Larks' Tongues in Aspic: King Crimson the Mystic

“Possibly you readers will be reading this and think it’s a load of garbage – spells don’t possibly work. I’ve had a couple done for me, and I can tell you they work.”

With Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, King Crimson makes you feel the space between the stars.

Robert Fripp: guitar, Mellotron, “effects”

John Wetton: bass, piano, lead vocals

Bill Bruford: drums, spoken word on “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One”

David Cross: violin, viola, Mellotron, flute, spoken word on “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One”

Jamie Muir: autoharp, percussion “and allsorts;” including kalimba, gong, cymbals, bells, bird calls, and whistles; spoken word on “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One”

Richard Palmer-James: principle lyricist

Produced by King Crimson

art by Peter Douglas (“Tantra Designs”)

Jesse Koblin said the term “band” only loosely applies to King Crimson. Instead, “King Crimson is an idea.”

It’s also (rather infamously) a revolving door. After understated, underrated masterpiece Islands, the King Crimson lineup du jour predictably collapsed. Principle lyricist Peter Sinfield exited that revolving door; and in April of 1972, Boz Burrell, Mel Collins, and Ian Wallace all opted to stay in America after tour to form a new group with Alexis Korner. By 1972, the music press saw King Crimson as old news. Everyone’s having doubts. Melody Maker reports Fripp is putting together what would become Earthbound, adding, “it’ll almost certainly be the last from the band.” Atlantic Records denied the album’s release in the States. It’s looking grim.

Around the same time, Fripp started working with a witch. No, really!

Walli Elmlark was primarily a columnist for Circus magazine, but among the English rock group circle, she was known as a practicing witch. She was the one who lifted the curse supposedly placed on David Bowie in theStation To Station era! In 1972, Walli teamed up with Fripp in hopes of making a spoken word album about her craft. It didn’t pan out, but her influence stuck. Fripp began wearing lots of crosses and beads a la Peter Green, became convinced that psychic abilities ran in his family, and began practicing what he called “low magic.” In interview, he said,

“Possibly you readers will be reading this and think it’s a load of garbage – spells don’t possibly work. I’ve had a couple done for me,” presumably by Walli, “and I can tell you they work.”

Pictured: Robert Fripp, in his Larks' Tongues-era uniform

Whatever tangible effects this magic had, we’ll never know, but practicing changed Fripp’s outlook on making music. Whether by the winds of inspiration or the vibes, Fripp decided it was time to form yet another King Crimson.

All rise for prog’s most decorated soldier, the only guy to have played in all of the big three: Bill Bruford. To paraphrase the guys of the Vinyl Verdict podcast, the number of times Bill has been in and out of Yes and King Crimson is truly incredible. He’d orbited the Crimson-verse long before joining; Yes played at Cream’s farewell gig. Who was in the audience? Crimson’s then-drummer Michael Giles!

Flash forward to 1972, when Close To The Edge production made Bill decide it’s so over. Of his time in Yes, this king of one-liners said, “nobody could agree what day of the week it was,” and “How we got anything done, I still don’t know.”

In March of 1972, they share a bill with Crimson in Boston. Bill links up with Fripp and decided we’re so back. But Fripp played hard-to-get; making him wait “as if (he) had been a tomato ripening upon the vine ready to burst forth with goodness.” In May, Fripp invited himself to Bill’s place, they jammed, and that jam accidentally turned into an audition. “We went into my music room and Robert said: ‘If I played this what would you play?’ Apparently I must have done the right thing because eventually he suggested that we do some more!”

Next came the guy I’d have probably gotten along with best, John Wetton. He had just exited his gig with the Family having just missed the King Crimson boat once before. He was in consideration to join after Greg Lake’s departure post-In the Wake of Poseidon, but Boz Burrell got the job instead. John was to jam with Fripp and Bill at Bill’s place, and the three got on. John joined the band looking to develop his singing more, and you know King Crimson loves a joint bassist-lead singer.

Next came our Scotsman, and maybe the most interesting guy in this story, Jamie Muir. He’s like a way less scary Ginger Baker, but man, what is this guy about?

Pictured: Jamie Muir, with singing saw (1972)

He’d always had an interest in “ethnic” music (Africa, India, the Middle East) and wanted to do what whatAlbert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders did: “...I just had to improvise. The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.” He’d moved through a few groups before this, most notably Sunship. He had a mouth full of blood capsules on stage decades before metal! Hiscommitment to individuality and utter devotion to rhythm was what paired him and Fripp up. Melody Makerwriter Richard Williams had great rapport with the latter. Williams passed word along to Fripp that Jamie was looking for a new group.

