Mel Collins: Saxes & flute, Robert Fripp: Guitar & keyboards, Gavin Harrison: Drums
Jakko Jakszyk: Guitar & voice, Tony Levin: Basses & stick, Pat Mastelotto: Drums
Bill Rieflin: Keyboards, Jeremy Stacey: Drums & keyboards

• Three CDs featuring over three and a half hours of material performed during the band’s five nights residency at Teatro Metropolitan, Mexico City in July 2017 + audio extras.
• One Blu-Ray featuring over two hours of multi camera HD recorded footage from Mexico City. Audio soundtrack in 24/48 LPCM Hi-res stereo & 5.1 DTS HD-MA, with “picture off” mode allowing the music to be heard independently in pristine, lossless audio.
• Four disc set presented in two mini-vinyl style gatefold packs with booklet including photos by Tony Levin & new sleeve notes enclosed in an outer slipcase
• Mixed by King Crimson member Bill Rieflin from full multi track recordings

King Crimson is a band that continues to defy conventional expectations. As listeners to last year’s rush-released official bootleg from June 2017 recorded in Chicago discovered, this band gets better by the year. Given the amount of rehearsals, practicing, constantly expanding repertoire base (nearly six hours’ worth of material ready to select from on any given night), wealth of experience among musicians, technicians/sound crew, more comfortable travelling arrangements, better PA systems/mixing desks & the fact that the band is playing, for the most part, in purpose built theatres rather than the more imaginatively named but sonically challenged venues that hosted rock gigs in previous decades, this should come as no surprise. But it does. Perhaps it’s still part of the Rock’n’Roll myth – the ‘hope I die before I get old’ thought process that seems forever associated with rock music that’s proved so difficult to alter. Whatever the reason, the concept of a band maturing, re-inventing itself and being able to present music from a lengthy history in recognisable but ever-changing ways, still with same sense of wonder as if it were newly-written, remains, if not unique, certainly notable.

A few weeks after the Chicago concert, the first part of 2017’s tour reached its final destination – five nights’ of concerts in Mexico City. All of the concerts were recorded and filmed with a view to issuing a definitive document of Crimson live in 2017 & “Meltdown” is the result of that process. With over two hours of HD filmed performance and three hours of audio – including, for the first time with this line-up, audio recordings of Breathless, Discipline, Moonchild & Tony & Jeremy’s nightly Cadenza improvs – “Meltdown” offers a comprehensive overview of a band at the very peak of its performing ability.

The band has just finished a tour of Europe with further concerts scheduled for the UK, France & Japan from October to December 2018. (Full details at www.dgmlive.com)