Robert Fripp - The Gates Of Paradise (1997) {DGM 9608}

Fripp continues his Soundscape series with this typically evocative piece. As with his other work of this period, the theme touches on devotional and spiritual matters, with Fripp painting challenging and solitary impressions with "Frippertronic" brushstrokes. The new age set will most likely balk at his more dissonant passages, but King Crimson fans and those with a taste for the unusual will delight in his ascetic excess.

The majority of this album has been assembled from studio performances recorded at DGM in the spring of 1994. "The Outer Darkness" Part I and XI (subtitled respectivelly "The Outer Darkness" and "In Fear And Trembing Of The Lord" are taken from the live perfomance in Argentina and are based on the opening and closing soundscapes performed on 9 June 1994. "Sometimes God Hides" is from the performance in the foyer to the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 9 March 1996.

This is probably the most genuinely frightening music I have heard in my life up until this point. This music is not frightening in the Halloween sense; it is frightening in the same way that Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost are scary. This recording is a sequence of Soundscapes depicting hell, purgatory, and paradise, and the soul's travels throughout. The Soundscapes consists of one electric guitar that is played in real time with digital recording and delay equipment, allowing the guitar player to build huge layers of sound through repetition, delay, and decay of notes made possible by the equipment.

This music is compelling in that it vividly conjures up atmospheres of a metaphysical hell, purgatory, and paradise, but is so frightening in that even when the music captures the serene strains of paradise, it is as if you are traveling towards the serenity with the cold wind of purgatory, or hell, at your back. During other sequences, it is as if you are stranded all alone in a cold, shrieking place in an unreachable point in outer space.

For such a technical music, this really is the height of emotional, and psychological, expression in music. In some points, the processed guitar noises take on a disturbingly vocal quality. This is definitely not easy listening, and it has a free-form, impressionistic quality that adds an initial level of inaccessibility to the music. This is probably the musical equivalent of abstract art, but there certainly are strong emotions and ideas expressed by this abstract music.