights of fumbling around with this new tuning, it began to reveal itself to us, it was not designed to play any music that we had heard, it was designed to become a new voice, and it was designed to become a collective voice, of which it has Become.