Taking Manhattan (By Strategy) - Brian Eno in New York
director's cut version, The Daily Note, 2013
by Simon Reynolds
It could
be argued that Brian Eno is the most consistently creative figure in rock
history, someone whose innovation rate over the decades eclipses even his
shape-shifting collaborators David Bowie and David Byrne. From his disruptive presence in Roxy Music,
via his alternately quirky and contemplative solo albums and his invention of
ambient music, through to his recent explorations of “generative music”, it’s a
career that has, well, careered, zigzagging from extreme to extreme, between
pop and antipop, between febrile rhythm and near-immobile tranquility. Then consider
the panoply of his partnerships with other artists-- Bowie, Devo, Talking
Heads, U2, John Cale, to name just a few—as producer or collaborator / catalyst.
Eno is also a musical philosopher, someone whose interviews, critical writings and sundry musings about sound, art, and culture deserve to be compiled into a book. (His published diary A Year With Swollen Appendices was hugely entertaining but didn’t capture the full scope and provocative richness of his thought).
It could also be argued that Eno’s most creative phase of music-making, collaboration, and conceptualizing took place during a period in the late Seventies and early Eighties when he lived in New York. 1978-84 were Eno’s surge years, and New York’s art scene and music culture were the climate that stoked his ferment.
Eno is also a musical philosopher, someone whose interviews, critical writings and sundry musings about sound, art, and culture deserve to be compiled into a book. (His published diary A Year With Swollen Appendices was hugely entertaining but didn’t capture the full scope and provocative richness of his thought).
It could also be argued that Eno’s most creative phase of music-making, collaboration, and conceptualizing took place during a period in the late Seventies and early Eighties when he lived in New York. 1978-84 were Eno’s surge years, and New York’s art scene and music culture were the climate that stoked his ferment.
“I’ve got this feeling that I really know New York very well and will be at home there... I feel there are two places I’m emotionally based in... One is the English countryside, where I was born and bred, and the other is the heart of New York City.” So said Brian Eno on the eve of his first visit to the city, speaking to Disc magazine in October 1972.
There
are perfectly logical reasons why Eno would feel a profound attraction to New
York. After all, the two biggest influences on his approach to music, The
Velvet Underground and Steve Reich, came from there. Eno also intuited that London, pop culture’s
energy center during the Sixties, had ceded that power spot status to New York
by the Seventies. Within a few years of the
Disc interview, he was spending extended
periods of time in Manhattan. Then he moved wholesale and made New York his
base for over half a decade. The ensuing
period is without doubt the most fertile and impressive stretch of his life work,
which included not just music but video art. Eno fed off New York’s border-crossing
artistic energy, but he also catalysed and contributed to it. There were more
playful, “lifestyle” reasons why Eno settled in Manhattan too. “I moved to New
York City because there are so many beautiful girls here,” he told Lester Bangs
in 1979. “More than anywhere else in the world."
His first
visit, in late ’72, was with Roxy Music on their debut US tour. The next couple
of trips he came as a solo artist. The
second of these, in 1975, was to promote Taking
Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Eno was accompanied by Richard Williams, the
former Melody Maker writer who was
the first journalist to rave about Roxy and then became an A&R at Island
Records. Williams had heard the buzz about Television, so the two Englishmen
headed down to CBGBs to see them perform.
Although Eno at this point had zero
pedigree as a producer, he and Williams worked with Television on demo
recordings. This could easily have turned into a debut album for Island. But
the results totally failed to capture the fierce majesty of live Television. “I
didn’t care for the sound he got on tape or the performance much either,” Tom
Verlaine once recalled. “The rest of the
band felt the same way. So we didn’t finish the ‘album’ they wanted those demos
to be.”
An
inauspicious start to Eno’s New York Period. And so it would be not Television
but a different CBGBs band (also with a TV-oriented name, funnily enough) who cemented
Eno’s connection to the city. Talking Heads first met up with Eno in London,
though. During this May 1977 hang-out session they discovered many common
interests both musically and intellectually.
Eno played them an album by Fela Kuti and declared that Afrobeat was the
future of music. He suggested that this was a direction Talking Heads and he could
jointly pursue.
Later
that month Eno was back in New York, where he accompanied his friends and intermittent
collaborators David Bowie and Robert Fripp to a Max’s Kansas City gig by Devo,
the hot hype of the season. So captivated
was Bowie by their robotic theatrics and angular sound, he took to the stage to
announce Devo’s second set of the night.
