Brian Eno on his music for film and television

BRIAN ENO interview

Sight and Sound, Winter 2020/2021

by Simon Reynolds

Brian Eno has been fascinated by the relationship between film and music for nearly half a century. In the early Seventies, he started buying soundtrack albums, in particular Nino Rota’s Fellini scores. The open-ended quality of film music when heard separate from the visuals became a kind of aesthetic ideal, encouraging Eno to drift away from the song forms of his early solo albums towards the sonic watercolours of Another Green World and then onto the instrumental moodscapes of his ambient records.

“Listening to soundtracks changed my ideas about what music was allowed to be,” says Eno via Zoom from his second home in Norfolk, where he’s been sequestered during the pandemic. After leaving Roxy Music in 1973, he and engineer Rhett Davies would work in the recording studio all day. “Just before it was time to go home, I’d say, ‘let’s do the film mix’. And that meant ‘take this material somewhere else’.  We might remove most of the main elements – the voice, or the drums - leaving a few elements that were now suspended in space. We might change the speed, slow it right down, or put a really long reverb on the sounds.  We never spent very long on ‘the film mix’ but often, at home later, I’d think, ‘that was the best thing we did today’”.

In 1976, some of these ‘film mixes’ were collated for an LP Eno pressed up in a limited edition of 500 and sent out to screen production companies as a “use me please” calling card. Two years later, the album was officially released, with a slightly different track list, as Music For Films. “If you listen carefully, you’ll notice there’s tracks from Another Green World but slowed down to one-third speed,” Eno laughs.

By 1978, Eno had already scored a “truly terrible horror movie” titled, in the U.K., The Devil’s Men, and  formed a productive collaboration with Derek Jarman.  Used in Sebastiane, “Final Sunset” is the only track from Music for Films that also appears on his new career-spanning collection Film Music 1976-2020. Ranging from a lovely rendition of  “You Don’t Miss Your Water”, the William Bell soul song best known in its countrified version by The Byrds, to the glitchy disorientation of “Design As Reduction”, a piece made for a documentary about Dieter Rams, the seventeen tracks have been sifted from some 180 projects for movies and television Eno completed over the past four decades.

Always an early adopter, Eno realized a long time ago that film work might be one of the main avenues through which an experimental musician like himself could get exposure and sustain a livelihood.  In recent years, the insatiable appetite on the part of the new streaming services for adventurous television has fostered an equally strong demand for adventurous sounds, making the music supervisor an increasingly creative and crucial figure. It’s been a godsend for musicians impacted by the erosion of record sales, especially the kind of musician who can’t rely on live performance as an alternate source of  revenue.

“It’s one of the places that people can do things that wouldn’t ever get played on the radio,” says Eno.  “As a composer in the popular music world, you’re always fighting to get anything heard if it doesn’t have a song or a beat.  Films are the place where suddenly all the things you  dreamed about doing, they can be done.  It’s true  for orchestral music too. Most orchestral music that is recorded now is for films. Quite a few studios, like AIR in London, survive pretty much on recording big orchestras for movies.”

Eno estimates that 15 percent of his income comes from film and TV work. Sometimes this will be commissioned;  other times it’ll be the use of a piece from one of his earlier records. In one case, included on the new collection,  it was both: “Deep Blue Day” was originally made for Al Reinert’s 1989 moon landing documentary For All Mankind, but is better known from its 1996 repurposing in Trainspotting, where its dreamy drift incongruously accompanies the junkie Renton’s dive into a toilet bowl to recover some opium suppositories. 

“Deep Blue Day” and the other For All Mankind pieces actually came out several years before the Reinert documentary reached screens, as the 1984 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. “The story Reinert told me that got me really excited about the project was about how each of the astronauts was allowed to bring one cassette with them, to listen to during the considerable down time you have traveling through space. Nearly all of them chose country & western music. I found this so charming - people right at the cutting edge of technology, pioneers at the edge of the frontier, playing what was basically Earth frontier music.”  That idea led Eno and his collaborators (his brother Roger and U2 co-producer Daniel Lanois) to the sound of “Deep Blue Day,”  which entwined shimmering ribbons of pedal steel guitar around a slowed-down Western Swing rhythm, a preset on a device called the Omnichord. Without that snippet of information from Reinert, says Eno, the soundtrack would probably have consisted of “just space music” -  amorphous, abstract, absolutely predictable. “It gave us a completely different direction.”

