KING CRIMSON: Peace (A Theme); Islands; I Talk to the Wind; Formentera Lady; Starless; Prince Rupert Awakes; Erudite Eyes; Moonchild; Book of Saturday; The Court of The Crimson King
Fernando Perdomo
Forward Motion Records: FMR030
Here is a bit of an oddity. As the guitarist and bassist of The Dave Kerzner Band and Jakob Dylan's Echo in the Canyon Band, Fernando Perdomo also has another life as an occasional classical guitarist and here he has done some solo guitar arrangements of one of the most iconic progressive rock bands King Crimson.
I have to admit that I am probably one of the few people on the globe who has almost never listened to King Crimson, and so these arrangements are not to me at all in their original form. So this review is literally taking these pieces at face value, without any prior knowledge of them.
My first reaction to these pieces were how low key they often were, which could be that he picked the pieces that were in fact gentle and ballad – like, or that he re-arranged them in that way to make them more appropriate to the guitar, but that they were quite different from the original. I don’t know which, but suffice it so say that none of them, were very up – tempo at all, and so the entire album of a little over 25 minutes is in one mood throughout. Not that that is a problem as such, but anyone expecting the odd fast, racy, bouncy piece will not get it here. I thought that his playing was quite good, although I was aware in a couple of pieces that some of his playing was not always completely clean, and there were a few odd smudges where he had not quite got his fingers in the right places. Moreover the entire album was not as clean and clear as I would often expect a classical player to achieve and felt that his sound engineer should perhaps have not only mentioned that there was a tiny mistake here and there, but that he then could have cleaned up the sound somewhat more to make it a little bit more listenable.
So in essence, I found this album a little soporific, mostly in one mood, and not wonderfully memorable, and because of the odd mistakes and the dull sound not really a CD I would like to listen to again.
Chris Dumigan
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