The Grid & Robert Fripp - Leviathan

 

CD + DVD Audio

Housed in an 8-panel digipak cased in an O-card

King Crimson's Robert Fripp has teamed with old friends electronic duo The Grid (a.k.a. Soft Cell's Dave Ball and onetime Psychic TV member Richard Norris) for a new electronic music collaborative album, Leviathan, which will be out June 25, 2021.

The album combines Fripp soundscapes with synth, drums, programming and effects by The Grid.

Though not intended as such, in some respects Leviathan and its creators represent between them one version of the history of British electronic music. In 1973, the curiosity of a significant chunk of the King Crimson and Roxy Music fan bases, along with an attractive price, propelled Fripp & Eno's "No Pussyfooting" into many thousands of homes where no such recording had previously registered a single sleeve, much less a gatefold.

By the early '80s Dave Ball & Marc Almond's Soft Cell were at the forefront of a wave of synth based bands who dominated the singles and albums charts. In the 1990s, The Grid — Dave Ball (again) & Richard Norris formed a key act in what was sometimes referred to as Electronica, sometimes herded under the (almost meaningless) "Dance music" category, occasionally (equally inaccurately/narrowly) described as "ambient" music, the struggles of music industry name-taggers never quite catching either the breadth of the music involved, nor recognizing — until much later — the scope of its influence.

The Grid's success — a number of hit singles and albums, including the million selling "Swamp Thing," world tours, remixes for Eno, Pet Shop Boys, Yello, Sylvian/Fripp — could find a ready audience among those for whom, by now, electronic music was part of the everyday musical fabric and commonality of experience, even as it continued to evolve and develop as a form in itself.

 

 

1. Empire

2. Milkwood

3. Pulse Detected

4. Loom

5. Leviathan

6. After The Rain

7. Fire Tower

8. Zhora

9. Sympatico

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