Starting with a kernel of inspiration is how Eno likes to approach composing for film. “Quite often, I will get started on it before I’ve seen anything at all. Before I’ve even read the script. I’ll just have heard the briefest description.” Although he’ll sometimes stick photographs of the movie set (as with Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones) or still images (NASA shots from the lunar missions, with For All Mankind) up on the studio wall, Eno never writes to the film itself. The idea of composing music  tailored to precise allotments of time or specific scenes is alien to him. If anything, he’ll operate the other way around, generating a large number of underscores and inviting the film makers to pick as they see fit.   

Eno goes one step further with his music for Series 4 of Top Boy, the formerly Channel 4, now Netflix drama about gang life on an East London council estate. “That’s what I was working on this morning. They start shooting next week and this time we’ve decided to try having the music available when they’re shooting. They can use it as a scene setter.” He pauses and chuckles wryly. “We’ll see how that works out.”

 

SIDE BAR - ENO’S PANDEMIC VIEWING

“I haven’t been watching much at all, but I do like this Japanese program, Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories [MBS / Netflix]. It has such an unusual mood. It’s all set in a small Tokyo restaurant that opens from midnight until 7-AM.  Each episode is only half-an-hour long and it’s essentially one person’s tale - some odd little story of life, often nothing dramatic. There’s something so calmly human about it. It’s extremely heartwarming and comforting.  Everything is at kind of a slow pace. And the production values look like a film I could have made. I don’t think there’s any music in the program itself aside from this song at the beginning of each episode ["Omoide (思ひで)", by Ludens].  A song in Japanese, sung by this rather faltering male voice. There’s something so touching about it, because it’s not a  polished, pro voice. Well, he may be a great pro singer for all I know, but somehow he’s managed to project this persona of real innocence. It’s beguiling. The song is such a great mood setter for the program.” 

Harold Budd tribute

Harold Budd tribute

December 10 2020, NPR Music

Some artists veer wildly between styles from record to record. And then there are those who discover their sonic identity and stick with it, hardly straying from the true path they’ve settled on. Their life’s work is the patient art of inflecting and perfecting.

Harold Budd belongs in this second category of artists, those for whom musical style isn’t something you can put on and take off like a costume, but a truth that comes from deep within the self that you discover and distill.  Over the course of his four-decade discography, Budd’s music floated between ambient, minimalist composition, and dreampop,  but ultimately evaded those categories to gently assert itself as a wholly individual voice. Cherished by a devoted group of fans and admired by his musical collaborators such as Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins and XTC’s Andy Partridge, Budd’s slow, tranquil compositions centered around his own piano playing. The Los Angeles-based musician died earlier this week from complications caused by covid-19, just a few days after testing positive. He was 84.  

Budd did not have many colors, but he was their master, as the saying goes. The primary hue in his palette was a snowy-white piano texture so smudged with soft pedal and sustain that it’s like hearing Erik Satie through a blizzard. When his melodies wander into the higher octaves, the twinkling tone is so pure and idyllic, it verges on translucent. Across the 30-plus records he made solo and in collaboration, he played other instruments – electric keyboards, synthesizers, early samplers like the Synclavier – but the acoustic piano remained at the heart of his sound. “The way I work is that I focus entirely on a small thing and try to milk that for all it’s worth, to find everything in it that makes musical sense,” Budd explained in a 1997 interview with Sound on Sound. The trouble with the modern recording studio with all its hi-tech options was that “ it gives you the freedom to do everything, and to me everything is a tyranny.”