Hailing the Akron, Ohio band as rock’s future, he vowed to produce their
debut album in Tokyo later that summer. In the event it was Eno, not Bowie, who
would produce Are We Not Men? and it
would be a whole year later, in Cologne.
As for Talking Heads, the first album Eno made with the group, More Songs About Buildings and Food, was recorded in Nassau. But the mastering was done in New York and Eno flew in on April 23rd 1978 to oversee the process. He planned to stay a few weeks, taking care of some other pending projects away from UK distractions, before heading home in time for his thirtieth birthday. But New York provided plenty of distractions of its own and as it turned out it would be seven months before he returned to Britain. Recalling, a few years later, this first substantial sojourn in New York, Eno admitted to enjoying the attention he received as a cult figure operating on the cutting edge of rock: “Everywhere I go, people are running up with cassettes... The first five weeks I was in New York this time I had 180 cassettes given to me”. But he spoke also of the stimulating conversations he was enjoying thanks to a cross-town traffic between different fields of art—music, painting, theater, modern dance—that didn’t exist in England.
A common
syndrome experienced by first-time U.K. visitors to New York is that they’re electrified
by the city’s kinetic (and cinematic) energy, then immediately crash into a depressive
slump upon arrival back in hum-drum England.
Eno refused to unplug.
By the middle of May 1978, he was enconsced in an
apartment in Greenwich Village, a sublet
from Steve Maas, who also owned and lived in the apartment above, and who was
in the process of launching the
soon-to-be-legendary Mudd Club. “The first time I heard of the Mudd Club,
somebody said ‘Eno’s got a new bar below Canal Street, let’s go’,” recalls
Glenn O’Brien, in those days the music columnist for Interview magazine and host of the New York cable music show TV Party.
“Actually Eno had nothing to
do with it, except I think he consulted with Maas on the sound system.”
Through
Maas, Eno met Anya Philips, who was involved in the initial conception of the
Mudd club. She hipped him to No Wave: a cluster of harsh, dissonant, uncompromisingly
experimental groups (among them the Contortions, whom Philips managed, and
whose frontman James Chance she would
later hook up with) that had emerged with the express intent of making
the first-wave CBGB punk bands seem passé and mired in rock’n’roll tradition. “I happened to be in New York during one of
the most exciting months of the decade... in terms of music,” Eno recalled. “It
seemed like there were 500 new bands who all started that month.” In the first
week of May, Eno attended a five-day festival of the No Wave at Artists’s
Space, a gallery in Tribeca. Impressed by the music’s extremism, he proposed
the idea of a compilation to Island Records, focused on the four key groups in
the scene: Mars, DNA, the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Intuitively
he grasped that No Wave was destined to be a brief spasm of unsustainable
intensity and that therefore urgently required documentation before it passed.
Eno had plenty
in common with the No Wavers. Most came from art school backgrounds similar to
his own. Like him, they approached music-making with a conceptual mindset and a
dilettante’s disregard for craft. “The New York bands proceed from a ‘what
would happen if’ orientation,” Eno informed New
York Times critic John Rockwell in July 1978, contrasting that approach
unfavorably with expressionistic, emotion-driven New Wave songsmiths like Elvis
Costello. In other 1978 interviews, he
praised No Wave using terms and concepts that he clearly would like to have
seen applied to himself: these “research bands” took “deliberately extreme
stances that are very interesting because they define the edges of a piece of
territory. They say 'This is as far as you can go in this direction'.” Pioneers like No Wave (or earlier the Velvet
Underground) generated a “a vocabulary” of ideas that later artists could use
in more palatable ways and that could ultimately become the basis of mainstream
pop in the future. “Having that territory staked out is very important. You
achieve a synthesis by determining your stance in relation to these signposts.”
But although there was a mutual admiration pact
between Eno and the No Wavers (who revered their patron for his work in Roxy
and solo), there were big differences too.
No Wave was based around an aesthetic of assault and confrontation.
Lyrically, it stretched from deadpan nihilism (James Chance) to tortured
expressionism (Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus) to explorations of psychotic
states (Mars). There was a huge gulf
between No Wave and Eno’s alternately quirky and placid music, especially the
proto-ambient directions pursued on Another
Green World and Discreet Music. Lunch speaks warmly of Eno today but at the
time she made a number of public jibes, describing Eno’s music as “something that flows and
weaves... It’s kind of nauseating. It’s
like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very smooth going
down.”
