Brian Eno

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

Some top tips and insights here. Thanks CaB (ThaB). He just has so much stuff that I've been too lazy / intimidated to simply listen through it all, so I'm really curious to hear about people's favourites.

It's funny lankyguy mentioned "...Milk Sea" as that's one of the only recent(ish) works of his I've listened to, and I thought it was pretty good. Are his other Warp releases worth checking out?

Since we're here: If I like Cluster & Eno can I assume After The Heat is similar? And does anyone know if his 'installation' works are any good? Or more like 90,000 hours of self-generating whalesong to be listened to in a gallery, type thing?

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

you might dig this pretty ambient Eno mix what I did once upon a long ago: https://www.mixcloud.com/Gardener/brian-eno-mix/

I'm halfway through this at the moment, by the way, and ruddy loving it. Some tracks I'm familiar with, others not, but this is indeed the general kind of Eno that floats my (small) boat (on a milk sea).

[jobotic]

After the Heat is excellent, particularly the vocal numbers.

Also Music for Films if you haven't mentioned it already.

[David Pielingtonburygrot]

The Great Curve is so good that i had a laughing fit the first time i listened to it.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

This

This is still a pretty damned hilarious thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFry159gZw

reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-mxVxFXLg

Girlfriend Byrne's is better.

[purlieu]

Since we're here: If I like Cluster & Eno can I assume After The Heat is similar?

It's much better in my view. Cluster & Eno is very slight, whereas After the Heat has a lot more going and much more depth, some darker and weirder pieces. Broken Head and The Belldog are superb.

[Buelligan]

Someone I used to know, who died, so I don't know them any more, lived with Brian Eno for years.  This person was one of the most normal lower middle class conventional people (apart from being a pretty competent musician) you'd ever meet.   They were also great pals with Phil Collins' bass (I think) player.  Which makes more sense.  That's my whole Eno story, right there.  Thanks.

[tao of wub]

Eno is one of my favourite musicians.  Because he is willing to experiment so much it is inevitable that you will find stuff you do and don't like. 

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a great album, it escapes sounding cheesy or cliched but captures a funk and amazing rhythmic feel that so many tried and failed at in the 80's .  A super collaboration and super energetic album.

Another Green World really surprised me by how strange and lovely it was.

It took me a while to get into his more ambient stuff, as I am sickened by the elevator music whale cry type of ambient.  I do enjoy Aphex's Selected Ambient Works, but Eno is not really like that either.

I'm quite fond of Eno's Textures, The Shutov Assembly, New Space Music, Thursday Afternoon and of course Music for Airports.  All good to listen to whilst out walking, or lying in the sun with eyes shut.

As an aside, I love the theme music to Chocky, the ITV kids 80s sci-fi tv show.  The sound so haunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9f7VBfzFjQ

It is John Hyde Astral Sounds, from the Album Red Kite, I think it is the track Coral.

[wosl]

One that I don't think's been mentioned yet, and which is worth a listen is his collab with J. Peter Schwalm: Drawn From Life - a hard-to-pin down mix of foggy ambience, neurotic rhythms and chilly glissandi, with the odd bit of vocoder-y vocal texture floating in and out. Laid back and meandering but with an edgy undertow ("paranoid ambient"? More 'urban' than some of his other ambient stuff, at any rate).  Laurie Anderson does vox on one track.

[Ambient Sheep]

An Ending (Ascent) is lovely backwards.

Apparently that's how he recorded it, I once learnt.  It's mostly just a few chords plonked down on a DX7... but then played backwards.

I love it.

[wosl]

Like the way Phil Minton throws in a cheeky wee bit of 'An Ending' during one of his performances.

[sirhenry]

I worked with Sarah Eno, Brian's first wife, for a couple of years and she would occasionally talk about their time together. The conversations were always a bit odd because when she mentioned David, you would have to work out from the context whether it was Bowie, O'List or someone else. Calling everyone by their first name seemed to be her way of avoiding name-dropping.

