A music-obsessed, retired San Francisco lawyer, and author of the rock & roll memoir Jittery White Guy Music (available on Amazon)... picking a random album or song in his collection every day or so and sharing a few thoughts.
I've long been a sucker for Robert Fripp's "Frippertronics," his 70s experimental recordings creating analog tape loops of his guitar noodlings and turning them into surprisingly evocative musical pieces. Still, while these sonic tapestries could work well on their own as ambient music, or backing songs by artists like Peter Gabriel (or even The Roches), his pivot into "Discotronics"--pairing these loops with bass & drum dance beats--seemed to be pushing his luck. Nonetheless, 1980's God Save The Queen/Under Heavy Manners was kinda cool, largely on the strength of Talking Head David Byrne's guest appearance (under a fake name) on "Under Heavy Manners."
Byrne narrates a litany of challenging vocabulary over one of Fripp's Discotronics pieces, and it's at once both self-consciously arty yet utterly hypnotic. (The track also brings Fripp firmly into the new wave era, signaling some of where he'd be heading with a revamped 80s version of King Crimson the following year.)
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