Yet
Eno-ification is strikingly absent from the compilation No New York. There’s nothing
like the “wet” finish to certain songs on Are
We Not Men or More Songs About
Buildings and Food that clearly bore Eno’s production fingerprints. “It was done totally live in the studio, just
like a document,” says Chance. Mars, the
most forbiddingly abstract of the No Wave outfits, benefited from a smidgeon of
Eno’s studio sorcery: for “Helen
Forsdale”, he put an echo “on the guitar part's click, and used that to trigger
the compression on the whole track, so it sounds like helicopter blades.” But DNA’s
Arto Lindsay was actually infuriated by Eno’s hands-off approach: “he was
reading some studio instrument magazine while we were recording, and I wanted
to throttle him!” He hastens to add that “Eno is a fabulous man... He was generous. I was dead broke, and he was
such a gentleman he would call me up and say ‘I’ll buy you lunch’. As a
relative veteran of the music industry, Eno also dispensed advice: Lindsay
recalls Chance showing Eno a contract
that he’d been offered by Michael Zilkha of ZE Records. “Brian said, ‘Nobody would sign that but a
desperate man’. James immediately signed it!”
At the
end of 1978 No New York slipped out
into the world via Island’s jazz subsidiary Antilles, to meager fanfare. No
Wave had already splintered, with most of the groups heading towards more
accessible music (discofunk in the case of Chance). But the record would
gradually accrue cult status, as much for the challenge of getting hold of a
copy as for the challenging music on it. The legend of No Wave has swollen over
the decades, in part because of intermediaries like Sonic Youth who (as Eno
predicted, sort of) turned its innovations into rock music, and partly as the
marker of a historical moment of absolute uncompromising purity. The movement,
which lasted barely two years and whose bands didn’t make many records or find
many listeners in their own time, has been the subject of no less than three
lavishly illustrated histories in recent years.
In the
winter of 1978/79, Eno went peripatetic, spending time in San Francisco,
London, Montreux, and Bangkok. When he returned to New York in the spring to
work on Talking Heads’s Fear of Music,
he had the germ of a new approach in his head: the merger of hypnotic dance
rhythms and found voices. Through
immersion in Fela and P-Funk, he had turned onto the idea of densely-layered
ethnofunkadelic polyrhythm. But on his Thailand vacation, he had taken with him
a recording of British dialects and become fascinated by the “redundant”
information in these heavily accented utterances. Regional cadences meant that the speech
contained its own musicality, something that he thought could be combined
excitingly with dance grooves. This
merger of found voices and trance rhythms would become the governing concept
for much of the music he made in the next few years, both solo and in his increasingly
collaborative partnership with Talking Heads.
The new
obsession’s first manifestation appeared on Fear
of Music as the opening track “I Zimbra”. It bore Eno’s clear imprint, from
the Afrobeat-style percussion to the use
of sound-poetry originally written by the Dadaist Hugo Ball but here incanted
by David Byrne. “I Zimbra” was pretty
much the reprise of what Eno had done on “Kurt’s Rejoinder,” from his 1977 solo
album Before And After Science,
albeit using a different Dadaist (Kurt Schwitters). But it was Fear’s
closing track “Drugs” that proved to be most prophetic. Talking Heads tried recording the song,
originally titled “Electricity”, in the conventional way, but couldn’t get it to
work. So Eno and Byrne took the accumulated takes and effectively remixed the
song into existence. “We kind of deconstructed it, tore it down to its basic
elements, then built it up again with new stuff,” recalls Byrne. “We took instruments out, replayed bits,
added other sounds. It became a mixture
of a live band and sound collage. Which was what ended up happening with My Life In the Bush of Ghosts and Remain In Light”.
If
“Drugs” was the practice, the theory got expounded by Eno in July when he gave
a lecture entitled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at the New Music New York
festival. Hosted by The Kitchen, this ten-day event was a triumphant
end-of-decade celebration of a diffuse and varied but coherent movement of
downtown Manhattan composition that during the Seventies defined itself against
the uptown classical music establishment (still in thrall to post-Webernite
serialism and dissonance). Reporting on
New Music New York, Village Voice’s
Tom Johnson identified two distinct waves of downtown music: the founding
minimalist elders (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Reich, Terry Riley, Robert
Ashley) and a new generation forging connections between composing and popular
music (Laurie Anderson, who used elements of performance art, video and
electronics, or Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, who deployed amplified electric
guitars). Eno fit perfectly right smack in
the middle of all this: he was profoundly influenced by Reich’s repetition and
use of tape-delay loops, but also embraced dance rhythms, electric noise, and
the sound-sculpting possibilities of the recording studio, just like emerging downtown
composers such as Arthur Russell, Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem.
