King Crimson’s eleventh stu­dio album THRAK veered away from their prior discog­ra­phy in more ways than merely how it sounded. The band’s rad­i­cal new form and sound was fit­tingly cap­tured and deliv­ered in a very dif­fer­ent pack­age than any­thing that had come before; not only were the fash­ions and times very dif­fer­ent than their last out­ing circa 1984, but even the for­mats had changed. The 1980s band employed min­i­mal­ist design on the larger can­vas of the LP record, replaced in the 90s by dense tex­tures on tiny CD inserts.

Eric Tamm pub­lished his book Robert Fripp: From King Crim­son to Gui­tar Craft in 1990, when King Crim­son appeared for all intents and pur­poses defunct. He nev­er­the­less cor­rectly nailed its cycli­cal nature:

“King Crim­son had always been a way of doing things, and indeed with the new band [King Crim­son 1981–84] the his­tor­i­cal King Crim­son pat­tern played itself out once more: a short period of intense col­lec­tive cre­ativ­ity result­ing in a dynamic new musi­cal style, fol­lowed by a decline into some­what man­nered refine­ments and rep­e­ti­tions of orig­i­nal insights and a frag­men­ta­tion of group iden­tity due to the indi­vid­ual cre­ative lean­ings of the musi­cians.“
– Eric Tamm, Robert Fripp: From King Crim­son to Gui­tar Craft, page 9

Look­ing back from the point of view of 1990, the major phases of the King Crim­son life­cy­cle did indeed fall into a tril­ogy of trilo­gies: roughly three albums per three years (with vary­ing gaps of inac­tiv­ity in-between). After their sin­gu­lar debut in 1969, this pat­tern fits the bumpy tran­si­tion period of 1970–71, the adven­tur­ous jazz rock fusion period of 1973–74, and the new wave / math rock curve­ball of 1981–84. The THRAK era is where this orga­ni­za­tional scheme falls apart. In stark con­trast, this phase spanned 1994–96 but pro­duced only one stu­dio album.

How­ever, that one sin­gle album of mate­r­ial nev­er­the­less gen­er­ated the biggest pro­mo­tional blitz and world tour. This par­tic­u­lar lineup would hardly be the first to record only one album, but it is cer­tainly dis­pro­por­tion­ately rep­re­sented by the largest num­ber of sup­ple­men­tary releases. The band may con­sider their live work dur­ing this period to be more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of their effort, but for bet­ter or for worse, his­tory will judge them pri­mar­ily for THRAK. Were the name “Islands” not already taken, the metaphor would per­fectly describe THRAK’s iso­la­tion amidst the band’s other work.

The THRAK ven­ture was a major com­mer­cial endeavor, very unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of a band that often oper­ated by the skin of its teeth, usu­ally stop­ping short right on the brink of big-league main­stream oper­a­tion. The rel­a­tive sta­bil­ity of 73–74 was hard won after years of strug­gle, and 81–84 was famously the result of the mem­bers of a lit­tle band called Dis­ci­pline real­iz­ing they had the name wrong all along, and were not only King Crim­son in spirit but in fact had every right to the name. The reviv­i­fi­ca­tion of King Crim­son in 1994 was care­fully pre­con­ceived and exe­cuted, and left behind a great deal of plas­tic and paper arti­facts to review here.

While King Crim­son mimed “Cat Food” on Top of the Pops in 1970 (the footage report­edly now lost) and MTV promo videos were shot for “Heart­beat” and “Sleep­less” in the 80s, most of the usual pro­mo­tional trap­pings passed the band by. As such, the discog­ra­phy prior to 1994 isn’t quite as visu­ally rich as that of some of their peers (when even a prog rock dinosaur like Yes had pro­duced quite a num­ber of 7″ and 12″ sin­gles, replete with sin­gle edits, dance remixes, and inter­est­ing art­work). THRAK was to be a quite dif­fer­ent affair, unique in King Crimson’s com­mer­cial legacy: the sin­gle stu­dio album with the great­est num­ber of sup­ple­men­tal releases. It was pre– and post-ceded by a bevy of related EPs, sin­gles, live albums, video­cas­settes, DVDs, lim­ited edi­tions, and a lengthy world tour. All of this col­lat­eral mate­r­ial required a great deal of graphic design and pack­ag­ing, all ener­gized by the pro­mo­tional force avail­able from major label Vir­gin Records.