Anyway, one day she was talking about when they lived in Leeds and I asked where in Leeds, as I had moved from there and knew it quite well. It turns out that they lived in the same house I'd been in (and now own)! But I have never been able to find confirmation. I knew that two of Peter Schmidt's prints that came with Before and After Science appeared to be of the house and have cherished them ever since for that reason, but no mention anywhere. Not even in the biography that came out a few years ago, even though it has a picture of him sitting in my bedroom. And a guy I once met who was a Music lecturer at Leeds Poly remembers him being there for a while.

But nothing official. Very odd.

But thanks for this thread; without it I would have forgotten that I found a copy of Nile a while ago that I had never listened to before just now. Too early to say if I like it...

[wosl]

I knew that two of Peter Schmidt's prints that came with Before and After Science appeared to be of the house and have cherished them ever since for that reason

Gorgeous, that set of prints. Schmidt achieved a high hit rate with that lovely, limpid and superficially almost illustration-like watercolour style (his earlier op-abstract things are very good as well).  peterschmidtweb is a little treasure of a place.

[Hooverbag Sherlocks]

They were also great pals with Phil Collins' bass (I think) player.

I sincerely hope that's not his imperial majesty Percy Jones you're downgrading to 'Phil Collins' bass player' there.

[Ignatius_S]

Interview today with Chris Frantz, plugging his new book and discusses Eno - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/21/chris-frantz-talking-heads-david-byrne

...Also sometimes as a producer he could drain the essential energy from bands: Devo and Ultravox both could have hit harder on debut...

No idea about Ultravox, but with Devo, Eno went along with what they wanted.

Eno has said Devo were the most 'anal' band that he worked with and they were only interested in a sound that replicated the recordings that they had recorded themselves. When I heard the Hardcore Devo collections, I really understood - or rather appreciated - what Eno meant.

Just about all the songs that re-recorded are near identical to the original recordings. Jocko Homo is the most different (albeit not radically so; its DNA is clearly extracted the Devo version) but more added little touches and a slightly faster tempo. You mention energy being drained, but Eno's Jocko Homo has certainly more than the Devo version and inclined to say there's the 'reworkings' tend to have a little more energy to them.

However, it's quite often said that Bowie ended up remixing most of Eno's production of Devo, which muddies the water.

A while ago, Mark Mothersburgh said that he would love Eno to remix the album as he originally wanted to. Can't see it happening, but the band have claimed that tracks where Eno was given freer rein, including him and Bowie doing backing vocals, do exist. I also think Holger Czukay was involved in a jamming session.

On the one hand, I admire Devo's bloody-minded approach working with Eno, but on the other, the first thing I thought of when I say this thread was 'you know, I would have liked to have heard what Eno would have done...

Re: Muzak, the liner notes to Ambient 1:....

Thanks for posting those linear notes - the last line really strokes a chord with me and articulates why it's an area of Eno's work that I've been gravitating towards.

[jobotic]

Probably worth bunging up the liner notes to Discreet Music too

"Discreet Music" (30:35) Recorded at Brian Eno's studio 9-5-75
Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachebel
(i) "Fullness of Wind" (9:57)
(ii) "French Catalogues" (5:18)
(iii) "Brutal Ardour" (8:17)
Performed by The Cockpit Ensemble, conducted by Gavin Bryars (who also helped arrange the pieces)
Recorded at Trident Studios 12-9-75
Engineered by Peter Kelsey.
Produced by Brian Eno 1975 EG Records Ltd.

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part.

That is to say, I tend towards the roles of the planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.

Two ways of satisfying this interest are exemplified on this album. "Discreet Music" is a technological approach to the problem. If there is any score for the piece, it must be the operational diagram of the particular apparatus I used for its production. The key configuration here is the long delay echo system with which I have experimented since I became aware of the musical possibilities of tape recorders in 1964. Having set up this apparatus, my degree of participation in what it subsequently did was limited to (a) providing an input (in this case, two simple and mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a digital recall system) and (b) occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer's output by means of a graphic equalizer.

