Giles Giles & Fripp - Selections From The Brondesbury Tapes vinyl lp (due to size and weight, this price for the USA only. Outside of the USA, the price will be adjusted as needed)
SKU
23-DGMLP9
Now this is pretty fascinating and also it's in surprisingly high quality sound for what it is and how it was made. This is the 'home demos' that Giles, Giles & Fripp worked on to get themselves their contract with Decca Records, as well as the demos that they worked on during the period of their contract.
There is plenty of material that is essentially just (although sometimes significantly better) alternates of the Giles, Giles & Fripp album, but it gets especially amazing as the disc progresses, as the band adds singer Judy Dyble, multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and lyricist Peter Sinfield. In other words, the group is well on its way to becoming King Crimson; all that's missing is Greg Lake!
“Giles, Giles & Fripp's 1968 demo home recordings, newly remastered by David Singleton. A must-have collection for King Crimson fans with some early indication of the band's sound / repertoire. 200-gram superheavyweight vinyl and digital release picks 13 of the best quality recordings from the tapes. Moving into 93a Brondesbury Road in 1968, Peter Giles, Michael Giles and Robert Fripp's North London flat soon became a centre of creative activity for the trio. Feeling energised after the frustrations they'd experienced while recording "The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles & Fripp" at Decca, they soon established their living space into a home studio (consisting of one Revox reel-to-reel tape machine) which was frequently visited by ex-Fairport Convention vocalist Judy Dyble, a then unknown Ian McDonald and, later in 1969, by Greg Lake. The musical output from that period is often mentioned as providing King Crimson fans with a glimpse into the early incarnation of the band's sound and composition. The popular Crimson ballad 'I Talk To The Wind' appears here in two early versions with one featuring Peter Giles on vocals and the other with Judy Dyble on vocals. Parts of Fripp's 'Suite No. 1' would later be transformed into 'Prelude: Song Of The Gulls' and his 'Why Don't You Just Drop In' became, with new lyrics, 'The Letters' for 1971's album "Islands". The Fripp-composed 'Passages of Time' is also of interest, consisting of a driving bolero rhythm and a middle-eight section that would later find it's way onto King Crimson's "In the Wake of Poseidon" as 'Peace - A Theme'. Although the audio quality is limited in places due to the original source, the 2025 remastering by David Singleton has improved the sound significantly compared to previous issues.”