Fripp-Eno MP3

Most major musicians, especially in the age of the Internet, don’t go away. They drift off the mainstream media’s line of sight and set up cottage industries. Guitarist legend Robert Fripp exemplifies this. Over at dgmlive.com (“DGM” standing for “Discipline Global Mobile”) there’s a steady stream of live and archival Fripp-related recordings that would make the most entrepreneurial and prolific jam band blush. Often as not, these include free downloads, as does a recent assortment of Fripp collaborations with Brian Eno, titled The Cotswold Gnomes, which is available as a set of MP3 files for the iTunes-like $9.95 and, for a few bucks more, in a “lossless” format (a la many of bleep.com’s offerings). As what the site refers to as a “hot tickle – free MP3 download” comes “Hopeful Timean” (MP3, dgmlive.com), though likely only for a short time. It’s a five-minute track of shifting synth clouds and gentle single note guitar lines. Those lines are echoed, in classic Frippertronic style, into the hazy background, but less for their ability to build algorithmic density than as distant echoes that double as premonitions. The piece was recorded on March 14, 2006, according to the information that accompanied the DGM site’s RSS feed of free downloads… er, tickles (RSS).