“My feeling about getting the call was terrific. King Crimson was the ideal for me because it was a rock group that had more than three brain cells.”

quoted from: Sid Smith, In the Court of King Crimson (2001.)

Well, now they’ve got four brain cells. Congratulations Jamie, you’re hired!

David Cross was the least experienced of the five-piece Crimson, and the last to join. The only other rock-and-roll violinists that come to mind are Papa John Creach and Jean-Luc Ponty, so David was already special. He was playing with a group called Waves, who were trying to get managed by EG – who managed King Crimson. Fripp attended a Waves gig one night and invited David to rehearsal. It was the same night as David’s grandpa’s funeral, but he soon realized you do not say no to Fripp.

Pictured: 7/22/1972 issue of Melody Maker announcing, "YES MAN TO JOIN KING CRIMSON"

In July of 1972, a new King Crimson was announced in Melody Maker; its headline boldly stating Bill left Yes to join.

The general consensus was: “Has he lost his goddamn mind?”

A journalist compared Bill quitting Yes to “Rolls quitting Royce,” while Chris Squire was convinced Fripp cast a spell on him! Bill admit later on, “I was thrilled to be part of it, although I’m not sure I really knew what I was getting myself into.”

Fripp’s goal with this iteration of King Crimson was to tap into the energy of American rock-and-rollers like Jimi Hendrix, while using the musical vocabulary of European classical music. “‘What would Hendrix sound like playing The ROS (sic) or a Bartok string quartet?’” Fripp wrote in his online diary in 2001. “If an older man might look back at this and be struck by that young man's arrogance, well, an ignorance of limitations sometimes allows the young...to achieve impossible things!” Bill later described this Crimson as,

“...a bit like Miles Davis – you pick five interesting guys, lock them in a room together, and try to extract a collision of experiences from them. And if they make an album without actually killing each other first, it will at least be an interesting album.”

quoted from: Mike Barnes, “How King Crimson made Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.” Louder Sound, 3/23/2024.

Despite Fripp boasting that this group would be together “for two or three years,” the cracks were already beginning to show. Bill remembers rehearsals being labored at best, excruciating at worst. “There were a lot of people sitting staring at their feet trying hard to find something that somebody else would like. On the whole, a wretched and expensive way to make music…” He had great difficulty gelling with a second drummer, even getting so frustrated on one occasion that he cried. He eventually surrendered to Jamie’s absurdity; indulging him in crawling around rehearsal space and playing household objects. If I had a fucking nickel.

And, of course, there was the issue of working with Fripp.

“...one part Joseph Stalin, one part Mahatma Gandhi, and one part the Marquis de Sade.”

quoted from: Sam Sodomsky, “Red.” Pitchfork, 9/10/2017.

Robert Fripp, guitar

Bill Bruford, drums

John Wetton, bass/vocals

David Cross, violin

Jamie Muir, percussion

Pictured, L-R: Jamie Muir, Bill Bruford, Robert Fripp, David Cross, and John Wetton

King Crimson mach five debuted in Germany, with a spot for the legendary music television show Beat Club. You can tell this lineup had only been rehearsing for a few weeks. “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One” is rough. Butit’s shocking how fully-formed it is so early on, and the band dynamics are on full display. David is visibly scared shitless, his eyes glued to Fripp. Fripp does not give him any ease. In Crimson, you were just supposed to Know Things. I can’t take my eyes off John, he’s so skinny and all hair. Jamie said he was trying to provoke Fripp in this performance and I believe it. If you were to transcribe his parts, it’d come out to the Wingdings font. And Bill’s inner monologue is something along the lines of, “What. Have I gotten myself into. Holy shit. Holy shit. I’m going to die.”

Above: King Crimson performing "The Rich Tapestry of Life" on Beat Club, 1972

Jamie came up with the album title as a description of the music this Crimson made. According to biographer Sid Smith, it was “something very precious and delicate held within heavy matter.” Like a lark’s tongue in aspic (jelly.) It turns out this body of the King was just as fragile as the others had been – by the time Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was out, surprise surprise! This lineup had already fallen apart. After their first shows of the new year, Jamie decided he had to pursue his spiritual awakening and become a monk. His departure crippled this Crimson, and they all knew it. Without the in-balance Jamie brought to the group, David got lost in the fray at live shows. He couldn’t consistently wail over top of the other three. During Red production, he exited the band under messy and vague circumstances; with management very likely botching all parties’ communication.