^^^^^^^^^^

Harold Budd started out as a drummer—which is funny, since his discography is marked by the absence of backbeat and rarely has any percussive element at all. Born in LA in 1936, then raised in the Mojave desert town of Victorville, he became bebop mad as a teenager and later rubbed shoulders with Albert Ayler when they were both in the army. Gradually Budd’s interest shifted towards the cooler kinds of West Coast jazz. Then, while studying music theory at college, his head was turned around by a lecture given by John Cage, there to talk up his 1961 book Silence.

Budd’s first forays into composition were Cage-damaged and modish in the Sixties style: scores that consisted of graphics or brief, open-ended instructions, a 24-hour long performance for gong. Using a Buchla synth, he recorded a droning Terry Riley-like piece called “The Oak of the Golden Dreams” that decades later appeared on – and provided the title of – a joint record with electronic composer Richard Maxfield.

Soon enough Budd turned away from both the post-John Cage American school of chance and reduction and from the stern, sombre atonality of Europeans like Boulez – the two dominant approaches in the post-war music academy.  Instead, he committed himself to what he would later describe as “an ethic of loveliness…  It was a political action. I was consciously dissociating myself, and becoming antagonistic toward the American avant garde.” 

That meant deliberately pursuing music that was “so sweet and pretty and decorative” that it would actively offend his erstwhile peers. The first fruit of Budd’s dissidence against dissonance was a 1972 piece influenced by Renaissance music entitled “Madrigals of the Rose Angel”. Somehow a tape of a live performance of a concert including that piece found its way to the ears of British composer Gavin Bryars, who played it to Brian Eno. He in turn phoned up Budd and invited him to come to the U.K. to make a record. “I owe him everything,” Budd once said of the surprise call from Eno.  “He changed my life in a way that was extraordinary.”

Budd’s debut album, The Pavilion of Dreams, came out in 1978 on Obscure, an imprint Eno set up through Island Records to direct attention onto left-field musicians he admired who were starving for an outlet, including then unknown composers like Bryars and Michael Nyman, and experimentalists like David Toop.  Pavilion was swiftly followed in 1980 by The Plateaux of Mirror, a full-blown collaboration with Eno recorded in a Hamilton, Ontario studio part-owned by a brilliant young sound engineer by name of Daniel Lanois.

The Plateaux of Mirror became the second release in the Eno-conceived Ambient series, after Music For Airports. Eno’s contribution was literally to create the ambience out of which the music emerged, using delays, reverbs, and other effects. “I would set up a sound,” Eno recalled, then Budd would improvise the melodies in response. As Budd put it, “I'm listening to the atmosphere at the same time that I'm playing so that the treatment influences what I play.” The result of the symbiosis between the two was an intensely visual soundscape that lived up to titles like “First Light”, “An Arc of Doves”, and “Among Fields of Crystal”. But the music’s effect isn’t just a synesthetic trigger to mind’s eye reveries. It’s physiological too: listening, you find yourself breathing deeper and slower. Time dilates – each moment glistens like a pearl catching the light as it revolves in front of your eyes.

Like many musicians, Budd disliked categories – “ambient” made him uncomfortable, and he was positively scathing about “New Age”, describing the concept as “distasteful,” a mere “marketing ploy” that smacked of kitschy “science fiction religion”. Still, the positioning of his work in those terms didn’t hurt when it came to reaching audiences. If the idea of music being healing or therapeutic didn’t appeal to Budd, his music’s meditational inwardness and the way that it activated visual imagery, through its sound but also titles like “Abandoned Cities” or “Ice Floes in Eden,” put it in proximity to the aims and effects of both ambient and the more interesting figures in New Age.   

Titles were something of a Budd forte. He wrote poetry and this facility with imagistic language led him to generate a large number of titles for music pieces long before he had composed them. "Very frequently, I carry them around like baggage,” Budd revealed in one interview. “I often can't wait to find a piece so I can get rid of a title because it's been haunting me for so long." In the liner notes for the reissue of his 1981 album The Serpent (In Quicksilver), he wrote of being inspired by “the image of a lethal viper gliding glacially in a pond of mercury… it’s what you see at the end of time.”