But
there was a problem with the studio-as-compositional-tool concept, at least
when applied to a rock band: it
empowered the “composer” (the producer-arranger) at the expense of the
musicians. The expanded authorial role for Eno & Byrne on “Drugs”
effectively relegated the other members of Talking Heads to session musician
status, something that would cause enormous friction on the next album, Remain In Light. The burgeoning relationship between Eno and
Byrne didn’t just unsettle the balance of creative power within the band, it
frayed emotional ties too. Bassist Tina Weymouth would acidly claim the pair reached
the point of merging into a symbiotic unit, even wearing similar clothes like some
postpunk Gilbert & George. Byrne
himself talks about the relationship as “mutually beneficial and co-dependent
in a way. We had musical things to gain from one another—each one could offer
something slightly different to the other.” It went beyond music collaboration to
shared “art and philosophical” interests like cybernetics or the spiritual role
of music and dance in tribal societies. “We had a surprising number of things
to chat about.”
Although
Remain In Light and the Byrne/Eno
masterwork My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
would be the main canvas on which he would explore these obsessions, such was
Eno’s nomadism in the New York years that he also pursued them with other
collaborators like Robert Fripp (also living in Manhattan at that time) and Jon
Hassell. Eno’s very first attempt at
spoken-voice collage had actually occurred in the UK back in late 1977, with
“R.A.F.”, a track made with the New York female punk duo Snatch (one of whom,
Judy Nylon, was a former girlfriend). In
retrospect, he would decide that this Baader-Meinhof inspired collage, released as the B-Side to the single “King’s
Lead Hat” (an anagram of Talking Heads!), was the very earliest germ of Bush of Ghosts.
In late 1979 Eno and Fripp closed in on the idea with a series of tracks called “Healthy Colours” that combined hypnotic drums and warped bass with vocal fragments from a radio program clipping in and of the groove. Although they were eventually released much later on the 1994 anthology Essential Fripp & Eno, the four-part “Healthy Colours” series was originally made for a never-completed album called Music For Healing.
In late 1979 Eno and Fripp closed in on the idea with a series of tracks called “Healthy Colours” that combined hypnotic drums and warped bass with vocal fragments from a radio program clipping in and of the groove. Although they were eventually released much later on the 1994 anthology Essential Fripp & Eno, the four-part “Healthy Colours” series was originally made for a never-completed album called Music For Healing.
That
title fits much better the other major strand of Eno music made during his New York
years: idyllic-yet-eerie ambient
soundscapes. The Plateaux of Mirror, his collaboration with pianist Harold Budd,
began with the LA-based pianist sending his compositions to Eno in New York,
but the actual recording was done in late 1979 in a studio in Hamilton, Ontario
owned and operated by Daniel Lanois.
Around
that time Eno also produced Day of
Radiance by Laraaji, a zither-player he discovered playing in Washington
Square Park on the edge of Greenwich Village. A spiritual seeker exploring
yoga, t’ai chi and Eastern philosophy and who today holds workshops in laughter
therapy, Laraaji’s quest for “cosmic music” had taken a decisive turn in the
mid-Seventies when he traded his guitar for an autoharp, which he then adapted
and electrified. He came to believe
that metallic chimes--bell-ringing, gongs, cymbals, gamelan ensembles, and the
instruments he favored, zither and hammered dulcimer—put the listener “in touch
with the higher presences... in Tibet they are used to break up concentration, get you outside linear time,
into a trance state.” Laraaji had been playing in the same spot in Washington
Square Park for a few years, sitting always in the lotus position with his eyes
shut, when one day he opened them to see that someone had left a message in his
busker’s hat. “It was from Brian Eno and it said ‘would you like to meet to
consider a recording project?’”.
