Semi-somewhat germane: This thread reminded me of a question a buddy raised way back when we were in high school, late 1970s, we're listening to King Crimson's "Starless" on his car stereo (cassette deck, pretty state-of-the-art for the time) and when the woodblock enters at 5:33 he turns to me and says "I've heard this tune a million times and I still can't figure out where those woodblock hits are going to land."
Well, several years later -- after I'd gotten turned on to the next incarnation of King Crimson's embrace of polymeter -- I realized that what the woodblock was doing at 5:33 in "Starless" was embarassingly obvious: He's just hitting the downbeats of 4/4.
The thing that made it so hard to predict for my buddy (besides the copious amounts of weed...hey, I did say this was in the late 1970s, right?) was that no one else in the band is playing in 4/4! That bass line is playing a 13-beat cycle (alternating measures of 4/4 and 5/8), and the guitar part is...well, to this day I don't have the patience to count what Fripp is doing there. In that context, the woodblock's simple 4/4 downbeats sound positively random!
