There’s nothing unusual about rock bands getting together and jamming to generate fresh ideas and explore new directions. But it’s certainly unusual for bands to take those sessions out on the road and open them up to the fans.
However, that’s what the members of King Crimson are doing. The band has split into two subgroups, known as ProjeKct One and ProjeKct Two, whose purpose is to “function as research and development units on behalf of” the larger group.
ProjeKct Two, consisting of Robert Fripp (guitar), Trey Gunn (guitar) and Adrian Belew (drums), brought its R&D to Chicago’s Park West on Friday night for a series of improvisations that yielded mixed results.
Although the sets were far more interesting and varied than the band’s recent “Space Groove” compact disc, as an evening of improvised music, they were less than brilliant.
ProjeKct Two’s willingness to embrace the unorthodox was apparent right away. Guitar virtuoso Belew spent virtually the entire evening behind an electronic drum kit, while Fripp and Gunn generally eschewed their accustomed guitar vocabularies for an array of exotic sounds and textures, often to good effect.
During the unit’s second improvisation, Belew laid down a polyrhythmic bed of programmed and spontaneous drum patters over which Fripp’s screaming guitar splinters and Gunn’s warped slabs of dissonance swirled into a dense sonic bramble. At its wildest, the piece recalled an intricate, discordant rendition of the ’70s Crimson classic “The Talking Drum.”
Similarly, the opening piece of the second set began with an ominous heartbeat bass rhythm that the band built into an eerie heap of quasi-industrial noise before melting into a coda of lush, moody orchestral textures. It was the kind of dark, trippy foray that has long been a King Crimson strength.
But as good as ProjeKct Two was at exploiting texture and tone, it was less impressive as an improvising unit. Several pieces didn’t develop actual ideas so much as they simply explored a sound or mood for a seemingly arbitrary time span.
On more than one piece, when the band wanted to push an improv to the next level, it did so not by collectively upping the intensity but by having Belew abruptly shift his drum pattern to double-time. In the world of improvised music, that’s cheating.
Still, the members of King Crimson deserve plenty of credit for taking risks when they could draw crowds simply by regurgitating the past. In this season of dinosaur rock reunions, that’s both rare and welcome.
