The ConstruKction of Light is King Crimson at their most severe — a dense, metallic, machine-driven record made by a stripped-down quartet, and the album on which Robert Fripp revisited his own past in the most rigorous way imaginable. Released in 2000, it divided listeners then and divides them still.

The short version

The ConstruKction of Light (2000) is the twelfth studio album by King Crimson, recorded in Nashville by the four-piece the band dubbed the Double Duo: guitarists Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn on Warr guitar and bass, and Pat Mastelotto on electronic drums. There is no drum kit anywhere on it. Home to the instrumental ‘FraKctured’ and to ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part IV,’ it is the most forbidding album of the band’s later career.

From double trio to double duo

The six-piece Double Trio of the mid-1990s, which had reunited Fripp and Belew with Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, made one great album in THRAK and then ground to a halt. Sessions for a successor in 1997 were abandoned: there was friction inside the band, and the practical difficulty of gathering six sought-after musicians, scattered across continents, in one room at one time was immense. Rather than fold, Fripp fractured the group into smaller units he called ProjeKcts, research and development laboratories for ideas. By the time a proper album came, Bruford and Levin had gone. Four remained, and they made this.

The sound

Dense, angular and unrelenting, this is Crimson as a precision machine. Fripp and Belew interlock in ferocious, mathematically exact guitar patterns; Trey Gunn’s Warr guitar rumbles somewhere between bass and lead; Fripp’s soundscapes drift over the top like weather. And beneath everything sit Pat Mastelotto’s electronic drums, which give the record its clinical, metallic sheen. Mastelotto himself never liked that sound, and years later re-recorded his parts on an acoustic kit for a revised edition, The ReconstruKction of Light, which most listeners now prefer. It is a fascinating record, and not a warm one.

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The songs

‘ProzaKc Blues’ opens with Adrian Belew’s voice pitched down into a grotesque growl, a comic blues he has described as his answer to fans who questioned his right to be in King Crimson. The two-part title track is superb, Fripp’s dissonant guitar answered by Belew singing microtonally against it. ‘FraKctured’ is nine minutes of Fripp at his most implacable: begun as another chapter of the Larks’ Tongues saga, it proved so plainly a relative of ‘Fracture’ that it took the name instead. ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part IV’ is the strongest thing here, a worthy addition to a series begun in 1972, and the cathartic ‘Coda: I Have a Dream’ reworks its material into a bleak finale.

Reception and legacy

Opinion split at once, and has not settled. Detractors hear a cold, airless production, sterile programmed drums, and a band recycling their own history rather than advancing it. Admirers point to the compositional strength of ‘FraKctured’ and ‘Part IV,’ and note that almost everything here was transformed on stage — the live album Heavy ConstruKction makes the case better than the studio record does. The sessions produced so much surplus improvisation that a second album emerged from the offcuts under the ProjeKct X name. Fripp, meanwhile, was proved right about the ProjeKcts: they had done their job.

The verdict

The ConstruKction of Light is for the committed, not the curious. Newcomers should start with In the Court of the Crimson King, then Red, then Discipline. But for anyone already inside the world of King Crimson, this is a rewarding, difficult, deeply serious record, and its best moments stand comparison with anything in the later catalogue. Come for the interlocking fury of ‘FraKctured,’ stay for ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part IV,’ and hear four musicians building something hard and exact out of very little warmth at all.

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