In
their post-Eno careers Budd and Laraaji would both go on to make music so
tranquil and gently rhapsodic it verged on New Age. But Plateaux and Radiance—Ambient
2 and Ambient 3 in the series of releases launched by Eno’s Music For Airports --have a certain
uncanny edge. In both cases Eno’s role largely consisted of creating the
ambience in which the compositions were situated, using reverb, harmonizer and
other studio techniques to smudge the edges of the sound into oneiric
soft-focus. Both projects prefigure the
preoccupations that would lead to Eno’s other supreme masterpiece of the New
York era, 1982’s On Land. Plateaux’s
titles like “Above Chiangmai”, “Among Fields of Crystal” and “Wind in Lonely
Fences” speak of Eno’s mounting interest in creating the musical equivalent of
landscape painting, while “Meditation #2”, the final track on Radiance, is based on Laraaji’s mental
image of New York’s Central Park Reservoir on a moody winter day.
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 unmistakeable: 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”.
Working in
Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while, before returning to New York, Byrne
and Eno added an extra element to the mix: alongside field recordings (Muslim
devotional singing, the gospel chants of Sea Islanders off the coast of
Georgia), they found themselves increasingly obsessed with the ranting and
raving of talk radio hosts and evangelists.
This proto-sampling approach would be hugely influential on later
soundbite-based genres like hip hop and jungle. What’s less well known is that Bush of Ghosts was itself influenced by
very early hip hop. Not the first rap records, though, so much as breakdancing.
Ironically, this
connection with hip hop would be forged not in New York but when the duo were out
in LA. “Brian and I met Toni Basil, a choreographer who later had a hit single
with ‘Micky’,” recalls Byrne. “She was working with this street dance group the
Electric Boogaloos and was going to do a whole show based on popping and
locking. Brian and I thought it was the most amazing dancing we’d ever seen. In
a way, some of the music we were making we thought was slotted for her to use
in a television program with these dancers. But it never happened.” Eno, for his part,
thought that the future of video, a form with which he had just started to
experiment, would be non-narrative: involving either ambient imagery (close to
stationary) or dance (extreme kineticism).
Both would be endlessly rewatchable, because ambient images would become
like décor while the fluid intricacy of experimental dance would be so
sinuously complex you could never get bored with it.
Byrne
and Eno’s work on Bush of Ghosts was
interrupted when they joined the rest of Talking Heads during the sweltering
hot New York summer of 1980 to start work on the group’s fourth album. Initially titled Melody Attack, the album quickly became a “pop” version of the
ideas being explored on Bush . Ideas
like the Fela-meets-Terry-Riley’s-In-C approach
of “having lots of instruments all
playing very simple parts that mesh together to create a complex track”, as Eno
explained to one interviewer. “For example there were five or six basses on
'Born Under Punches', each doing simple bits.”
Unfortunately this methodology reduced the other Heads—Weymouth, drummer
Chris Franz, keyboard player Jerry Harrison—to raw content generators,
producing material to be assembled into constructions by Eno and Byrne. There
was also a kind of deconstruction of the band itself: with bass parts being provided by people
other than Weymouth, roles became fluid and uncertain. Even Byrne himself had to change his
approach: rather than go into the studio with written songs, he improvised clipped,
chanted melodies to suit the roiling rhythmic density of the new direction. His
vocals became increasingly percussive, verging on rapping in sections of “Born
Under Punches” and “Cross Eyed and Painless”. On the shimmering dreamscape
“Seen And Not Seen”, he abandoned singing altogether for recitation, speaking
the story of a man who learned to change his facial appearance by willpower.
Remain In Light was an artistic triumph. But it
was also a disaster: pushing for the new direction and thereby assuming a vastly
expanded degree of creative control, Eno irreparably damaged what he had
earlier described as “the best working relationship I've ever had within rock
music." Talking Heads-- even his
symbiotic other half Byrne-- started to suspect that Eno was trying to turn to
the group into a new Roxy Music where he was the leader, not Bryan Ferry. That there was an inverse ratio between the
creative fulfilment of the band and that of the producer had been apparent to
Eno as early as More Songs About Buildings:
as he told Melody Maker, with that
album “the songs that were least complete going into the studio came out best
for me”. Fear of Music was better still because “there were even fewer complete songs”
at the start of the recording process, leading to the formation of a “group
mind, a recording identity” with him at
the center. Remain was the culmination, resulting in music so complex that its
live performance required the expansion of Talking Heads into a
nine-piece.
Yet
despite his steering role in the project,
Eno had his own misgivings about Remain: he felt that the album could have been taken
much further. Those frustrations would take on a bitter edge when My Life In the Bush of Ghosts came out within
a few months of the extravangantly praised Remain.
