King Crimson - Earthbound
Quite soon after I heard this, I was getting into all kinds of jazz and progressive rock. It's famous for bad sound quality, which I think is a fantastic quality for this record. It was recorded with a normal cassette player in 1972. I think most of the critics hated it when it came out… They were asking how anyone could release these kinds of recordings. I really like this kind of recording: the sound quality really introduced me to the beauty of distortion. The recording quality is a really important part of the record. The performances are really great also. I like some of the studio albums a lot also, like Larks' Tongues In Aspic or Red, they're classics, but maybe in the end it was this one that made the biggest impression. The lineup of the group was changing on every album at the time, and on this album the lineup is completely different except Robert Fripp from only two years before that. The style of King Crimson was changing for every album. If you compare Islands to the next studio album Larks' Tongues, they are quite different.