First things first. THRAK was pre­ceded months ear­lier by the EP VROOOM in Novem­ber 1994. The extended play for­mat became cus­tom­ary in later years, such as Level Five and Happy to be Happy With What You Have to Be Happy With each serv­ing as teasers for forth­com­ing full releases. VROOOM was also their first CD-only release of an orig­i­nal stu­dio record­ing (THRAK itself would be avail­able on CD, cas­sette, and the short-lived mini­disk for­mat). Visu­ally, VROOOM con­tin­ued the band’s asso­ci­a­tion with Bill Smith Stu­dio that began in the early 90s with the archival releases Frame by Frame: The Essen­tial King Crim­son, Heart­beat: The Abbre­vi­ated King Crim­son, Sleep­less: The Con­cise King Crim­son, and The Great Deceiver.

The sig­na­ture style of this period is densely lay­ered pho­tog­ra­phy. In this case, Smith uti­lized pho­tographs by The Dou­glas Broth­ers of a tower block, a lad­der, a radi­a­tor, strands of hair, and tiled walls (accord­ing to In the Court of King Crim­son, by Sid Smith, page 286). But for the first time since Earth­bound and Star­less and Bible Black, the dom­i­nant visual ele­ment is the typog­ra­phy. The word “VROOOM” takes up the whole of a three-panel folded jewel case insert. The aus­tere typo­graphic style estab­lished a sig­nif­i­cant shift in design direc­tion, away from the serif fonts of yore. The band name and EP title are set in beau­ti­fully restrained Hel­vetica Gill Sans (embar­rass­ing error cor­rected 12/28/12, thanks to com­menter Peter Grenader). Restrained, that is, in terms of color and point size — as we shall see, there are other ways of cre­at­ing empha­sis through type design, such as set­ting the word “VROOOM” in all caps and adding an addi­tional “o”.

Ono­matopoeia dic­tated the nam­ing con­ven­tion of the next few releases and the titles of a few key com­po­si­tions. The tracks “VROOOM”, “VROOOM VROOOM”, “THRAK”, and “B’BOOM” were set in all caps, adding visual empha­sis that made them stand out in track list­ings but also sug­gested great vol­ume and den­sity. The theme of cre­ative cap­i­tal­iza­tion would linger through­out King Crim­son album and song titles until at least 2000, by which point it had evolved into idio­syn­cratic mis­spellings and camel­Case, par­tic­u­larly with words like “Con­struKc­tion” and “ProjeKct”.

VROOOM was orig­i­nally sold with an insert card auto­graphed by all six band mem­bers. Expe­ri­ence sell­ing his own inde­pen­dently released solo albums influ­enced bassist Tony Levin’s neg­a­tive opin­ion of the design: “who picked these dis­gust­ing col­ors — what is it, cran­berry? Why does King Crim­son have a cran­berry CD cover?” (Beyond the Bass Clef: The Life and Art of Bass Play­ing, page 106)

VROOOM also fea­tured the first use of an intrigu­ing six-pointed icon used spo­rad­i­cally across the lifes­pan of this par­tic­u­lar lineup. I have no evi­dence to sup­port the fol­low­ing sup­po­si­tion, but I’ve long won­dered if its ori­gins were per­haps related to the celtic knot­work emblem that adorned Dis­ci­pline, orig­i­nally derived by John Kyrk from the Fourth Way Ennea­gram asso­ci­ated with G.I. Gurdjieff.

But a more lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion is as a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the double-trio con­cept for the band. More than a mere sex­tet, the con­cept of two guitar/bass/drum trios could just as eas­ily be described as three duos (here we go again with the trilo­gies!). The emblem would appear in one form or another on nearly every double-trio release, effec­tively brand­ing them all as part of series. Most notably, it served as the dom­i­nant visual ele­ment for the live album B’BOOM and the tour pro­gram. In ret­ro­spect, it per­haps might have made for a bet­ter cover of THRAK itself. It would have bet­ter branded the album as part of the con­tin­uüm fol­low­ing the visu­ally con­sis­tent run of albums in the 1980s.

The main event was a big-budget stu­dio album recorded at Peter Gabriel’s bucolic Real World Stu­dios in the fall of 1994 and released in April 1995. THRAK dates from a par­tic­u­lar period in the early to mid 1990s when bands as diverse as My Bloody Valen­tine, Curve, and Nine Inch Nails were explor­ing dense, noisy, lay­ered elec­tronic sounds — albeit couched in tra­di­tional pop/rock song­writ­ing. Many of the key albums from this period bore the names Flood, Alan Moul­der, and Mitchell Froom in their credit sheets, and their sig­na­ture sounds spilled out into the main­stream when bands like U2, Garbage, and even Suzanne Vega hired them.

