30.EPILOGUE.51: July 8, 2003
"Retreating To A Useful Position (1)."
Noticing the overwhelming relief-- almost joy-- that some people
feel when it transpires that they are "really" ill, and so can at last
relax and become inert without feeling guilty any more. My dad was
a good example-- after a life of cruel working hours, the relief of resignation.
-- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices.
FACTS AND SUPPOSITIONS
Brian Eno was a founding member
of Roxy Music in the first few years of the 1970s. He played on their
first two albums (Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure).
Because of Eno's presence, those two albums are by far the weirdest and
most adventurous works by that band. He then got sick of fighting
with Bryan Ferry and left to pursue a solo career in 1973.
Brian Eno is a musician,
producer, and sometimes a singer.
Brian Eno cannot play a
single instrument and, on many important theoretical levels, he does not
understand what he does.
Brian Eno thinks a lot.
Sometimes way too much. But that's okay because it's rare for people
who make music to think at all, let alone way too much.
Brian Eno's full name is
Brian Peter St. John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. I can understand
why he prefers "Brian Eno."
Brian Eno has also written
a book. It's called A Year With Swollen Appendices.
It's a diary, and it was written in 1995. Some of it is kind of arrogant,
some of it is also distant, but some of it is also very humble and intimate.
Also, there are short essays at the end of the book which detail many of
his theories of music and art.
If you ever see any pictures
of Roxy Music from the early days, Eno is that guy with really long hair
who's dressed like a girl. He looks the freakiest of all the freaks
in that band-- which is saying a lot with Andrew Mackay dressed like a
green-haired Elvis and Bryan Ferry himself looking like some bisexual 1950s-style
James Dean greaser. Eno claims he dressed like a girl in an attempt
to access his more intuitive or feminine side. I also think he did
it to one-up everyone. I mean, he looks totally alien and actually
kind of creepy in Roxy Music-- and so when they were all on stage people
probably came away remembering Eno above and beyond anything else.
Also, cross-dressing was in the air-- after all, these were the founding
years of Glam.
While in Roxy Music, Brian
Eno made weird sounds with machines. He couldn't play an instrument,
so he-- intuitively-- created chaos.
After Roxy Music, Brian
Eno still made weird sounds with machines.
Even today, Brian Eno makes
weird sounds with machines.
Brian Eno coined the term
"Ambient Music."
Brian Eno has also produced
U2, Talking Heads, Devo, Laurie Anderson, Jane Siberry, James, David Bowie,
and many others.
Brian Eno gets Grammies
sometimes. I always find this weird.
In his solo career, Brian
Eno dressed like a girl for a couple of albums. But because the effect
grew boring, he stopped. He also started losing his hair, so he cut
it really short.
EARLY STUFF
Brain Eno's first solo album,
Here
Comes The Warm Jets, is a collection of very strange, mostly assaultive
art-rock, with a few subtle interludes. Lots of guitars, but also
weird synths, strange arrangements, and found sounds, tape experiments,
multitracked vocals, and all sorts of other goodies. The lyrics are
funny, free associative, and sometimes kind of menacing. Eno's voice
is strong, but pleasant. He doesn't have the best singing voice,
but also not the worst. And he consistently sounds like Eno.
(If I remember correctly,
Eric Tamm in his book Brian Eno And The Vertical Colour Of Sound
puts his voice at a perpetual C.)
Eno's second solo album,
Taking
Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) sports far better production values, but
is more less in keeping with spirit of the first, although much more focused.
it actually kind of sounds like a record The Beatles might make if they
were doing an opera based on Neuromancer. Kind of science-fiction-y.
Songs about spies and cybernetics and conspiracies, end-of-the-century-Asia,
and weird mysticism.
Taking Tiger Mountain
sounds simultaneously dated and fresh. It sounds very much like the
product of the year in which it was produced, but also strangely futuristic.
Between the two solo albums,
Eno also recorded a record of experimental music with King Crimson guitarist
Robert Fripp. That album was called (No Pussyfooting) and
consisted of two long experimental guitar pieces that were neither Rock,
nor Jazz, nor Classical, and very ahead of their time.
Here Come The Warm Jets
and Tiger Mountain are maybe the hardest "rocking" of all Eno's
output. And, it is interesting to note that some of the songs are
even edgy and assaultive by today's standards. Not Rammstein, maybe,
but at least kind of proto-punk.