In 1984, Budd, Eno and Lanois reprised their Plateaux synergy with The Pearl, another peak in all three men’s careers.  If the Eno connection brought Budd an audience he’d never imagined reaching, a whole other swathe of listeners discovered him through his 1986 collaboration with Cocteau Twins, the Scottish trio whose intricately-textured rhapsodies floated somewhere between eerie Goth and enchanted shoegaze.  Released on the Cocteaus’ label, 4AD, clad in an exquisite sleeve by designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Nigel Grierson, The Moon and the Melodies was credited to Harold Budd, Elisabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, Simon Raymonde. Gorgeous tunes like “Eyes Are Mosaics” sung by Fraser in her liquid chirrup sat alongside diaphanous instrumentals such as “Memory Gongs,” as blurry as a watercolor with a little too much water in it. That tune reappeared very slightly altered and with a different title, “Flowered  Knife Shadows” on Budd’s solo album of 1986, Lovely Thunder. 

Budd collaborated frequently across his career, often finding the most sympatico partners in the U.K. and Europe. He made albums with Hector Zazou, XTC’s Andy Partridge, John Foxx, and Bill Nelson; he teamed up repeatedly with Cocteau guitarist Robin Guthrie (their last collaboration, Another Flower, came out this summer).  Japan’s David Sylvian and Steve Jansen coaxed him out of mid-2000s retirement,  putting out Budd’s albums Avalon Sutra and Perhaps on their label Samadhisound.  

Despite this proclivity for building artistic relationships based in mutual trust and warm friendship,  Budd primarily steered a lone course. Alongside the pair of Eno projects, the characteristic core of his work are the solo records, albums like Abandoned Cities, Lovely Thunder, The White Arcades, and Luxa. These are records that not only refute the idea that artists ought to develop, they in some profound way challenge the idea of progress itself, hinting that the true goal of art is to achieve suspension from time altogether. 

^^^^^^^^^^^

Pulling together a quick turnaround tribute puts you in a mind state that couldn’t be further from what Harold Budd’s music is all about. Every so often, amid the frenetic collating of information and quotation, the sifting and sequencing, I had to remind myself to take a deep breath and listen to the wordless wisdom contained in his sound. 

Although its aura is ethereal and unworldly, Budd’s music is actually an exemplary form of humanly useful music. When the mundane urgencies of life, or the shit and nonsense of our political culture, get you frazzled, which is pretty much every day these days, you can put on this music and imbibe its stillness and grace. His records are exactly the kind of music you’d play for calm and solace during a bereavement – or at a service sending someone to their final resting place. Harold Budd sounds like heaven on earth.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Facts I wish I had known so that I could have included in the piece

That he taught himself to play the piano in his late thirties, in order to be able the music he wished to compose. 

Things Harold said

"Being immediately pretty is the most important component."

"I really like to find as much life as possible in the smallest amount of material. A very simple scale, a relationship of note against note, especially a sustained note; I milk everything for all it's worth."

"One of the things was I got profoundly upset and bored to death with the avant-garde music that was being practiced around the world—the Western world—at that time. It seemed self-congratulatory, and for a small cadre of snobs, and I refused to go on with it."

"I really minimalised myself out of a career"

 I cannot play the piano. I can play what I play, I can play me, but I have a dyslexia when reading music. I’m not a professional musician. I hack away at it and the piano is convenient. By no means would a proper pianist consider me one.”

"I slipped back into discovering something that no-one else was doing, or was likely to do in the very near future. I divorced myself from modern music in a sense, and began to develop a language which I thought was honest to God me, and totally outside of competition with my fellow composers.”

"I admire painters very much and I secretly wish that I were doing that"

"“Brilliant blasts of colour that simply engulfed you” - on Mark Rothko, Ellesworth Kelly, and other painters he admired. 