(Originally Bush was meant to come
out first, but it got delayed due to
sample clearance issues). Although Bush is now revered as a groundbreaking
classic, at the time it received a mixed critical response, suffering both from
a post-Remain backlash and from having
its innovation-thunder stolen by the Talking Heads LP. Some critics accused
Byrne and Eno of being coldblooded eggheads and, worse, neo-imperialistic
appropriators of world music.
“One day in early 1981 I arrived at
the studio and Eno was on the couch, he was reading the English music papers
and he had the most downcast expression on his face. The reviews of Ghosts were out... “ So recalls Material
keyboard player Michael Beinhorn, then
participating, along with his bandmates, in an amorphous Eno project. “My
sense is that Brian at that point decided, ‘I’m never going to make rock music
again.’”.
Whether it was as clearcut as that—after all he’d already been making
ambient music for years and the ethnogrooves of Bush of Ghosts and Possible
Worlds were situated some distance from rock—it does seem that the lukewarm
response to Ghosts encouraged Eno to
move even further from song-based pop
forms and into atmospheres and soundscapes. That trajectory reached fruition
with his ambient pinnacle On Land, an
album whose genesis can be traced back
to the sessions with Material in January 1981.
Although
Eno’s relationship with Byrne continued fitfully (he contributed to the Head
frontman’s solo project The Catherine Wheel)
it would be eclipsed by a new kindred musical spirit who entered his life in the latter months of 1980.
Eno became close friends with Robert
Quine, formerly the guitarist in Richard Hell and the Voidoids, discovering
they shared a passion for psychogeographic drifting through the streets of New
York and “a feeling for music that was
‘at the edge of music’”, as Eno put it. Although they never directly
collaborated, Quine is one of several people prominently thanked in the sleeve
notes of On Land. (Laraaji is another).
“I actually encouraged him to put out
On Land,” Quine has said. “He
was going to dump parts of it.” Eno himself wrote, in a tribute to Quine following
his 2004 death, that “without his interest, I'm not sure
I would have ever finished and released that record.” As well as morale elevation, Quine steered
Eno in the right direction aesthetically: he introduced him to the 1974 Miles
Davis’s piece “He Loved Him Madly”, a 32 minute long requiem for Duke Ellington,
so slow-moving and low-spirited it’s as if the music’s own vital signs have
been suppressed to a life-threatening degree.
Eno was
particularly entranced by Teo Macero’s “revolutionary production” on the track,
which provided him with a model of the
“spacious quality” he wanted to achieve in his own music. “Madly”, Eno said, “has a very strange atmosphere, as
if you are standing in a clearing hearing different instruments at different
distances from you. It was mixed with that feeling of distance, and that
interests me a great deal.” Another
influence was his own experiments on a trip to Ghana with outdoor field
recordings, where he held up a mic to the capture the nothing-in-particular
waft-and-murmur of town and field.
On the first day of the sessions
with Material, which took place at the newly equipped studio in Brooklyn
operated by the group’s sound-man Martin Bisi, Eno arrived with photographic
slides that he purchased that very morning at the Museum of Natural History.
“He called me on the way over, asking if I had white sheets because he wanted
to project images on the walls,” recalls Bisi. Eno turned up in a cab with his
German friend Axel Gros, whose resume includes contributing “noise production”
to Holger Czukay and Conny Plank’s experimental postpunk project Les
Vampyrettes, and promptly set up projectors all around the room. “The idea was
to play music and record surrounded by images of animals like impalas and water
buffalos. Landscapes too-- Kilimanjaro, the savannah.”
The session wasn’t super-productive.
Bisi, by his own admission, was an amateurish sound-engineer in those days
(later he would become an accomplished, in-demand producer), and actually
annoyed the typically calm and mild Eno so much that the latter hurled a chair
at one point. Material bassist Bill Laswell would in his subsequent career make
ambient records himself but at that point his background was Southern funk
bands and he just couldn’t get into the Eno vibe.
Laswell and Beinhorn are actually given co-write credits for “Lizard Point”, On Land’s first track, but Beinhorn says “I can’t pick out a note that actually comes from me. Maybe it’s in there as half-speed tapes or processed in some way.” Most likely the co-credits are Eno’s way of honoring the first stirrings of a direction that developed during the month-long session. One thing that does definitely make it onto the record is the tape of frog sounds on “Unfamiliar Winds (Leek Hills)”, which came from Laswell’s friend Felipe Orrego, who recorded them in Honduras.