(People tend to label Eno's
early lyrical output "Progressive Rock," although I don't really see him
having much in common in bands like Yes and Rush.)
It was after
Tiger Mountain,
however, that something started to change.
ENO'S LYRICS
Eno's lyrics are strange.
They are not composed with any fixed intent in mind and so become almost
infinitely allusive and-- because of their well-crafted meaninglessness--
deeply meaningful. A lot of his songs are kind of threatening and
weird, filled with obscure wordplay and surrealistic imagery.
He composes his lyrics by
singing nonsense syllables alongside of the music he has recorded.
Eventually, when he finds some nonsense he likes, he tries to shape it
into words approximating his initial vocalizations. This highlights
the fact that that meanings are multiple, and usually come out of the void.
When Eno is vocalizing, he is generating sounds that in his mind seem to
go with the music he has created. Then, when he begins honing the
sounds into words, he imposes a meaning on a (mostly) meaningless sonic
utterance. Thus, the content of the songs springs, not directly from
his mind, or from some sort of point he wants to convey, as does the content
of other "singer-songwriters" works, instead it is suggested by the process
of composition itself. This makes Eno's songs fairly impersonal--
because even when his vocalizations have been codified into actual words,
the word-combinations he uses are fairly abstract and surreal-- but it
does make them resonate within the listener's mind because they (the songs)
play with the fact that human beings need to make patterns, or generate
sense, even from emptiness. Thus, Eno generates a situation where
his words have meaning dependent upon the impressions of the listener.
Eno's songs mean different things to Eno than they do to me, or you.
This, of course, is how all communication works-- nothing is ever clear,
every reading is a misreading-- but Eno's songs capitalize upon and amplify
this effect.
Eno likes odd imagery and
strange rhymes. This gives his songs a very playful feeling.
He also likes to position dark lyrics in cheery environments subverting
expectations.
He likes to invoke motion
and images of activity, making it seem as if the people in his songs are
doing something, thus making his songs seem as if they are about something
very concrete and specific, while still being vague enough to make you
wonder that those concrete and specific things are.
For example, Taking Tiger
Mountain, like I said above, is filled with spies and conspiracy, cybernetic
manipulation, cabalistic mysticism, and the cannibalism of people by machines.
Before
And After Science has songs about infinity, time, stillness, and paranoia,
and science. The unfinished My Squelchy Life features songs
about either God being unable to communicate with us or language being
a "a feeble system" or maybe both, paranoia, decision-making, and strange
cyberpunk landscapes. Wrong Way Up has the most beautiful
song about painting and about the end of the world ever written ("Spinning
Away"), and the few songs on Another Green World deal with landscapes,
love, and stillness.
He also likes writing songs
about people on boats, for some reason.
Of course, intent doesn't
totally go out the window, neither does psychology. Because Eno himself
has to first interpret his noises before you get to interpret his words.
So, the sounds also suggest ideas to him, and because of the fact that
I can pick reoccurring preoccupations out of his lyrics, these ideas--
through repetition-- shed light on his own obsessions and the workings
of his mind as well. So, even when his songs are impersonal, they
still do issue from a consciousness and hence are personal statements.
And it all means nothing.
Or maybe it means everything. Either way, it's up to you and the
effect is interesting as hell.
Sometimes funny, sometimes
spooky, sometimes even moving (especially "Golden Hours" and "Everything
Merges With The Night" from Another Green Word, "Spider and I,"
the closing number off Before and After Science, and Wrong Way
Up's "Spinning Away.")
Also, his vocals are often
multitracked. And so you get these choirs of Enos all singing in
unison, sometimes harmonizing with each other. Dozens and dozens
of voices. The effect is very lush.
Eno writes songs that read
like very abstract poetry that mean nothing at first glance, but then pile
up layers and layers of multiple meaning with each successive encounter.
DISCRETION
As the story goes, some time
after Taking Tiger Mountain (this would be about 1974-ish) Brian
Eno was in a motorcycle accident and so was stuck in bed for quite a while.
During this time a friend came over with an album of classical music for
him to listen to. She put the record on the turntable and then left.
Unfortunately, the volume was too low on the stereo. And then, just
at that moment, the stereo decided to screw up, and he lost the sound from
one of the speakers. And thus, poor, crippled Eno was stuck in the
room listening to a record that he could barely, hear issuing from a dying
stereo. This experience (possibly enhanced by a lot of painkillers)
caused him to begin thinking of music in a new way: as something that existed
not in the foreground, or even the background, but blended with the environment
in such a way that it both enhanced it and was indistinguishable from it.
