Arguing with the Gods: What I
Like About Brian Eno
There has been a lot of nonsense
written about Brian Peter St John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno -- and I'm probably about to
add to it.
Most people at least recognize the name and are familiar
with the basic outline of his career. Eno was a member of Roxy Music early on -- he played
synthesizer and added electronic processing to the group's sound. After the band's second
album, For Your Pleasure [EMI 65823], he left them to embark on a series of solo
projects, and, later still, to produce best-selling recordings for other artists,
including John Cale, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2.
Eno's first project after leaving Roxy Music was a 1973
collaboration with Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting [EG Editions EGCD 2], an LP with a
single "song" per side. The album consisted of a dense wash of sound --
prolonged chords, breathlessly sighing choruses, drifts of guitar sustain. It wasn't pop
music and it sure wasn't classical music. Most listeners were completely baffled by it;
some were mesmerized. (I was -- and am -- both: I love it most days; sometimes it drives
me up a wall.)
Eno's next two projects were pop music -- of a most
ambitious sort. Here Come the Warm Jets [Plan 9/Caroline 1510] and Taking Tiger
Mountain (By Strategy) [Plan 9/Caroline 1511] were sprawling epics that mated
enigmatic lyrics -- often inspired by random word associations and dream logic -- to
perfectly crafted rock'n'roll mini-operas. In terms of sonic craftsmanship, the two discs
were like Phil Spector on a really good trip.
In 1975, Eno released Another Green World [EGCD 21],
the recording generally acknowledged as his masterpiece. Eno still composed more-or-less
traditional pop songs ("I'll Come Running," "St. Elmo's Fire"), but
they were splashes of vivid color against the more somber sonic landscape of his
instrumentals, which were getting slower, almost static.
In mastering the art of stillness, Eno had discovered his
true metier, the manipulation of the recording process itself. The soundscapes of Green
World employed muted backgrounds -- sometimes the foreground was quiet, too, as in
"Zawanul/Lava," in others it was illuminated with bright splashes of tonal
color, as in "Sky Saw."
That same year, Eno produced Discreet Music [Plan
9/Caroline 1520] for his tiny Obscure record label. Discreet Music, like No
Pussyfooting, consisted of Eno "treating" music rather than
"creating" it. In his notes, he cites Eric Satie's notion of "musique
d'ameublement" (furniture music) as his inspiration -- that is to say music that
inhabits a room the way the furniture does.
The centerpiece of Discreet Music is Eno's tape
delay treatment of Pachelbel's Canon (which had not at that point become overplayed or
even much played at all). Utilizing several tape recorders running at slightly different
speeds, Eno reconstructed the Canon so that its melodic elements moved at a glacial pace,
bobbing in the sheer wash of sound and occasionally bumping into themselves and other
fragments.
Play Discreet Music at the volume you would listen
attentively to, say, Another Green World and you will quickly tire of its lack of
drama; play it at a level at which you are barely aware that it is on and it can
completely transform the way you perceive your room. Music as furniture, indeed!
Discreet Music marked the beginning of Eno's
exploration of "ambient music." That phrase has become hackneyed in the years
since Eno first coined it to describe what he was doing, but it's basically Satie's
"musique d'ameublement," except when it isn't (sorry, one of the things I like
about Eno is his sense of whimsy -- don't take any of his proclamations too literally or
you'll get in deep trouble). That said, Eno's definition of ambient music is "music
deigned to calm the mind and create space to think."
To think. What an extraordinary concept.
And yet, at its best, Eno's ambient music is ideal for
taking you beyond the state of conscious thought -- of transporting you (or at least me)
to the same "zone" that intense concentration or physical effort does -- to a
place where you can simply be without engaging the analytical portion of your mind.
Some people call this meditation, but "calm the mind" is just as good a label.
What fascinates me most in Brian Eno's music is his
realization (figuratively and literally) that sound and space can affect each other so
intensely. Discreet Music is not brilliant music, but it has enhanced my enjoyment
of numerous dinner parties by positively charging the rooms where the parties were held,
in much the same way a humidifier subtly changes the atmosphere.
Which brings us to Music For Airports [Plan
9/Caroline EEGCD-17]. Eno claimed to have created these sparse compositions to calm
passengers' fear of flying and induce calm, but that was an entirely theoretical
justification -- the works were not actually composed for a specific airport nor, I
suspect, did Eno ever expect them to be played in one. Yet, both LaGuardia and
O'Hare have installed Music For Airports in their concourses -- a circumstance that
caused me to drop my luggage and interrupt traffic flow in the concourse of LaGuardia's
Marine Terminal when I recognized the music while in transit there in 1980.
I thought it was beautiful. The slow moving piano notes
rang in the echo-y corridors and the mutter of voices and the clack of high heels ebbed
and flowed in and out, above and beneath the sonic textures. It reminded me of Debussy's La
Cathédrale engloutie (the submerged cathedral) from Préludes -- not because
of any similarity in theme or treatment, of course. It simply gave me the same sense of
strange wonder as Debussy's image of an underwater cathedral. Suddenly, the familiar
landscape of an airport corridor was transformed into something quite extraordinary.
It was probably the most intense esthetic experience I have
ever had in a transit hub.
And that's really why I so admire Brian Peter St John Le
Baptiste de la Salle Eno. He has made a career out of creating unanticipated moments of
beauty and tranquility that can unexpectedly overtake me in the unlikeliest circumstances.
That's a rare gift.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Note: If you want a play-by-play of Eno's career,
there are lots of places on the Web that can give you that. Two of the best are: music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/,
an excellent introduction to his music, and music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/lyrics.html,
which includes his lyrics and hyper-detailed discussions of their meanings and references.
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