Another force influ­enc­ing the gen­e­sis of THRAK was the world music scene sur­round­ing Peter Gabriel’s Real World. The asso­ci­ated record label, record­ing stu­dio, and world music fes­ti­val were all gath­er­ing steam at the time, and brought a num­ber of musi­cians together from around the world that would not have ordi­nar­ily col­lab­o­rated. In was in the midst of these two con­texts that Trey Gunn and Robert Fripp worked on at least three records with pro­ducer David Bot­trill at Real World Stu­dios: David Syl­vian & Robert Fripp’s The First Day, Toni Childs’ The Woman’s Boat, and finally, King Crimson’s THRAK. They all share a dense, dirty, heav­ily processed sound, but one also light­ened by world music elements.

After the VROOOM EP intro­duced “VROOOM” and “THRAK”, the orig­i­nal CD book­let for the THRAK album included the addi­tional sound effects such as “crash” “wal­lop”, “pop”, “bang”, and “snap”, each illus­trated (in vary­ing degrees of lit­er­al­ness) by a dig­i­tally altered photograph.

The inte­rior art­work is gen­er­ally in keep­ing with the Bill Smith Stu­dio aes­thetic, but the front cover is curi­ously unique, and appar­ently an exam­ple of Smith work­ing slightly out­side of his wheel­house. It appears to be a sin­gle pho­to­graph instead of a deeply lay­ered col­lage. The image is art­fully cropped and seem­ingly adjusted for color and con­trast, but oth­er­wise unma­nip­u­lated. It is not only unlike other Bill Smith Stu­dio works, but also unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of THRAK-related releases like the Dinosaur and Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream sin­gles. It’s more rem­i­nis­cent of the abstract, tex­tural work of Rus­sell Mills, who cre­ated famous sleeves for Brian Eno, David Syl­vian, Nine Inch Nails, and many others.

The sub­ject of the cover pho­to­graph is a detail of an uniden­ti­fi­able object. For some rea­son, I con­tinue to pic­ture an axe head or a wrecked car door, even though Bill Smith has since revealed to Sid Smith:

“I have to be able to hear the music for an album cover that we’re doing. It seems to be to have a very hard, met­ally kind of vibe to it and that’s what gave me the idea for the cover.” The piece of metal he even­tu­ally used was a sec­tion of a com­puter secu­rity cup­board in Smith’s premises, which hadn’t quite lived up to the manufacturer’s guar­an­tee.
– Sid Smith, In the Court of King Crim­son, page 270

I sus­pect these mun­dane ori­gins bely some­thing deeper. Bear with me as I gen­tly enter into Freudian ter­ri­tory. The rusted metal hunk is clearly emblem­atic of some­thing dis­tressed, dis­torted, loud, and heavy. It is man­u­fac­tured, manip­u­lated, tech­no­log­i­cal, and mas­cu­line. But the left edge of the object is obscured by shadow, a chiaroscuro cre­ated by an enig­matic hole. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the hole rep­re­sents a female aspect, mark­ing a divi­sion between the harshly lit ruined object and the murky tex­tures hid­den in shad­ows. If I’m in any way right about this, the THRAK cover is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the themes of dual­i­ties expressed by the Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, In the Wake of Posei­don, and Three of a Per­fect Pair sleeves, inspired by the union of oppo­sites (sun/moon and male/female) in Tantric theory.

In April 1994, THRAK shared the record store shelves with some of the above releases. This is a very incom­plete selec­tion of what would have been brand new at the time, and likely to be fea­tured along­side. There is a wide vari­ety of graph­i­cal styles, and only the Tricky and Belly albums come close to the highly tex­tured, lay­ered look that Bill Smith Stu­dio cre­ated for VROOOM and THRAK. The usu­ally reli­able Pink Floyd art depart­ment also dis­ap­pointed that year with their over­cooked cover for the live album Pulse — sug­gest­ing a band that couldn’t make a deci­sion and instead decided to dec­o­rate their album with every sin­gle design idea they had all at once (which included a battery-powered LED light in the spine). My favorite of these is the Faith No More sleeve, with its bold, pow­er­ful illus­tra­tion of insti­tu­tional oppres­sion. As you can see, THRAK rather dis­ap­pears into this jumble.

THRAK is the only King Crim­son album to be made avail­able in more than one edi­tion at the time of release. In the early 90s, com­pact discs were often pack­aged in card­board sleeves called long­boxes, in part to com­bat shoplift­ing but also, more prac­ti­cally, to allow music shops to dis­play the new stock with­out rebuild­ing their shelv­ing already opti­mized for much larger LP records. By my mem­ory, THRAK was released after long­boxes were dis­con­tin­ued (a major com­plaint being that they were incred­i­bly envi­ron­men­tally wasteful).