And thus, the seeds of what he was later to call Ambient Music germinated.
It is important to note
that Eno's idea of Ambient and the current idea of Ambient Music-- primarily
involving really slow dance music with maybe a house or dub beat and whale
sounds in the background while some stoned "guru" mutters about transcendence
and Gaia-- are totally different. The current trend in Ambient Music
is very beat-oriented and also exists in the foreground. Whereas
Eno, while he never totally eschews the possibility of a regular rhythm,
tends towards a more beat-less type of ambiance. Something that is
more akin to natural sound, or repeating melodic patterns, or tonal (or
even in some cases atonal) clusters of sound that could be considered notes--
or in some cases maybe not. While most current Ambient Music exists
to "chill" the listener out at a rave, or enhance your drug of choice in
a-- sadly-- usually cheezy manner (there are notable exceptions to this,
though), Eno's Ambient Music is both far more cerebral, and emotional,
and less utilitarian. Eno's Ambient Music exists more as an object
unto itself-- it doesn't come with politics and recreational drugs, and
for that reason is more pure. You can impress politics upon it, or
take drugs and listen to it, if you want to-- but these things are not
presupposed by the music. You can contemplate Eno, or ignore it.
It exists as an environment unto itself.
This makes Eno's Ambient
Music all sound overtly intellectual which it both is and isn't-- at least
as far as thinking about the music is concerned-- after all, you can analyze
Eno's technique or you can just listen to a bunch of really nifty, mysterious
sounds, or not. It's all up to you. This is because the music
functions as part of the environment and so can either be appreciated as
art, experienced as background noise, or ignored altogether.
Eno's first Ambient excursion
was called Discreet Music. (But he didn't call it "Ambient
Music," then. And an argument could be made that, (No Pussyfooting)
can also be considered as some kind of "proto-Ambient" music.) Discreet
Music is quiet, and slow. (A chunk of it also appears as "Wind
On Wind," off the second Fripp / Eno collaboration, Evening Star.)
A simple sequence of notes repeats in a near-static pattern, but also very
slowly changes over the course of time. This is because the notes
have been fed into a tape delay system that uses time to slowly alter their
sequence, and also allows Eno to subtly adjust effects in real time (echoes,
equalization, etc.), making it seem as if the piece is part of an infinite
process-- always in motion, but at the same time static. The sounds
used in Discreet Music are electronic, but reminiscent of a quiet
flute. The music fades in, and then after a half an hour it very
slowly fades out. It's very calming, and beautiful.
It's also kind of sad.
Actually, there are two
different sequences of Discreet Music notes, one in the left speaker
and one in the right and the original release of Discreet Music
called it "Discreet Music 1&2." That there are two Discreet
Musics running simultaneously in split stereo, each a little bit out
of synch and changing in slightly different ways only serves to enhance
the motion-in-stasis of the piece.
And, to further drive home
the fact that this new kind of music is at home in both the foreground
and in the background, Eno actually accidentally made Discreet Music.
Almost no intentional composition was employed. The story goes he
was working on a sonic background for use in a concert with his friend
Robert Fripp. He set up some machines and started them running.
Then he got a phone call and got busy doing other things. And by
the time he remembered he was supposed to be recording some music, the
piece was done. And, to top it all off, when he later listened to
what he'd recorded he accidentally played the tape at a much slower speed
than he'd meant to. He liked what he heard and so recorded a version
for LP.
And, it works. It
really, really works. (But you knew I'd probably say something like
that anyway.) If you listen Discreet Music like you would
a consciously composed piece you will find enough variation in the repeating
patterns to hold your attention. And if you just let it play in the
background it will make you feel wistful, and maybe relaxed. Also,
if you play it on an endless loop for hours, at a very low volume, and
then go outside you will still hear it in the background. It kind
of programs itself into your head.
GREEN WORLDS
Around the same time as Discreet
Music, Eno also released another vocal album. This one was entitled
Another
Green World.
Actually, both Discreet
Music and Another Green World came out in 1975, but-- seeing
as I was very, very young in '75 and also back then in no way an Eno fan--
I don't really know which came first. However, it's pretty safe to
say they were both, probably, give or take a few months, simultaneous.
