Eric Tamm

Most rock stars aren’t worth writing about. They're not up there playing music because they’ve got a lot of interesting things to say. Otherwise they’d be writers or public speakers, wouldn’t they?

But Robert Fripp, founder and leader of the band King Crimson through several incarnations from 1969 to the present, student of the mystic Gurdjieff, inventor of “The Drive to 1981” and other three-year plans, founder of the Guitar Craft workshops, small, mobile, intelligent unit — Robert Fripp is different. He’s, you know, an intellectual. “Me and a book is a party,” he says, “me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy.” He puts out solo albums with songs on them in 17/8 time. Leading rock luminaries - like Eno and Bowie - call on him to ‘spray burning guitar’ over their songs, yet he’d just as soon write articles about the history of stereo mixing for Musician magazine.

I find the guy quite interesting, in short, and his music three parts fascinating, one part awe-inspiring, and one part extremely irritating. And he’s a short bloke from Wimborne, Dorset who sounds like rather like Arthur C. Clarke. That makes it even better.

But let’s talk about the book. Eric Tamm is an academic musicologist, but don’t let that put you off. He’s also a rock musician, and was a student at one of Fripp’s Guitar Craft workshops. In this book, he does three things — no, make that four:

1. He gives a partial biography of Fripp (who is disinclined to spill out personal details).

2. He goes chronologically through the albums Fripp’s been involved in, from King Crimson to the League of Gentlemen to ventures with Brian Eno to solo efforts, treating some briefly and others in depth.

3. He takes us through the twists and turns of Fripp’s thinking, particularly after he disbanded King Crimson for the first time in 1974 and spent ten months attending the Fifth Course at the Sherborne Centre of the International Society for Continuous Education, founded by J.G. Bennett, a student of Gurdjieff’s who was, in Fripp’s words, “living proof that if a creepy, uptight Englishman, with severe emotional problems, could become a human being through dint of effort, so could I.” What Fripp learned (experienced?) there has been in the background of his work ever since, and comes out most notably in the Guitar Craft workshops, in which he teaches young guitarists a new way of tuning, thinking about, and playing acoustic guitar.

4. He describes his time at a Guitar Craft workshop led by Fripp. It sounds a bit like encounter group therapy — it’s fascinating, but scary; you feel most of the time that you’re making a major breakthrough, and then some of the time it feels like it’s all a con, or maybe you’re being brainwashed. What I’ve heard from Guitar Craft graduates sounds technically impressive but empty to me — but then, I’ve never liked Bach, either. The workshop certainly made a big impact on Eric Tamm, and this is the best part of the book, because his feelings about Fripp and his music come to the fore, and the academic musicology is set to one side for a while.

At one point, Tamm remarks that Fripp has, by becoming a teacher, turned being an egotistical smart-ass into his greatest strength. Fripp may be as full of ego and delusion as any other guitar hero, but it’s interesting ego and delusion, and it makes good reading.

(Review originally written for Aotearapa)… (más)

This book is available free for download (or used to be) at the author's web site.

At the time I bought this I found it disappointing and perhaps even painfully boring. Few, if any, books could be found on Eno, or on Robert Fripp.

But Tamm's books are rather technical discussions of the music, so unless you're a musician very interested in the technical aspects of the music of these artists they are not very interesting.

If you are looking for a book about Eno himself this isn't of much interest. Russell Mill's More Dark Than Shark is another thesis project that digs instead into artistic representations of Eno's lyrics from his first four albums and includes a bit of trivia on the sources of those lyrics and is a better book overall but expensive if you can find a used copy.

Another Eno book, Eno's autobiographical "Year of Swollen Appendices" offers a diary view of a year of Eno's life for a year and also lacks a bit in offering much insight or gossip on Eno's early career and gets distracted into weird things such as Eno pondering what his own urine would taste like. As far as I know there still really isn't a good book *about* Brain Eno.

This Eno book was somewhat amusing because Eno himself apparently had little background in music theory and was thus quite unaware of what he was doing technically. For years he had described himself as a "non-musician" who approached music more from a standpoint of processing and using the recording studio as a musical instrument. His early work with Roxy Music and Fripp largely involved his processing music through a synthesizer, such as the filtering on Roxy's first album. It's arguable that part of Eno's charm is that he doesn't know what he's doing and approaches music as a textural collage of sound.