"It's curious about The Plateaux of Mirror. It came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom"

"This whole 'new age' business is very distasteful to me. I don't like being even considered in that “category and I have almost no respect for it at all... It's very lightweight and very bothersome to me. .. I don't think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music”

"That one frosted my balls so much. I was just enraged every time I’d walk into a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or something like that. There I was in the new age category and I just thought ‘Jesus Christ, how can I escape from these mindless bastards?"

"When I did the White Arcades album, I went to the studio with a list of titles and that's all."

 "I've never worked with musicians who know how to read music. So that's always swell for me,

"A mature artist ought to be able to make a good record from the contents of a cutlery drawer."

"The one collaboration that never occurred and never would occur would be David Sylvian, whose work I admire above all others. I just love everything he does. There is a really good reason, it’s because although one thing is good and another thing is good, putting them together doesn’t make it twice as good. In fact it could be a disaster, and I’ve never wanted that to happen."

Things people said about Harold 

"A great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" - Brian Eno.

"I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created”  - Eno, on The Plateaux of Mirror.

“Harold Budd's intention was to make what he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't like! - Eno

"He was really down to earth, a ham 'n' eggs kind of guy" - Cocteau Twins, via David Toop.

                                            

Cheeky Harold put out the same piece twice under different names, in the same year. You can see why though, what a beauty. 

Another Moon + Melodies lovely.

Cocteau Twins "Eyes Are Mosaic ft. Harold Budd", as if this was a modern rap'n'B record! YouTube is pretty darn lax as an archive - of course it should be credited to Harold Budd. Elizabeth Fraser. Robin Guthrie. Simon Raymonde. 

Eternity... 

His music lends itself to the infinitely extended remix 

Jon Hassell RIP

 JON HASSELL

Fourth World vol. 2: Dream Theory In Malaya

Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism

Melody Maker, May 11th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

typo alert -- gameplan = gamelan!

JON HASSELL

City: Works of Fiction

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

JON HASSELL, interview

the Observer, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

[click to enlarge]

JON HASSELL, interview

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

[click to enlarge] 

Single of the Week

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

JON HASSELL/808 STATE

VOICEPRINT

(Land)

     Jon Hassell is an avant-garde composer who keeps an eye, or rather an ear, out for instictively/unwittingly avant-garde pop forms like rap and house. (He's described his astonishing album "City: Works Of Fiction" as "classical rap"). 808 State are a techno-dance production team who flirt with the avant-garde.Someone had the bright idea of getting them together, and the result is this radical remix of "Voiceprint" off the "City" album.

     Hassell's original method of composition reveals how much of an affinity his way of working has with the sampling aesthetic. Having got his musicians to play six wildly different mixes of the track, he chose his favourite sections, drew up a complicated map between the segments, and programmed it into a computer. The result: "a mosaic in which each of the tiles is a spontaneous event", and a brilliant balance between improvisation and composition, seduction and alienation. 808 State have taken the abstraction process one step further, by sampling from a vinyl version of "Voiceprint" rather than remixing the original tapes. It's a radical reconstruction rather than a track underwrittn by a standard-issue 1990 groove.

     The result is a richly evocative exercise in unspecific exoticism: you think of dunes, mosques, mirages, bazaars with their hubbub of foreign tongues and heady assault of pungent, unfamiliar fragrances.  Hassell's trumpet calligraphy darts in and out of 808's techno-vistas, synths shimmer like a heat-haze. "Voiceprint" presents the city of the future as a fractal labyrinth of uprooted cultures that co-exist but never mingle. Single of the week, because it's a work of imagination, and it works your imagination. 

This week, that's rare.

snippet from

Taking Manhattan (By Strategy) - Brian Eno in New York

director's cut version, The Daily Note, 2013 

by Simon Reynolds

.... Another inspirational collaborator Eno hooked up with in 1979 was Jon Hassell, whose post-Miles, raga-influenced music Eno had encountered when the trumpeter-composer performed at the Kitchen that summer.  Hassell’s knowledge of many forms of exotic ethnic sounds and his concept of “Fourth World Music” (hi-tech modernity meets pre-industrial tribalism) would be massively influential on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Indeed, at its inception that album was conceived as a three-way collaboration.  Byrne recalls “all hanging out together, talking and exchanging records”.  At his Tribeca loft, Hassell played Eno and Byrne field recordings on ethnomusicological labels like Ocora.  The idea emerged that “we would hole up and make a fake ethnographic records, with the sleeve notes and everything,” says Byrne. “We’d invent a whole culture to go with it.”

