Search - Bpm & M :: Xtrakcts & Artifakcts

The King meets a blender?

spiral_mind | Pennsylvania | 06/08/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As if King Crimson wasn't weird enough to begin with, now we've got this smoker of a CD. It's an electronic experiment done by Pat Mastelotto, KC's drummer/sampler extraordinare, and mixer/techno-wizard Bill Munyon. It takes instrumental tracks and a few spoken words from shows & rehearsals by Crim and its ProjeKct fractals - Robert Fripp, Tony Levin, Adrian Belew and Trey Gunn are all over the place in bits and pieces (there are even three whole notes from David Byrne) - all spliced and diced together into this intriguing new goop. Listening is like having your radio possessed by a little imp with ADD who changes & combines random stations at every little whim. It can be hard to listen to this kind of thing for the whole hour all at once, but I find it works great in the car for 5- or 10-minute stretches at a time.



Needless to say, it's a lot more esoteric than your average techno album and it'll probably only appeal to a subset of Crimson fans. If you're particularly drawn to the electro-jazz approach of the ProjeKcts and want something in an even more far-out vein, you should be all over this one (for reference, it most resembles the freakier aspects of P3 and PX). There's a lot more of the random shift/cut-n-paste approach going into this, and since the drums are the only 'live' element, it's missing the spontaneity and interaction that go into a collective improvisation. But it's never less than fascinating because of the sheer wackiness of everything we hear, not to mention the fold-out poster of caricature artwork, which is a real hoot.



If you're not familiar with current-day Crimson, I'd recommend starting with one of their discs first. And if you're curious what might come from the fringes of a group already pretty fringy, this'll give your synapses reasons to grow new pathways (if your speakers don't short out first). Wild, nutty and completely unique."