Trying to get beyond Fripp?

[The Man Himself <altruist@shoko.CALARTS.EDU>]

Try this: Stop listening to Fripp and check out a very very different area
of music.  That sounds (and reads) a lot more harsh than it's really
intended, but I've always found that the best way to let an influence
assimilate into my collective unconscious, rather than sound like the
musical equivalent of a bad photocopy, is to get what I can from someone's
work and then go someplace very different.  Focusing one's creative
interests in a more opposite sort of direction seems to facilitate any
previous influences' settling into their proper place in the psychic cue. 

On a related note, I saw at the NAMM show today (thanks Ted!!!) a couple
of huge posters of Fripp and Belew in the Fernandes booth, both of them
being advertised as Sustanior (is that what it's called?) endorsers.  I
tried the sustainer, and what do you know -- very Frippish.  So the moral
of today's lesson: If you already sound more like Fripp than you want to,
don't buy a Fernandes! 

--Andre

P.S. - See the home studio feature on David Torn in the current (Metallica
cover) issue of _Musician_.