Both Hassell and Laraaji were present at the first sessions, in August 1979, for the album that  became My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Also contributing to the dense mix of sound was David Van Tieghem, whom Eno had seen doing a gizmo-based piece called A Man and His Toys at New Music New York, and two bassists: Tim Wright from DNA and Bill Laswell, then playing in a band called Zu (later to mutate into Material).  Of these early sessions, Eno would later wryly comment that “what was so weird was that at first I thought I'd wasted my money. I just couldn't understand it at all.” But gradually, sculpting down “ this barrage of instruments playing all the time”, an audio-concept emerged:  a “jungle music” sound, embedded in a spacious widescreen production he’d never achieved before. Profiling Eno for Musician towards the end of 1979, Lester Bangs got advance glimpses of the work-in-progress: “It sounds like nothing we've ever heard from Brian Eno before; like nothing ever heard before, period. The influence of the move to New York is unmistakable: a polyglot freneticism, a sense of real itching rage and desperation... It gives intimations of a new kind of international multi-idiomatic music that would cross all commercial lines, uniting different cultures, the past and the future, European experimentalism and gutbucket funk.”

Work on Bush-to-be was sporadic and at a certain point Hassell dropped out of the equation – a turnabout that enraged him to the point of making public accusations of being ripped off. He and Eno would reconcile fairly swiftly, however, resulting in the collaboration Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics and the appearance, or rather apparition, of Hassell’s ghostly gaseous trumpet on the Remain In Light track “Houses In Motion”....

bonus reading:

Marcus Boon interview with Jon Hassell 

Brian Eno / King Crimson box sets (1989)

RETRO-ACTIVE: BRIAN ENO + KING CRIMSON BOX SETS
Melody Maker, 1989

by Simon Reynolds

"What I've always liked in music is the sense of being
baffled... When you think: 'God! I like this, but I don't
know why!'" For a practising musician, Brian Eno has an
unusually penetrating insight into music. Eno is almost
unique in that by far the best explications of his methods,
aims and achievements, issue from his own mouth.  But then
Eno was one of the first pop musicians who was as much a
critic as a creator.  With Roxy Music, Eno more or less
presided over the birth of meta-rock: music that (self-)
consciously refers to other music.  In a way, this CD box set
tells the story of Eno's growing disenchantment with the
knowingness and referentiality of his early music, and his
quest for a way out of post-modernism's "mire of options"
into a music of forgetfulness and self-elimination.

 According to Eno, "the biological function of art is to
expose you to disorientation... Art rehearses you for
uncertainty". Roxy's early music was originally forged in
this spirit.  But success placed them in a position "where
that uncertainty had to go", as did their "insanity...  that
element of clumsiness and grotesqueness".  Eno left in order
to lose himself again in unmapped territory.  He hit upon "a
whole series of tricks and subterfuges that I use to create
an accidental situation..." His aim was "to defeat bits of
me, or amplify bits of me...  I'm looking to reduce my
conscious intervention and get the intuitive parts of me
going". Eno's strategies included chance (the use of a pack
of card with musical ideas written on the back) and
contingency (found sound, tape delay techniques etc).

Another Green World (1975) originates from a strange
period in rock history when Eno could call on the talents of
both John Cale and Phil Collins without it seeming
incongruous. What Another Green World reminds me most of is
The Residents' "Commercial Album". It's a collection of
musical sketches: sometimes exquisite watercolours, sometimes
lamentably Python-esque skits. Both "In Dark Trees" and
"Zawinul/Lava" anticipate the stark, Satie-esque simplicity
of the instrumental half of David Sylvian's "Gone To Earth":
the former, a mind's eye vista of paddy fields and aquaducts,
the latter, a rainforest's dawn chorus.

