King Crimson

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (minimal spine wear)

Released in September 1981 on EG, Discipline is the third King Crimson reinvention and, by Fripp's own reckoning, the start of a new band that happened to keep the old name. The original quartet had ended in 1974 with Red. Seven years later Robert Fripp convened a new line-up around himself: Adrian Belew (guitar, vocals), Tony Levin (bass, Chapman Stick), and the returning Bill Bruford (drums, Simmons electronics). The brief was unlike anything Crimson had attempted before: interlocking, Steve Reich-inflected guitar patterns played by both Fripp and Belew against Levin's Chapman Stick and Bruford's hyper-precise polyrhythmic kit.

The opener "Elephant Talk" turns Belew's animal-language vocals into a rhythmic instrument. "Frame By Frame" is the band's interlocking-guitar manifesto, two players executing complementary patterns in different time signatures. "Matte Kudasai" is the album's one ballad, originally tested on Daryl Hall's shelved Sacred Songs. "Indiscipline" is Belew at his most theatrical. "The Sheltering Sky" sets up a long groove for solo improvisation. The closing title track is six minutes of pure interlocking-guitar pattern study, a piece that defined the band's whole next decade.

The original vintage European Polydor / Editions EG pressing of 2302 112. Discipline is the album that broke King Crimson open for the post-punk and post-rock generations to come, and an early reference point for the math-rock lineage that extends through Don Caballero, Slint, Battles and far beyond.