A spe­cial lim­ited edi­tion set fea­tured the CD in a stamped metal long­box, includ­ing the tour pro­gram, 24kt gold CD, rice paper sleeve, and a VROOOM badge. Gold-coated com­pact discs are reput­edly more reflec­tive (pos­si­bly improv­ing play­back fidelity) and may even decom­pose more slowly than stan­dard “sil­ver” discs. Remark­ably, the lim­ited edi­tion did not include the stan­dard CD book­let, or indeed any addi­tional art­work or any sleeve notes at all. As such, the stan­dard retail CD is a more attrac­tive item in terms of over­all design.

The orig­i­nal 1995 CD edi­tion was the first King Crim­son stu­dio album to not be released on vinyl, and the first to fea­ture pack­ag­ing designed specif­i­cally for the jewel case for­mat. It remains far and away the most lav­ishly illus­trated of all thir­teen stu­dio albums. A multi-paneled fold­out came in lieu of the tra­di­tional sta­pled book­let, effec­tively one-upping the gate­fold LP for­mat in all but dimensions.

What does not work so well, how­ever, is the fully-justified and thus vir­tu­ally unread­able lyric sheet. Also, the pho­tographs are often overly lit­eral depic­tions of the music, includ­ing a toy car with motion blur, a shat­tered light­bulb, and dinosaur bones.

By and large, the 30^th Anniver­sary remas­tered edi­tions issued between 2000–2001 sported dra­mat­i­cally improved pack­ag­ing over all pre­vi­ous CD edi­tions. In many cases, they even sur­passed the orig­i­nal vinyl (Earth­bound and USA in par­tic­u­lar ben­e­fit­ted). The one excep­tion is THRAK, and the only instance where the orig­i­nal pack­age design was more appeal­ing. For the first time, no vinyl edi­tion existed to repli­cate, so the the orig­i­nal CD book­let was dep­re­cated in favor of an entirely new book­let of his­tor­i­cal clip­pings. A selec­tion of the orig­i­nal art­work was rel­e­gated to the inner gate­fold spread. The cred­its and lyric sheet are even more illeg­i­ble than the orig­i­nal, and the pho­tographs are reduced to postage stamp size.

The track “Dinosaur” was released as a sin­gle on com­pact disc in 1995, along­side a pro­mo­tional ver­sion with a dif­fer­ent cover. Part of the appeal of sin­gles to fans and col­lec­tors is orig­i­nal mate­r­ial such as b-sides or alter­nate mixes, but Dinosaur offered only live record­ings avail­able else­where, and abbre­vi­ated sin­gle edits.

The live album B’BOOM (named after the Bill Bru­ford / Pat Mas­telotto) duet, was released in August 1995. Labelled as an “offi­cial boot­leg”, it was rushed to mar­ket not only to doc­u­ment the band’s return to the stage for the first time in a decade but also in an effort to beat the boot­leg­gers. King Crim­son was heavily-bootlegged in the past, and they rightly antic­i­pated their first live shows in over a decade to be like­wise a target.

The dom­i­nant image of the dou­ble trio icon on the front cover makes the point that the band con­fig­u­ra­tion is even more impor­tant live than in the stu­dio. The sym­bol extended even to the phys­i­cal place­ment of the musi­cians on the stage, although you wouldn’t know it from a book­let free of pho­tographs. The Pho­to­shop rip­ple effect looked strik­ing at the time but is now rather dated.

The sec­ond and final sin­gle “Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream” was released on com­pact disc in Octo­ber 1995, with another sleeve by Bill Smith Stu­dio. The cover depicts an organic, bio­log­i­cal object, pos­si­bly a grain of pollen or even a brain. The sickly green hue is, to be hon­est, a lit­tle icky, and reminds me now of the stem cell pho­tog­ra­phy that appears on Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back (read The Dork Report review) and Live Blood albums. Unlike Dinosaur, I believe the Sex sin­gle CD is worth seek­ing out for the pos­i­tively sub­lime live record­ing of “Walk­ing on Air”, supe­rior even to the stu­dio ver­sion (I’m not sure if it’s been released else­where, but it’s def­i­nitely not on B’BOOM). (update 12/28/12: this “Walk­ing on Air” appears to have also been released on the mail-order-only live album Live at the Wiltern. Thanks to com­menter TK for help­ing me track it down)

