DISCIPLINE

When I first heard this album in 1981 I was completely taken off guard. I was heavily steeped in the progressive rock of bands like Yes, Rush, Genesis, ELP, Kansas, Gentle Giant, and I was already familiar with King Crimson having heard and loved Starless And Bible Black and Lark's Tongues In Aspic. Nothing, however, had prepared me for Discipline. To my ears this was something completely new and unique to progressive rock.

One of the first things I noticed was that the instrumentation was different from anything I'd heard in prog before. There were no keyboards and no orchestral instruments. The opening riff in the first song, Elephant Talk, is played on a Chapman Stick (an instrument completely unknown to me at the time) and the tone was so unfamiliar that I couldn't imagine how it was being produced. I remember thinking that it sounded "flexible", like a piece of sheet metal being flipped back and forth. Bass player/stickist Tony Levin immediately became one of my idols. I noticed that the drums didn't sound like any drumset I was used to either. It sounded like a drumset and a percussionist. The drummer, Bill Bruford, doesn't ride on cymbals or hi-hat on this album. Almost all of the riding is done on a roto-tom, an octoban, or an electronic drum. This gives the drumming a very ethnic percussion and, at the same time, a techno feel. To top it off, guitarists Fripp and Belew use guitar synthesizers to emulate orchestral textures, to imitate animal noises, and to create some frightening and beautiful tonality/discord.

Having surprised me with their sonic palette, they proceeded to stand me on my head with their lyrical style. Three of the songs on the album, Elephant Talk, Indiscipline, and Thela Hun Ginjeet, are delivered in a kind of spoken declamation combining Lewis Carroll like word games with stream of consciousness poetry. The two songs that are actually sung, Frame By Frame and Matte Kudusai, have lyrics that are both enigmatic and melancholy. I have no idea what they are referring to and the mystery makes them all the more intriguing.

To top it all off, the band experimented with polyphonic and polyrhythmic textures. The guitars and stick play individual syncopated melodic lines simultaneously, weaving in and out of each other in complicated patterns. The polyrhythmic figures occur when one or more of the members plays in a different time signature from the rest of the band resulting in a kind of rhythmic moire. These techniques are exploited to the extreme in the instrumental title track.

This album has the quality of sliding back and forth between extremes. It is at times obsessively precise, at other times loose and chaotic. At one time playful and silly, at another somber and serious. It has an ethnic/world music feel and a technological/cosmopolitan feel. It is alternately naive and jaded. One unifying factor throughout, however, is the amazing skill and creativity all four musicians is never compromised.

All of these aspects had a profound effect on me as a young listener and musician, so much so that it ultimately affected my taste, and my playing and composition style. When asked what ten albums I would want with me if I were stranded on a desert island, Discipline will always be included in the canon. It must be obvious at this point that without hesitation I would give this album a five star rating.