With this review, I’m rounding out my coverage of the big three King Crimson albums: In the Court of the Crimson King, Red, and this. (The secret forbidden fourth thing is Discipline, but we’re not there yet!) What sets Larks’ Tongues apart?

With this album, Crimson temporarily left behind jazz sound. Make no mistake, the jazz sensibility is still there: through improvisation, simultaneity, and “ESP.” These guys somehow tapped into the same thing Can and theMahavishnu Orchestra did, but without courting fusion. Instead, this lineup’s sound was driven by a., the “edgy” side of classical music (Stravinsky, Bartok, etc.,) and b., the combo of John and Bill. Sid Smith called it “steroid funk,” Fripp called John “the Crimson lurch” and this rhythm section “‘the flying brick wall’ – you know, ‘play with it or duck.’” These two were great on Red, yes. John was a far more confident vocalist there. But with the atmosphere of Larks’ Tongues, they were able to explore the far reaches of their playing styles and abilities.

What was that atmosphere? At risk of sounding inarticulate: this album has some weird fucking juju, man.

I won’t lean into the witchcraft angle as hard as my contemporaries have. But to deny there was some spiritual “special sauce” here would deny the influence of the ideas Fripp was into back then.

Before launching into track-by-track breakdown: yes, I have heard the Elemental Mixes of Larks’ Tongues. While I struggle with the concept of them (I struggle to answer the question of “who are these for?”) the mixes of “Book of Saturday” and “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two” are cool insights into how those tracks came together.

We drop the needle on Jamie’s intricate kalimba part. If you listen to the sessions disc of The Complete Recordings box set, you’d know this wasn’t improvised! This was an intentional, cyclical pattern. The kalimba is layered with bells, a shimmering whistle, and what sound like modified bicycle horns made to creak instead of honk. It invokes insects in the grass. The first core motif of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One enters by way of David’s anxious, forever-ascending violin part. It’s cut by Fripp’s snarling guitar and forever-descending riff. The clattering percussion physically cannot take up any more space. It’s disorienting and clausterphobic. There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Then, everyone clamps down on a monstrous riff. If you aren’t prepared for this, or if you naively turned up the volume on Jamie’s quaint little stream, this will blow you into the next room!

When I reviewed Red, I compared King Crimson to a monster. When the whole band locks its jaw down on a riff like this, it knocks the wind out of a listener. It feels menacing and huge. Rarely can monsters illicit the shock of rising over the hill again, but somehow “Part One”’s second build is even more powerful. John fashions a weapon out of his signature Crimson sound: that awful gurgle he could get from the wah-wah. Jamie layers in more screeching horns, like peacocks fleeing paradise. Bill delivers a loud-and-clear roll into the second bruising pass of the riff. A spiraling bass line from John and one of Fripp’s dizzying, maniacal patterns carries us into an oddly funky rhythm section excursion. This is exactly what Sid Smith meant when he said “steroid funk.” I love how inventive, creative, and textured the double-drummed treatment by Bill and Jamie is. The band links on a minor spiral before another rattling, driving section headed by John’s muscular wah-wah bass. I always thought, “Wow, it sounds like these guys pulled their crash cymbal out of the dumpster. I dig it though.” Turns out I wasn’t too far off – on The Complete Recordings, Bill asks engineer Nick Ryan, “Is it possible to have the baking tin louder in my cans?”

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but Bill could play bullshit in Farmer John overalls and sound great.

But don’t count out Fripp’s atonal, jagged rhythm playing on “Part One.” Despite how metallic and grating it is, it’s the connective tissue of this composition. Next is the “water section,” with Jamie on zither and David on violin. Bill calls this movement the summation of the album’s title: the peace within the chaos. Consciously or unconsciously, David’s solo mirrors Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending.” He represents the lone winged creature in this scene; the butterfly that escaped the carnage, darting around. Or the swan dangerously close to the tidal wave. It’s an emotive, human element for us to connect with. We hear a far-away woman’s voice murmur under the final movement before the mystifying coda. Bill had stuck a reel-to-reel in front of his TV at home and brought in the recording to use on “Part One.” Sid Smith’s In the Court of King Crimson erroneously attributes this to a radio recording and Gallowglass, but it’s in fact two scenes from the show Weir of Hermiston. (God, does this interplay between film and music make me wish these guys recorded a horror movie soundtrack.)

