Robert Fripp

Featuring: David Byrne

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

With original innersleeve.

The second installment of Robert Fripp's "Drive To 1981", released on Editions EG in January 1980, splits the LP cleanly between two contrasting approaches. Side A, God Save The Queen, is pure Frippertronics: three long tape-delay solo guitar pieces whose loops were recorded across the United States in 1979 (in pizza parlors, art galleries, record stores, a Calgary planetarium). Fripp had been touring these "small, mobile, intelligent units" of solo guitar performance for two years; this side is the first studio-issued document of the system at full scale.

Side B, Under Heavy Manners, is what Fripp called Discotronics: Frippertronics looped under conventional dance-band instrumentation. Paul Duskin drums, Busta Jones plays bass, and on the title track an uncredited David Byrne (billed as "Absalom el Habib") delivers one of the most unhinged vocal performances of his Remain-In-Light-era career over the band. "The Zero Of The Signified", the side's other long piece, doubles a Frippertronics solo with Barry Andrews's organ. The combination is one of Fripp's most extreme experiments: a record that conceptually divides itself between pure-system isolation and rhythmic embodiment.

The original vintage EGG / Polydor pressing of 2311 005, the Chris Stein-co-designed cover photographing Fripp behind two Revox machines. The record sits between Exposure (1979) and the League Of Gentlemen debut (1981) in the Drive To 1981 sequence: a pivot record of Fripp's late-1970s aesthetic and one of the most consequential solo-guitar artefacts of its decade.