Beyond musical affinities (Material’s own avant-funk evolution paralleled Bush of Ghosts) Eno had opted to work from the group’s base in Gowanus in part because of a longstanding inclination to avoid expensive recording studios, where time-is-money pressure could paralyze creativity. The cheque for a month’s time in advance Eno gave Bisi actually enabled the aspiring producer, then only 18, to equip the place. After that session, however, Eno created his own workspace in his new apartment, a large loft on Broadway and Broome that he bought and moved into with his girlfriend Alex Blair and their cat Poo-Poo. Although there were other sessions at proper studios-- in New York, in Ontario, in London—much of the work for On Land was done in this mini-studio.
Laswell and Beinhorn are actually given co-write credits for “Lizard Point”, On Land’s first track, but Beinhorn says “I can’t pick out a note that actually comes from me. Maybe it’s in there as half-speed tapes or processed in some way.” Most likely the co-credits are Eno’s way of honoring the first stirrings of a direction that developed during the month-long session. One thing that does definitely make it onto the record is the tape of frog sounds on “Unfamiliar Winds (Leek Hills)”, which came from Laswell’s friend Felipe Orrego, who recorded them in Honduras.
Beyond musical affinities (Material’s own avant-funk evolution paralleled Bush of Ghosts) Eno had opted to work from the group’s base in Gowanus in part because of a longstanding inclination to avoid expensive recording studios, where time-is-money pressure could paralyze creativity. The cheque for a month’s time in advance Eno gave Bisi actually enabled the aspiring producer, then only 18, to equip the place. After that session, however, Eno created his own workspace in his new apartment, a large loft on Broadway and Broome that he bought and moved into with his girlfriend Alex Blair and their cat Poo-Poo. Although there were other sessions at proper studios-- in New York, in Ontario, in London—much of the work for On Land was done in this mini-studio.
The album’s working title was Empty Landscapes. But the African
mise-en-scene that backdropped the Brooklyn session faded out as inspiration, a
residue of the Remain/Ghosts phase
(Eno had even talked to interviewers then of wanting to move to Africa). Instead,
the landscapes gradually took on a decidedly English atmosphere, a nostalgic
direction influenced by Fellini’s Amarcord
with its dreamlike recreation of small town life in 1930s Italy.
Upon its release in 1982, Eno described On Land as an attempt to conjure up the atmosphere of the Suffolk countryside of his childhood: desolate and melancholy, but also familiar and comforting, “a nice kind of spooky”. He told Musician, “that mood is very much a feature of the environment where I grew up. It's a very bleak place and most visitors find it quite miserable. I don't think it's miserable but it's definitely a sort of lost place in a lost time--nothing has changed in this part of England for many hundreds of years.” His goal was to create a heightened version of this landscape of memory, partly by using audio-tricks that were non-naturalistic (a 70-second echo, for instance). He titled “Lantern Marsh” after a phosphorescent marsh in East Suffolk that he had seen on a map but never actually visited. Other titles and sounds had actual memories attached to them. Leek Hills, as in “Unfamiliar Wind (Leek Hills)” was a wood in which he used to play, while “The Lost Day” featured a “little bell sound” that worked on Eno like the audio counterpart to Proust’s Madeleine cake. On a Christmas visit to his parents in Suffolk he discovered the reason why it attracted and affected him so much: he went for a windy walk along the river Deben and heard the sound of “the metal guy wires banging against the [metal] masts of the yachts”. It was virtually the same sound that he’d generated using a Fender Rhodes electric piano played extremely softly. A sound that tugged at his buried memories with uncanny power. Hence the title “The Lost Day”, so close to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.
As well
as an exercise in personal hauntology, On
Land was a conceptual project. During the making, Eno wrote “25,000
words on general thoughts about music. In doing that I started getting a much
clearer idea of what I was doing than I've ever had while I was actually in the
midst of making a record.” Thematically,
he was exploring “a
general set of feelings about northern hemisphere living, as true for Norway
and Belgium as for England: the big variation in the length of daylight, the endless
summer evenings, the endless winter nights – the importance of seasons and
their continuous reminder of the passage of time.” Musically, he was developing an approach to
composition and mixing that made no distinction between foreground and background.
“Everything that happens is a part of the landscape.” One inspiration was the Breton landscape
painter Pierre Tal-Coat, after whom the album’s third track was named. He even used “landscape” as a musical
instrument, generating sounds using stones and sticks as well weaving in recordings
of wildlife like rooks and frogs.