This was the moment that left me in awe, convinced of this ensemble’s greatness. What do I always get at? It’s not plainly about musicianship, it’s about what you do with it. This Crimson did incredible things with that musicianship because they had creativity. For instance, it was Jamie’s idea to have layered spoken word at the end. It’s the single most mantic moment on Larks’ Tongues, sounding like the Tower of Babel itself. If the burst into the coda was seeing the sun and moon meet in an eclipse, this is hearing Mesopotamian civilizations pray to it. I love it. These spoken word parts by Bill, Jamie, and I think David are credited simply as “newspaper readings” on the 40^th and 50^th anniversary editions of Larks’ Tongues, as Fripp apparently forgot their sources. But earlier this year, SingingSheep on YouTube did what 50 years of Crimson fans, Fripp’s whole team, and even Robert Fripp himself could not do. From the below photo from Larks’ Tongues sessions, he found two of the books the guys read from on “Part One.” Bill reads from Enough of Dying! Voices for Peace by Kay Boyle and Justine van Grundy, while (I think? It’s very hard to tell) David and Jamie read from Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound. Between this and finding the Weir of Hermiston scenes that appear early in the tune, sir Sheep has done some amazing work.

Bill wraps “Part One” up by saying: “Mumble mumble.” These are men in their twenties, after all.

No movement overstays its welcome. Every one does something different, while feeling cohesive. It takes us on a journey from terror through earthy muck, respite to doom to awe. “Part One” is the “shit or get off the pot” moment of Larks’ Tongues. If you can’t handle this, bow out now, because you don’t deserve to hear the rest.

Book of Saturday grounds us in our present time, with a reserved guitar, bass, and Fripp’s winding feedback accents. About the song’s content, Larks’ Tongues lyricist Richard Palmer-James said, “I think what I was trying to do was create a sort of collage or scrapbook, containing simultaneous images of a love affair before, during and after...combining different viewpoints in space and time in hope of getting nearer to the story in its entirety.” Before reading that text, “Book of Saturday” made me think of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Lo and behold, that’s the comparison Richard himself drew! I’m also reminded of the central line in Pink Floyd’s “Free Four:” “The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.” “Saturday” is a rock-and-roll man already getting nostalgic about the “glory days” he’s actively living out.

“We lay cards upon the table,

The backs of our hands.

And I swear I like your people,

The boys in the band.

Reminiscences gone astray,

Coming back to enjoy the fray

In a tangle of night and daylight sounds.”

Day and night are turned completely upside-down, “my wheels never touch the road.” He never lays down roots for too long. “A cavalry of despair,” rock-and-roll tends to attract lost souls.

“All completeness in the morning

Asleep on your side,

I’ll be waking up the crewmen

Banana boat ride…”

Who knows what “She responds like a limousine” means, but we can safely say this is a scene of the narrator waking up next to another new lady and waking up the guys so they can hit the road again. You can tell John isn’t the most confident vocalist yet, but I like how much echo they kept on his mic. It makes the feel more emotional; like our narrator is alone in an empty room, organizing his photographs after dumping his gear in the doorway. These are the only vocal harmonies on the album - a hint of a bygone pastoral Crimson.

Hearing Exiles, I thought, “What is that sound?” I thought it was dogs howling, but it’s actually Jamie rubbing glass rods with a cloth. Throaty chants come in, linking this to the ritualistic moments in “Part One.” We also have futuristic varispeeding provided by Fripp. He properly enters with his dark, gloomy Mellotron motif; marking this tune as a proto-“Fallen Angel” even without the original rocking riff. It comes in like a storm over black waters. David’s violin and flute heighten that at-sea feel; he’s the flag, but a spot on the horizon. The lyric is about Richard realizing he didn’t want to move back to his home of England after living in Germany for several years. He also took inspiration from the last stanzas of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Again, I love John’s ragged, untrained voice here. He delivers that hopeful, but somber feeling perfectly. The lyric itself isn’t as strong. Lyrics were never this Crimson’s strong suit. They were hurting without Peter Sinfield, and you can tell. Fripp’s exceptional, tender soloing reminds me of his work on “I Talk To the Wind,” especially him sneaking in a variation of his “comfort lick.” Overall, “Exiles” feels the most like something another prog group would’ve done.

