Fripp & Eno - "(No Pussyfooting)" 1973

This album was recorded in three days..... but stretched across 3 years! It´s a collaboration that foreshadowed Eno´s ambient albums, but it was released around the time of his "Here Come the Warm Jets". So it makes sense that for ambient music, it´s still very psychedelic- with Fripp´s electric guitar work layered in sometimes unsettling washes of sound. Eno was experimenting freely at this point with his tape loops; he and Fripp did not have accessibility or conventional structure on their minds. At the same time, they struck upon something blissfully beautiful and transcendent that was a culmination of ideas and methods very important to the asthetic of the two musicians both then and in the rest of their work up to today.

Fripp & Eno - (No Pussyfooting)
Island, 1973


















A very informative entry on wikipedia HERE about this release.

Two reviews from Progreviews.com:
The album cover shows Fripp and Eno in a glass room, reflected endlessly between two walls of mirrors. It fits the music perfectly, with brittle notes reflecting endlessly between two tape decks and providing a background drone while Fripp's guitar solos over top. The drones are ever-shifting, and are not the kind of sound that fades into the background - they're too menacing for that. Fripp's solos are sometimes slow and dreamy, sometimes fading away to nothing... and then sometimes leaping out to bite you with a mean tone and a flurry of notes.

I always think of this album as something that would be nice to put on as background music, but then it usually grabs my attention and refuses to release it. The droning guitar and synthesizer backgrounds provide textures that are interesting enough to listen to on their own, and then we get some of Fripp's finest playing as well. My only complaint is that "Swastika Girls" it a little slow to start - the background set up at the beginning is interesting, but it's almost a full eight minutes before anything else happens. But that's a minor gripe.

If terms like "ambient" and "drone" immediately make you think "boring new age", you should give this disc a try. It might change your mind.

review by Bob Eichler — 5-10-03

The drones consist of tape loops fed with the guitar notes. Two tape recorders were connected in such a way that a when a note is played into the recorder, the note would play back repeatedly, until gradually the note decays into nothingness. Fripp adds one or two notes at a time, waiting a while between addition of the next note or notes, causing the music to slowly and gradually evolve in a layered fashion. Fripp plays the guitar notes without an attack in such a way that an individual note doesn't seem to sharply burst in and then sharply decay, instead the notes just seem to start, sustain, and stop, creating long, humming lines. The repetition and gradual layering of these long lines creates a wave-like electronic hum. Also, it can be interesting when notes are not added to the loop; about three-quarters through the piece, after a solo section ends, the underlying drone is exposed again, but it is strangely hushed, since for a time period no new notes were added, so the old notes were allowed to decay and mesh together.

Third, there are a lot of improvisational guitar solos on top of (not feeding into) the drones at various points in the music, and these solos are very impressionistic and create a lot of drama by building into peaks, submerging back down into calm, and sometimes causing complete musical meltdowns. Throughout, a lot of interesting guitar textures are used, from laser-beam legato to heavily distorted riffing, to quiet slurred lines, to complete discordant chaos.

Despite this recording's "classic" status, I think a lot of people have a hard time with it. If you are new to the unique nature of the music, it can be relatively inaccessible at first listening, with the long running time of the tracks (two side-long tracks) making the music even more difficult. I guess that is the price you have to pay for this timeless work of art, and indeed a landmark of guitar innovation.

review by Heather Mackenzie — 1-31-03

I included the latter review for the readers who may not have much exposure to more ambient or drone music. On this blog I have a wide variety of music from the 60´s and 70´s, and this album probably falls into the less accessible camp... but it´s really highly recommended and well worth sitting through. This sort of music requires patience and in the end is very rewarding. I´ve read too many negative reviews of this album by people who don´t understand the nature of ambient music... It´s not prog rock, my friends. By the way, apparently King Crimson used some of these recordings to open and close their shows during 1973 and 1974...

HERE´S a good review written back in the 70´s close to when the album came out, that shares a bit about the musicians themselves and their philosophy and personality.

And another good review, this time from Progarchives.com:
"It was inevitable that Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, the most cerebral English rockers of the 1970s, would collaborate sooner or later. Their paths crossed for the first time at the recording of Matching Mole's Little Red Record, which Fripp produced and Eno appeared on as a guest musician. They discovered they had similar ideas, although in some ways they were polar opposites; Fripp the master guitarist had developed a formidable technique over years of dedicated practice, while Eno was a self confessed non musician. Both were interested in the possibilities of using tape recorders and delay systems, and it was this shared interest which led to the recording of this album.

Side 1 was reputedly recorded at Eno's flat one night after they had shared a bottle of wine. Fripp produced long, droning notes from his guitar which were looped and manipulated by Eno. Layers of sound shift and move almost imperceptibly into new forms, with everything taking place slowly and gracefully - the impression is not of a composition with a defined beginning and end, but rather of an excerpt from a much longer piece which could still be slowly evolving years later. As with much of the best minimal music, very little appears to happen but at the end of side 1 you find yourself wondering just how the piece got to 'there' from 'here'.

Side 2 follows a similar pattern, although on this piece Eno also uses his VCS3 to add to the texture. Even more than side 1, this sounds like the product of cold, detached intellects, the very antithesis of the sweaty physicality of rock. At the same time it's bold and radical in the way that the best rock music should be - although minimalism had been around for some time, and plenty of German innovators were exploring the possibilities of electronics and synthesisers, this was highly unexpected coming from members of comparatively mainstream acts like Roxy Music and King Crimson.

Aside from the music itself, this is also a significant album in that it can be seen as the first step towards Frippertronics and towards Eno's ambient experiments of the late 70s/early 80s. Fripp and Eno would work together again, occasionally in their own right or on other people's projects, and their paths continue to cross even now. This is a landmark album, and is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in minimalism and electronica." - Syzygy at Progarchives.com

There´s a really interesting and personal review HERE of this album and Fripp & Eno´s second collaboration which also appears here on Nost-Algae, "Evening Star". HERE you can read another similarly excellent blog post about the album, and some interesting comments in response.

About the cover:
I heard that here in Spain the album cover was censored because of the [erotic] nature of the deck of cards Eno has on the table (I believe I read somewhere that it´s a Tarot deck, but I could be wrong, I don´t know much about that...) and further information is quite scarce. A long time ago I found some details about where the photo was taken, but now I can´t seem to find the site again. Only a lot of people awed by it and the way it reflects the tape loops perfectly. It seems it was quite a good shot to not reveal the photographer somewhere in the reflections...

Apparently there is a double CD reissue of the album remastered by Fripp that includes the album´s tracks reversed and at half speed. I´m going to have to get out my vinyl and check that out now! For the original album:



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