Finally, there was a technological aspect to On Land: on the original LP sleeve he provided a diagram of a
simple three-way speaker system he had devised to realise fully the music as a
listener-enveloping environmental experience.
Some of On Land’s glinting, diaphonous music soundtracked his first major video work, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, which comprised glacier-slow images of the New York skyline at sunset captured from the window of his downtown apartment. Both the audio and video reflected a desire to slow down the city’s hyped-up metabolism, transform New York against its will into a more tranquil and ethereal place. “Medieval” was a sideways allusion to an experience of culture shock and stimuli-overload in Chinatown, when his senses were assaulted by strange smells and sounds. Eno decided that to survive in the city he needed to imaginatively transform the place into something less overwhelming for a Suffolk native raised amid the “aloneness” and “very slow pace of things” that characterized that unpopulous coastal region of Eastern England. The idea of New York as a “strange, medieval, huge complex town in the middle of nowhere ... suddenly it made the place tolerable for me.... You can easily live in New York and just see the mess of it. I wanted to make it mysterious again.”
Eno had started messing with video back in 1979. His first installation was accompanying a Frippertronics performance at the Kitchen (Fripp dubbed it “video Muzak”). The early roof-scape work was also shown at Grand Central in early 1980 and at La Guardia to accompany an airing of Music for Airports. Eno also used a Polaroid snap of “video feedback”, created by pointing the camera at its own monitor, as the cover for Bush of Ghosts. His interest was to create what he call “video painting”: something that could be left playing in someone’s living room, watched inattentively or not at all, working (like ambient music itself) as a tint in the environment, closer to perfume or incense than a narrative-based artform. The concept was hatched partly in opposition to how rock videos had evolved. Pop promo directors “all think if we want to make a thing interesting we've got to put more and more action into it. But that just gives you a blur which takes maybe five watches to work out, and after that you don't want to see it again. My solution to this problem was to take the video away from being a short film, a little story and turn it into something beautiful to look at, like a picture.”
Recalling
Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan in a 1989 interview, Eno said:
“Like the music that accompanies
them, the films arise from... a desire
to make a quiet place for myself. They evoke in me a sense of 'what could have
been' and hence generate a nostalgia for the future." But in truth they
seemed to be more simply a product of nostalgia, in its original sense of
homesickness. While still living in
downtown New York, even dabbling a little on Wall Street after eavesdropping on
the conversation of brokers at the gym, Eno was little by little absenting
itself from Manhattan. He started to
lead an increasingly reclusive life, spending most of the day in his apartment,
holed up in the small studio, which he described as “a sort of sacred space
somehow”. He would tinker with music,
experiment with perfumes (one of his obsessions), read and think. Picking up on
this cloistered vibe, People
magazine’s Arthur Lubow described a
typical day in the life of Eno as “self-indulgent and monastic,” and wrote of
his music’s drift towards “an Arcadian kind of yearning.”
Girlfriend Alex spoke of Eno’s “social claustrophobia. He doesn’t like
sitting around gabbing.”
Back in
1972 Eno had told Disc that he’d
“always been attracted to whatever place on the planet seemed to be the centre
of the most tension and energy.” London had been that place; now it was New
York. By by the Eighties, it seemed that all the things he once found so magnetic about New York--
the border-crossing conversations, the musical ferment—had become negatives: a
form of mental crowding threatening to
his own creativity and equilibrium.
His last North American musical projects—Apollo: Atsmopheres & Soundtracks, made to accompany Al Reinert’s film about NASA and the Moon landings, and The Pearl, made with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois—were both recorded in the relative seclusion of Hamilton, Ontario. There was also a video painting of a nude woman, shot in San Francisco, and designed to accompany his most vaporous ambient album yet, Thursday Afternoon.
His last North American musical projects—Apollo: Atsmopheres & Soundtracks, made to accompany Al Reinert’s film about NASA and the Moon landings, and The Pearl, made with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois—were both recorded in the relative seclusion of Hamilton, Ontario. There was also a video painting of a nude woman, shot in San Francisco, and designed to accompany his most vaporous ambient album yet, Thursday Afternoon.
Once
upon a time Brian Eno had talked of being emotionally based in two places: “the
English countryside, where I was born and bred” and “the heart of New York
City.” But in the end the heart tug of his homeland would prove stronger. A burglary at the Broom Street apartment
sealed the deal of his utter alienation from Manhattan. In the middle of 1984, Eno
returned to England.