They also share a very similar, restrained aesthetic.
(This was also the time
Eno cut his hair, cropping it back severely. His image was now almost
the polar opposite of what it once was: where his look had been previously
garish, flamboyant, and shocking, he was now cool, restrained, and almost
monk-like in appearance.)
Only 5 of the 12 tracks
on Green World are vocal. The rest are relaxed, and sometimes
slightly sinister, atmospheres. The album is very gentle, almost
painterly. Most of the lyrics on it evoke places and landscapes.
Critics either loved it or hated it. I think it's brilliant.
Then, in 1978, Eno recorded
an album called Before And After Science. On the whole it
"rocks" more than Green World. But only in part. The
first half of the record is more aggressive, but the second half is very
quiet. There are 10 tracks, 8 of them have vocals. The songs
on Science are about space and time and the future. Again,
like so much of Eno's lyrical output, the songs are kind of science-fiction-y
in places. Kind of abstract in others. A few of the songs are
gentle, but sometimes have very sinister undercurrents. The last
song, "Spider and I" is like being wrapped up in glowing light.
Then, after Before and
After Science, Eno stopped singing for a very long time.
NOTE:
I've lived with Eno's music
and songs for so long I cannot be objective about them.
NOTATION AND PAINTING
Eno cannot write or read music.
He also cannot play instruments-- at least not in any sort of traditional
way. (He can kind of noodle on a keyboard a bit.)
So when he composes his music he uses charts and graphs and artwork to
convey what he wants-- either to other musicians or himself-- on an intuitive
level. This isn't important to know when listening to his music,
but it is interesting.
Thus, because of his compositional
techniques, the visual world and the world of sound intertwine in his work,
and so he likens his music more to the act of painting than strict musical
composition. He achieves this "painterly" effect partially through
the use of sonic stasis, and complex stereo effects that position sounds
in space. He also uses electronic sounds, or treated acoustic sounds,
or in some cases found or environmental sounds, juxtaposed with more "normal"
instrumentation, sometimes in very unusual ways (percussive keyboards,
drums sounds stretched into near melodies, etc.). This gives his
music a feeling of sonic colour, and in his more successful pieces he conveys
a kind of synesthesia-- a sense of "listening" to a "canvas" rather than
experiencing music with a beginning, middle and end, or a verse-chorus-verse
structure. Also, Eno tends to hide sounds at low volumes or inside
other sounds, or very subtly alter a note or two, here and there, while
his sonic clusters repeat. This creates music of extreme subtlety.
For example, I've been listening to Eno's full-disc piece Thursday Afternoon
for 10 years now and although, on the surface, there is very little sonic
action, I still occasionally find sounds I'd never noticed before: sometimes
echoes, other times very soft, slight shimmers-- once I realized I was
listening to two notes at once, overlapped-- and once I was aware of the
effect I was able to hear them both distinctly until they bent into other
sounds. The effect is kind of like looking at the brush strokes on
a canvas: the more you study them, more details and textures begin to appear.
NOTE 2:
Even though Eno stopped singing,
he didn't stop making music. In fact it's almost as if not having
to worry about writing songs freed him up to do his real work.
FUN FACT
In Philip K. Dick's mind-snapping
novel VALIS, we are introduced to a character named Mini.
Mini is a musician and the composer of something he calls "synchronicity
music" which involves lots of extended electronic tones. Synchronicity
music-- possibly-- contains coded information about the true nature of
the universe and, once decoded, can put the listener in touch with forces
infinitely greater than mortal man. Either that or it simply triggers
psychotic episodes in a small percentage of the population.
Mini is based upon Brian
Eno, and his "synchronicity music" is based upon an lp of Discreet Music
that Dick played obsessively for friends and family-- and well, pretty
much anyone else who would listen. Dick loved his copy of Discreet
Music so much the grooves of his copy wore out. This is all in
Lawrence Sutin's biography of Dick Divine Invasions. But it
looks like I lost my copy of Divine Invasions, so I can't tell you
what page.