The sec­ond of three live albums doc­u­ment­ing the THRAK tours was released on CD in June 1996. THRaKaT­TaK is the only non-archival King Crim­son live album to actu­ally fea­ture a pho­to­graph of the band play­ing live — on the front cover, no less. It’s rather amaz­ing that they avoided the cliché nearly every other band in the world read­ily employs for their live discs, even the most design-conscious ones like Peter Gabriel. Unfor­tu­nately, an ugly yel­low sticker is per­ma­nently affixed to the front of my copy (but to be fair, its mes­sage is rather dryly funny: “Warn­ing! This recod­ing con­tains explicit live instru­men­tal impro­vi­sa­tion and a poster”). The inte­rior art­work includes sev­eral con­tri­bu­tions from Tony Levin: pho­tographs of charred basses (casu­al­ties of a fire in his home stu­dio) and schemat­ics for his Café Crim Valet Road Case, includ­ing space for wine bot­tles and an espresso machine.

“When Crim­son made plans to come out with the CD THRaKaT­TaK, I rumi­nated on how I could come up with a photo for the pack­age that was as rad­i­cal as the music. I con­sid­ered pro­ject­ing a slide of the band onto one of the burnt basses, but there was too much black in the char­coal body for good con­trast. […] I tossed the basses into the snow in front of it [his burned-down home stu­dio], fished them out enough so that they showed, pho­tographed them with the barn remains behind them, and onto the fin­ished print I painted a fire ris­ing into the sky. The final work became the inside cover of the THRaKaT­TaK CD and served a ther­a­peu­tic need for me to cre­ate some­thing pos­i­tive out of the ashes.“
– Tony Levin, Beyond the Bass Clef, pages 63–64

In my opin­ion, the THRaKaT­TaK sleeve is a casu­alty of the 90s “grunge” design trend (its coin­cid­ing with a musi­cal genre also called grunge is coin­ci­dence) of dis­tressed fonts and textures.

Per­for­mances dur­ing the tour of Japan were filmed and released on VHS as Live in Japan in 1996. The yel­low sleeve with col­lage of band pho­tographs recalls the orig­i­nal laserdisc sleeve for Three of a Per­fect Pair: Live in Japan. The same footage was repur­posed for the DVD Deja VROOOM, first released in 1999 and tweaked for reis­sue in 2007. The Deja VROOOM sleeve is far more char­ac­ter­is­tic of the band than the VHS case, sport­ing a P.J. Crook cover that is well-suited for the wrap­around DVD case for­mat. Unfor­tu­nately, I have the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the DVD and the menu nav­i­ga­tion is so appallingly designed as to be very nearly unus­able (sup­pos­edly the 2007 edi­tion included a redesigned nav­i­ga­tion scheme, but I can’t con­firm). Inter­ac­tive design is what I do for a liv­ing, and I’d love to cri­tique it more here, but I’m afraid I’d lose too many read­ers, so, mov­ing on…

The third and final live album dat­ing from the THRAK tours was VROOOM VROOOM, con­tain­ing excerpts of two very dif­fer­ent shows in Novem­ber 1995 and August 1996, but belat­edly released in Novem­ber 2001. Per­haps the series was halted when they ran out of ono­matopo­etic track names? The cover art fea­tures two paint­ings by P.J. Crook: two street views, painted in one-point per­spec­tive, a styl­iza­tion often employed in film by Stan­ley Kubrick and Wes Ander­son. The two oppos­ing street views reflect the fact that each disc of the dou­ble album depicts the band at two points in its exis­tence: the first rel­a­tively new, with the sec­ond disc show­ing them much later, with the mate­r­ial nailed down and played at a blis­ter­ing pace.

VROOOM ART & DESIGN CREDITS:

• Graphic Design 1994 Bill Smith Studio
• Pho­tog­ra­phy 1994 The Dou­glas Brothers

THRAK ART & DESIGN CREDITS:

• Design and Com­puter Images 1994 Bill Smith Stu­dio, London
• Pho­tog­ra­phy 1994 Lewis Mulatero, except cow­boy and boxer

B’BOOM ART & DESIGN CREDITS:

• Design: Bill Smith Stu­dio, London

THRAKATTAK ART & DESIGN CREDITS:

• Sleeve Design: Bill Smith Stu­dio, London
• Cover Pho­tog­ra­phy: Steve Jennings
• Burn­ing House and Gui­tar Pho­tog­ra­phy: Tony Levin

VROOOM VROOOM ART & DESIGN CREDITS:

• Cover Art­work: from paint­ings by P.J. Crook
• Design: Hugh O’Donnell
• Pho­tos: Steve Jen­nings, Robert Leslie, Tony Levin

FURTHER READING:

• Inter­view with Bill Smith — Album Cover Designer Extra­or­di­naire by Arkade

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