Easy Money is set apart by its stamping, heels-in-the-dirt groove. It’s the most rock-and-roll – and maybe most tangible – cut on Larks’ Tongues. Its personality is colored by its use of sound effects. The gross, wet percussion is Jamie sloshing his hands around in a bucket of mud. What other band could blend a Mellotron and guitar virtuoso with buckets of mud and church bells and have it sound natural? I hear a new sound effect every time I listen to “Easy Money.” We also hear hissing snakes, a zipper, chains, and crinkling money; contemporaneous to Pink Floyd’s “Money!” Dark Side of the Moon came out just weeks before Larks’ Tongues. This is a really coolmoment where two prog groups in completely different stages of their careers were thinking about the same thing. This all exists in a vacuum. John’s hedonistic ad-libbing in the beginning is one of my favorite moments on the album. Speaking of guitar virtuosos, I appreciate the subtlety of Fripp’s playing here. Even his winding yarn-ball solo doesn’t detract from the sheer power of this rhythm section. Listening to takes of John’s bass part on The Complete Recordings, I hear hints of what he would play on “Starless.” Isolating his part certainly brings out how necessary it is to “Easy Money”’s off-kilter groove.

In lyric and music, “Easy Money” is a crude rendering of showbusiness; snakes in the grass and horny bastards looking to burn anyone for a quick buck. John doesn’t deliver sleazy as well as Roy Harper could on “Have A Cigar,” but the sentiment is there. David gets lost on a number like this. I feel he could’ve asserted his presence before the final verse, because he’s the electricity that pins it to the wall.

A wind machine segues us into Talking Drum, which I consider this to be “Larks’ Tongues” part one-and-a-half. This cut is informed by Jamie’s musical experience; he played in Osibisa offshoot Assagai before Crimson. While I do prefer alternate takes to this one (as there’s more of the titular drum,) I’m always taken by its cyclical nature. Even David’s violin is locked in the spiral. This feels ritualistic, not unlike Bitches Brew. I went hard on the circular feel of Brew; picked up from African rhythms and carried on with funk. We have those exact influences here, presented in an entirely different context. It’s all this, plus European paganism. We were all cavepeople dancing around a fire at one point, appealing to the elements not to wipe us out. We are at the mercy of the elements, and we are powerless to the endless spiral. The screeching finale was Jamie’s idea. At first I assumed it was a brass section like on “Schizoid Man,” but it’s actually Jamie and Bill on modified bicycle horns!

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two is jostled around among 4/4 time, 5/4, 11/8, and 10/8; a reference to the Sacrificial Dance in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And because fuck it, this ensemble is tight enough to handle it. Before I read texts where Fripp directly referenced Rite of Spring, I’d had the Sacrificial Dance in mind. Fripp’s guitar tone is heavy and unrelenting. He’s the undisputed leader and lodestar of this last track, dragging the rest of the band through this punishing trudge.

In my Red review, I likened “Starless” to galactic death and David’s role in “Providence,” as the space traveler swallowed by the black hole. “Part Two” is human death. Here, the violin is the poor maiden; the ballerina trapped in the middle of the circle, unable to escape her fate. She is forced to dance herself to death. With a strong arm and gentle hand, Bill guides the doomed ebb and flow of “Part Two.” The dancer’s exhaustion sets in before another burst. John’s playing threatens to show that exhaustion – I do not envy him. The whole ensemblecreates the spirit to which this sacrifice is meant to appease.

It ends with a large, loud, extended burst. The maiden collapses into the fire, sending ashes into the sky and people fleeing. The spirit is satisfied – for now.

After the ashes settle, the last thing we hear is Bill ask, “Can I do one more immediately?” I mean, you can, but I wouldn’t try to mess with that!

Bill once said, “if your version of rock music is sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, or three chords and the truth, there isn’t an awful lot of that on Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.” There’s something much bigger. Humans have an innate need to devote themselves to something bigger than them. Think religion, or a cause to better the world. For years, I’ve been saying rock-and-roll is just another manifestation of that need. Imagine my shock when I read this interview quote by Fripp:

“Playing before an audience is a magical rite. If you’re in front of half a million people and you draw together the energies of that half million and you attract angelic power...and bind the two together in a cone of power and then direct it, you can make the world spin backwards. Playing is a ritual...”

quoted from: Ian MacDonald, “Head, Heart, and Hips.” New Musical Express, 8/25/1973.