In VALIS, Mini, while
conducting experiments with lasers, also accidentally kills a young girl
named Sophia. Now, Sophia may or may not be the living form of VALIS
(an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligent System), which itself either
may or may not be a superintelligent satellite from another dimension orbiting
the earth firing information at people that makes them either sane, or
insane; some kind of other alien life form breaking through into this reality,
once again firing information at people that makes them either sane, or
insane; a big fat mean trick being played on all the characters in the
novel by unknown forces who want to play with their heads for unknown but
probably extremely cruel reasons, or may just a scam by some burnt out
rock musicians (or maybe the musicians believe the scam and it's Mini himself
who's manipulating everything); or the living form of God incarnate come
down to redeem humanity and wrest it from the grips of the insane Gnostic
god, the Demiurge; or something else, entirely different. Regardless
of what VALIS is or is not, all of its / their plans (if there even are
plans) get kinda sorta screwed up by Mini when he kills Sophia. Unless
it doesn't because it was all part of the plan.
Either way, it looks like
Brian Eno may have killed God.
Cool.
NOTE 3:
I've lived with Eno's music
and songs for so long I cannot be objective about them.
And, because of this, I
can write neither coherently nor well about them, also.
AMBIANCE
After
Before And After Science,
Eno released a tape-loop experiment entitled Ambient 1/Music For Airports.
This is the first "official" Ambient Music generated by Brian Eno.
As with Discreet Music,
Music
For Airports is constructed of simple note sequences, recorded onto
tape loops of varying lengths. Eno just sat back, pressed "record"
and slightly altered the output. The result is 4 long tracks of slowly
changing, yet strangely static, gentle music.
Track 1 (entitled "1/1")
consists of a prepared piano playing a very simple tune, and a synthesizer
(or maybe two) droning, and contributing other effects. Track 2 ("1/2")
is a series of female voices very gently going "aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh."
The voices have been slowed down and sped up. Sometimes they harmonize,
sometimes they form dense layers, and sometimes everything is just silent.
Track 3 ("2/1") is a piano mixed with the voices from "1/2". Track
4 ("2/2") is composed of a series of long, overlaid synth lines.
The overall effect of the album is majestic, restful, and kind of nostalgic.
And sombre.
It's good music to drink
tea to, and contemplate the afterlife.
And, in a way, that's what
was intended. Eno doesn't really like flying. After all, flying
is kind of scary:
I thought, "I want to make a kind of music that prepares you
for dying-- that doesn't get all bright and cheerful and pretend you're
not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, 'Actually,
it's not that big a deal if I die'" (A Year With Swollen Appendices,
page 295).
Music For Airports was
played at London's Heathrow airport for about a week before customer complaints
made them take it off. Too many people were getting depressed.
That aside, the album is
also very theoretically interesting. Music For Airports (as
does Discreet Music-- and later Ambient works like On Land
and Thursday Afternoon) functions like a hologram.
(NOTE: This hollographic
effect isn't really all that present in the shorter prices, though.
The shorter pieces still generate moods and play with the foreground /
background dichotomy-- and quite well-- but are more like quiet soundtrack
pieces, and in some cases feel somehow much more consciously "composed."
Especially the collaborations with people like Harold Budd, and Jon Hassell.
But more about those in parts 4 and 5)
In a hologram, you have
an image burned into glass using lasers. However, if you shatter
the glass, each piece of the glass still retains a copy of that initial
image, only at a lesser resolution. The same effect occurs-- musically--
when you listen to much of Eno's Ambient Music: if you listen to about
a minute of it, you know what the entire piece sounds like. However,
because the music also slowly changes, you get a greater feeling for the
entirety of the piece if you stick with the whole thing. Thus, an
excerpt of a few minutes is like the entire piece at a lesser resolution.
And, if you consider that the pieces recorded onto vinyl or cd are also
excerpts of works created by looped tapes or various lengths, even the
"complete" pieces available on official recordings are still lesser representations
of a much larger whole.
Eno dubbed Music For
Airports "Ambient Music" because the word "ambient" suggests the word
"ambiance, which is what Ambient Music is meant to convey (either that
or mood)-- but also because "ambient music" also suggests the scientific
term "ambient energy." Ambient energy is a type of omnipresent background,
or potential energy that can change from its passive background state into
a more active one. Also, the word "ambient" means encircling, or
surrounding. Air, for example, is an ambient substance. Thus--
to repeat-- ambient music exists equally in the background or the foreground;
it can remain "ambient" and blend with the general atmosphere of the environment
in which it is played, or it can cross over into the foreground as an object
of active contemplation; and it is all-encompassing or encircling, part
of the atmosphere, like air.
And, y'know, all that aside,
the music is also just plain beautiful.
30.EPILOGUE.51: July 8, 2003