But for each of these succint, spare studies, there's a terribly dated item of
English eccentricity, with the Eno persona pitched somewhere
between Cat Stevens and Bill Nelson. "I'll Come Running" is
Gilbert O' Sullivan on LSD, all plinky plonky piano and cod-
surrealist couplets. Elsewhere on the album, "The Big Ship"
is a prototype for the second side of  Low; "Sombre
Reptiles" sounds like dying rock dinosaurs languishing in
their own equivalent of the elephant's graveyard, while the
title track you'll already know and love as that most restful
theme tune for BBC2's Arena.

Before And After Science (1977) was one of Eno's most
feted albums, and one of the ones he personally rated least.
Listening now, one can only agree with his verdict. It's a
curiously muted, indistinct record; an oddly centre-less
music, teeming with beautiful detail (guitar filigrees as
graceful as Japanese calligraphy, mysterious sounds
shimmering in the furthest corners of the mix), but unhappily
placed midway between dispersal and focus.  The subdued warp-
funk of "No One Receiving" looks forward to Fear Of Music
and Remain In Light. "Backwater" is uptempo, quirked-out
pop, riddled with twee rhymes like "a Senator from Ecuador
who talked about a meteor... passed it on to a conquistador".

As with Another Green World, every so often there's a
pretty sound-painting like "Energy Fools The Magician", but
in the main tracks like "King's Lead Hat" fall within the
manageable orbit of Anglo eccentricity. (At the time Eno was
fond of patronising forgettable curios like the Portsmouth
Sinfonetta). Only later was Eno to go out-of-orbit, into
truly dis-orientating territory.

 So funnily enough, by far the most absorbing and simply
beautiful music in this box set is Apollo, a collection of
"atmospheres and soundtracks" for Al Reinhert's film of the
moon landings - an album disregarded in its day (1983) as
just another in Eno's ambient series. With his forays into
ambience, Eno went from meta-rock (which relies on the
listener being thoroughly schooled in rock history, in order
to understand the mischievous mis-appropriation of that
history) to infra-rock.  The impressionism of the early solo
albums gives way to a total atomisation of sound.  Eno
compared ambience with Monet's "Waterlilies": huge canvases
but without "any predominant features... your eye focusses on
no landmark, the whole thing is a continuous rippling
surface.  Close up, the intricacy is amazing. You have to
wander through them. I can gaze at them for hours and never
get bored".

Eno's ideas about ambient music have an affinity
with that currently fashionable area in modern science called
"chaos theory", which focuses on phenomena that are
structured but impossible to predict (cloud patterns, the
crystalline structure of snowflakes, the movements of
fluids), and whose infinite variability is captivating.
Ambient music's paradoxes (it's both serene and chaotic,
intimate and impersonal, sedative and utterly absorbing)
satisfied the demand Eno had always made of pop: blissful
bafflement.

Apollo attempts to supplant the official version of
space travel (another giant step in man's mastery of the
cosmos) and rewrite it as an experience of estrangement,
humility and awe. The sound of "Apollo" consists of twinkling
clusters, remote susurrations and rumblings, an infinite
recession of motes into the backwaters of the galaxy. Lovely.

Another of EG's 20th Birthday box sets comes from
KING CRIMSON, the band captained by sometime Eno collaborator
and guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp. This stuff has dated very
badly indeed. The multi-million selling In the Court Of The
Crimson King (1969) is a baroque'n'roll calamity. "21st
Century Schizoid Man" is a typical Crimson frightmare, all
scrofulous, overwraught improvisation and brash, blaring
saxophone.  "I Talk To The Wind" is an almost fetching piece
of pastoral psychedelia, marred by a flute (never a good
idea). And "Epitaph" inhabits much the same plush boudoir of
mock-despair as "Nights In White Satin". Larks' Tongues In
Aspic (1973) is more bearable, the title track leapfrogging
between Oriental reveries and art school Sabbath heaviosity.