(If you can get past the “TMI” moments and mental image of him doing calisthenics in his tightie-whities while saying all this, the interview is well worth the read.)

Fripp once said life was driven by three things: the head, the hips, and the heart. He said Bill was the head, David the heart, and John the hips. Fripp himself was “the lowest common denominator.” What did Jamie provide? Spectacular, radical imagination. Dare I say he’s the MVP of this album? You know he’s something else when Bill Fucking Bruford plays second to him!

Our two drummers are an odd couple. One in a fur vest, the other in overalls. But they needed each other. Bill himself said that Jamie nudged him out of the nest! Bill joined Crimson to broaden his horizons as a player. Jamie forced him to confront that.

This ensemble speaks to the power of John and Bill as a unit, that which will take over on Red. They’re balanced by sensitive, quiet David, and Fripp in his esoteric phase. Jamie throws that balance; channeling the ancient and wholly unpredictable. Fripp said his primary contribution was simply being him. Then you have newcomers Jamie and David balanced by John and Bill’s established names in the scene, with Fripp as the fulcrum. There are so many ways you can see this King Crimson! It’s terribly engaging.

Who knows? Maybe magic was involved. Fripp admitted he didn’t know what he was doing in this era; driven purely by intuition. “We might recall that the young Stravinsky of The ROS (sic) didn't ‘know’ what he was doing either: for him it was more an instinctive & intuitive process.”

The monster was not coming over the hill as we once thought. It wasn’t in the sky or the ocean. This is a monster with no physical body, as inevitable and terrifying as an eclipse. Twelve inches of wax can hardly hold it. I’m brought back to the feeling the “Part One” coda invokes. Though we can hold our thumbs out to measurethe space between Ursa Major and Minor, we are so, so small compared to the actual space between. This albummakes me feel the space between the stars. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic reminds you, compared to its ritual and intangible, you are just a tiny satellite skating across the sky; untethered from the mothership in the Madonna.

Pictured: Madonna with Child and Infant St. John, AKA "Madonna Dell'UFO"

Personal favorites: the whole thing

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Barnes, Mike. “How King Crimson made Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.” Louder Sound, 3/23/2024. https://www.loudersound.com/features/king-crimson-larks-tongues-in-aspic

Fripp, Robert. “Nashville.” DGM Live, 3/11/2001. https://www.dgmlive.com/diaries/Robert%20Fripp/2001-03-11

Koblin, Jesse. “Exploring ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.’ King Crimsons’ Dissection of Rock n’ Roll.” The Milscellany News, 11/10/2021. https://miscellanynews.org/2021/11/10/arts/exploring-larks-tongues-in-aspic-king-crimsons-dissection-of-rock-n-roll/

MacDonald, Ian. “Head, Heart, and Hips.” NME, 8/25/1973. https://geirmykl.wordpress.com/2022/11/13/article-about-robert-fripp-king-crimson-from-new-musical-express-august-25-1973/

Romano, Will. Mountains Come Out of the Sky: An Illustrated History of Prog Rock. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2010. https://archive.org/details/mountainscomeout0000roma/page/41/mode/1up?q=crimson

Smith, Sid. In the Court of King Crimson. London: Helter Skelter, 2001. https://archive.org/details/incourtofkingcri0000smit

Smith, Sid. Liner notes for King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic: The Complete Recordings. 6/2012.

Sodomsky, Sam. “Red.” Pitchfork, 9/10/2017. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-crimson-red/

Williams, Richard. “Crimso Meets Eno!” Melody Maker, 11/4/1972. https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_mm-nov72b.html

“Interview with DAVID CROSS.” DMME, 10/1999. https://web.archive.org/web/20191020100332/http://dmme.net/interviews/cross1.html

“K. Crimson’s Fripp: ‘Music’s Just a Means for Magic.’” Rolling Stone, 12/6/1973. http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/rs149-robert-fripp/

“The album so good, it destroyed the band｜King Crimson - Red.” Spotify: Vinyl Verdict, 3/8/2025. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0zaZ5NKjJbll3pYiMfTZq3?si=5f6ca152befa408f

“The Talking Drum: A Jamie Muir Interview.” Ptolemaic Terrascope, 1991. https://www.elephant-talk.com/wiki/Interview_with_Jamie_Muir_in_Ptloemaic_Terrascope