ROBERT FRIPP & THE LEAGUE OF CRAFTY GUITARISTS - LIVE!

Those of you knowing of the Crafty League Of Guitarists (I know! ;-), will for sure know what to expect with this or any other albums since they all sound a bit the same. The least we can say is that RF&TLOCG are pretty consistent in their output, dishing what seems to the ever-eternal chord progressions.

The fact that this album is recorded live does not make all the more exciting and there is apparently no crowd (or it has been put to sleep right from the start) so everything indicates that this was a live series of guitar courses given somewhere in West Virginia. 18 guitarists (mostly acoustic) taking turns in playing different relatively slow moving variations (you love maths, this could be for you) somehow not too far from minimalism and a weird sort of new age. Only one track seems to be standing out of this record and it is the one where there is an electric guitar (one guess would be Fripp), the 9min+ The New World.

While this may be fascinating to those guitarists learning their craft, to the average proghead, this album as well as the vast majority of the others is really of no big interest. My rather severe rating here is by no means a quality judgment, but really this is for fans only.

This album is a report from Robert Fripp's guitar craft courses he gave in the 1980's, where he in a tight schedule disciplined the course attendees to approach their instrument from a new angle provided; His own tuning system was introduced, and with only a little time for sleeping the course attendees were educated to be the most committed players. In Tamm's book about Fripp he was asked that how many people had gone crazy during the course, and the reply was "Only few". In the end of the courses Robert booked a local restaurant for the guitar cadets to perform live on stage the stuff which they had studied, and this album brings us one of those results, culminating mostly as a wall of slowly morphing acoustic guitar chord layers. This is quite fascinating material if you are interested in guitar playing technics and Fripp's ideas, or soothing ambient music. I find this as a nice relaxation album but it's not the most essential record in Fripp's solo works discography for me.