Discipline (1981), with execrable vocalist Peter Sinfield
long since banished in favour of Adrian Belew, is almost
listenable. "Elephant Talk", for instance, is a prog rock
version of Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rapppinghood", with its
corrugaged mutant funk riffs and lyrical romp through Roget:
"ballyhoo and balderdash ...  diatribe and dissension".  It
doesn't sound nearly as redundant now as it must have done in
'81.


2020 note: Well, it's interesting how taste can shift around over time... Another Green World is now one of my all time favorite albums (and in the Eno-alone chart would be in a tight cluster at the top with On Land, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Plateaux of Mirrors) and  Before and After Science I like a lot more (especially the washed-out / washed-up songs about castaways at the end of time type tunes). Apollo, conversely, I find "nice", but never play.

King Crimson, also, I've come to appreciate if not quite adore.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Brian Eno-David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Virgin/EMI
Uncut, 2006

by Simon Reynolds
 
On its original 1981 release, this album was widely dissed for being “cold-blooded,” “detached”, an eggheads-in-the-soundlab experimental exercise. Yet Bush of Ghosts drips with emotional intensity, it’s just that the feelings don't come directly from the record's makers but from the found voices--Pentecostal preachers, Algerian Muslims--harvested by the duo from American radio and ethnic field recordings. In another sense, the whole project is framed by the conflicted emotions--uneasy fascination, admiring envy--that this material stirred in Byrne & Eno, at once attracted by the fervour of these true believers yet incapable (as progressive sorts trapped within modernity’s rationality and temperance) of accessing that kind of passion themselves.

Chances are, you’ll feel the same cold rush as Byrne & Eno the first time they heard the preacher who “stars” on “The Jezebel Spirit. ” The electrifying conviction of his cadences as he exorcises the slutty she-devil that’s possessed an unfaithful wife will make your hair stand on end, even as your liberalism recoils from the patriarchy he’s restoring (“Jezebel, you have no rights to her, her husband is the head of the house”). Elsewhere, it’s the mystical rather than moralising aspect of religion that enthralls Byrne & Eno: “Regiment,” for instance, entwines the ecstastic ululations of a Lebanese mountain singer with sinuous bass and arabesques of synth. Throughout Ghosts, the duo lovingly recontextualise their sources, embedding the voices in a sticky web of psychedelic rhythm, funky ambience, and some of the most counter-intuitive and contortionist basslines you’ll ever hear.

Tracks 1 to 5 (the original first side) are great, but 6 to 11 (side two) is a whole other plane, gliding you through a phantasmagoric sequence of steadily more untaggable and precedent-less groovescapes. Following “Moonlight in Glory”-- falter-funk laced with the halting cadences of Scriptural chants and astral gospel plaints, as incanted by a literally isolated African-American sect from the Sea Islands off Georgia’s coast--“The Carrier” shimmers like a portent or future-ghost of The Unforgettable Fire. But instead of Bono, thankfully that Lebanese dude[tte?] reappears to kiss the heavens. “A Secret Life” is an itchy microcosm as gorgeously infolded as Can’s “Quantum Physics,” while “Come With Us” pretzels bass-gloop and stereo-flickering sorcery into a disorientating audio-maze. Heading out into a non-specifically Oriental hinterland of gaseous gong sounds, “Mountain of Needles” sounds like God sighing with satisfaction at the end of the sixth day. Byrne & Eno, the Creators of an equally marvelous if somewhat more compact universe of sound, ought to have felt pretty pleased with themselves too.

 It’s a pity that the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked onto it: the inevitable slew of out-takes, most of them sketchy and substandard, diminishes the sense of conclusion achieved by “Mountain”. A couple of the bonus tracks work as intriguing footnotes ( the ungodly exhalations of “Vocal Outtakes”, the needling stellar twinkle of “Solo Guitar with Tin Foil”) but overall, the effect is a bit like the Almighty following up the Cosmos with an encore of… Croydon.

^^^^^^^^

the excised cut