So, Tamm's dissections explaining Eno's apparent affection for things like Dorian modes and such came as news for Eno himself, who was amused to find explanations for what he was doing and that Tamm saw patterns in Eno's choices. Historically Eno has relied on systems that add random elements, such as using his Obliqyue Strategy cards to make decisions for him.

In retrospect I suspect this book may have influenced Eno somewhat to further explore things by starting pieces from a technical basis such as a specific modal approach.

I suspect I might also find this a bit more interesting now that I have more interest in music theory.

If I recall correctly Tamm originally approached Robert Fripp wanting to do a book on his music as a thesis for a music degree and Fripp suggested Eno would be a better subject. Tamm later did a similar book on Fripp's music also.

By the time of the books' publication Eno was playing around with generative music software from SSEYO.

The Koan software created by the Cole brothers relied on setting various parameters such as mode, key and other factors and then randomized the music in a way that a specific "song" could generally be recognized by unique qualities but would never or rarely play the exact same way twice in a row.

Eno saw this software as an extension of his tape loop based generative systems and embraced the software and became a celebrity spokesperson for Koan. A software only release of Eno's music, Generative Music One, was released on floppy disk and could be played by the Koan software.

You can (or used to be able to) find copies of the music then converted to audio files and CDs, but the original intent of the Koan based Generative One music was that each piece would never play precisely the same version twice.

One drawback of the Koan software that it relied on a specific style of Soundblaster sound card chips that allowed certain control over instrument voice parameters. This makes the software quite dated, and SSYEO struggled through various approaches to offering the Koan software as a web tool for web page soundtracks, and I think later moved to phone based music.

I seem to recall the AWE 32 sound card needed to run Koan correctly at the time of it's release cost me $200 and was a bit too noisy when I tried to get a clean signal out. Depending on what soundcard was used to create audio files from Eno's Koan pieces the works may not even sound as originally intended.

In any case, it's not clear if Tamm's book influences Eno, who typically shied from feedback and discussion of his music with fans because he didn't want fan expectations to influence his creative process, or if the Koan software contributed to influencing Eno to look more at technical musical constructs. My impression is that the 1990's led to Eno being more conscious of musical theory. All this gets a bit beyond the scope of tamm's book, but seemed worth including to offer smoe additional context.

In the decade or so since this was published Eno's music has gone down a few different paths, so at this point the book doesn't even cover something like 1/3rd of Eno's musical history.… (más)

[Originally published in EST magazine, 1991]

This is Tamm's second book, his first being a very comprehensive if slightly academic look at the work of Brian Eno. Released from the constraints of a musicology degree, in this volume he feels better able to add the personal touch, avoid some of the more tediously academic dissection, and stop apologising for the validity of "low culture" music as a topic for discussion.

Fripp's music has varied from the unlistenable (both through sheer banality, rarely, and through sheer esotericism, frequently) to the sublime, but it has maintained a high standard for innovation. Basically a rock guitarist, he's taken the influences of minimalism, jazz and ethnic musics, and used them to create a highly individual, highly complex range of his own music. Highlights from his long career include his two classic albums of looped and manipulated guitar noise recorded with Brian Eno, the intricate contrapuntal rhythms of the second King Crimson band (especially on the album Discipline), and some of his solo work from the late seventies and early eighties, such as Exposure and God Save the King. Whether playing horribly fast series of plucked notes on the electric guitar or turning it's output into long, stretched out tones using his tape-manipulating Frippertronics system, there's a lot of worthwhile music there.

The book reflects this, suffering mainly from a tendency to idolise Fripp. Some of the academic rigour of the Eno book might actually have helped matters here. But in return it scores highly by presenting the most thorough examination in print of the influence of Russian "spiritual" "guru" Gurdjieff on Fripp, and how this has affected Fripp's approach to guitar tuition.

For fans, an essential purchase, but it may well contain plenty of interest for the more casual reader as well.… (más)