It is a point of discipline to accept this passive role, and for once, to ignore the tendency to play the artist by dabbling and interfering. In this case, I was aided by the idea that what I was making was simply a background for my friend Robert Fripp to play over in a series of concerts we had planned. This notion of its future utility, coupled with my own pleasure in "gradual processes" prevented me from attempting to create surprises and less than predictable changes in the piece. I was trying to make a piece that could be listened to and yet could be ignored... perhaps in the spirit of Satie who wanted to make music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner."

In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn't the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.

Another way of satisfying the interest in self-regulating and self-generating systems is exemplified in the 3 variations on the Pachebel Canon. These take their titles from the charmingly inaccurate translation of the French cover notes for the "Erato" recording of the piece made by the orchestra of Jean Francois Paillard. That particular recording inspired these pieces by its unashamedly romantic rendition of a very systematic Renaissance canon.

In this case the "system" is a group of performers with a set of instructions - and the "input" is the fragment of Pachebel. Each variation takes a small section of the score (two or four bars) as its starting point, and permutates the players' parts such that they overlay each other in ways not suggested by the original score. In "Fullness of Wind" each player's tempo is decreased, the rate of decrease governed by the pitch of his instrument (bass=slow). "French Catalogues" groups together sets of notes and melodies with time directions gathered from other parts of the score. In "Brutal Ardour" each player has a sequence of notes related to those of the other players, but the sequences are of different lengths so that the original relationships quickly break down.

London, September 1975

[Sin Agog]

Eno put all ten albums of his awfully cool boutique label, Obscure Records, up to stream a few years back.  Looks like all the streaming links are still dandy.  I always love when famous peoples try to use their brand to help others come up, and that helped launch the careers of Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which made it all well worth it.

[sirhenry]

Eno put all ten albums of his awfully cool boutique label, Obscure Records, up to stream a few years back.  Looks like all the streaming links are still dandy.  I always love when famous peoples try to use their brand to help others come up, and that helped launch the careers of Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which made it all well worth it.

And they can be found here: http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/obscure.html

[spaghetamine]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/21/chris-frantz-talking-heads-david-byrne?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1595334589


Chris Frantz DESTROYS Brian Eno

don't think he likes him much :(

[sirhenry]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/21/chris-frantz-talking-heads-david-byrne?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1595334589


Chris Frantz DESTROYS Brian Eno

don't think he likes him much :(

There was a radio interview with Tom Tom Club when they first played over here where Tina Weymouth said that the band was formed because Byrne and Eno had fallen in love with each other and were acting like a couple of public school boys with their wank jokes and increasingly self-obsessed ideas. They spent all their time with each other, and as the rest of the band just wanted to play music they formed another band. It was very diplomatically put if feelings were as high as that article implies - she came across as equally annoyed and amused at the time. But then Tom Tom Club were riding the crest of a wave at the time so she could afford to be generous.

[Ignatius_S]

Probably worth bunging up the liner notes to Discreet Music too

Ta!

Eno put all ten albums of his awfully cool boutique label, Obscure Records, up to stream a few years back...

And they can be found here: http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/obscure.html

Ta-ta!

And they can be found here: http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/obscure.html

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/21/chris-frantz-talking-heads-david-byrne?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1595334589


Chris Frantz DESTROYS Brian Eno

don't think he likes him much :(

Aye, posted above - but as one person said in the Frantz thread said, journalists will zero in on the more negative stuff.. plus, he's got a book to flog.

[Johnboy]

Taking Tiger Mountain the album is such a remarkable thing.

It might take you a few goes but every track is utterly unique.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

Probably worth bunging up the liner notes to Discreet Music too

If there is any score for the piece, it must be the operational diagram of the particular apparatus I used for its production.

I always loved the fact that he was nerdy enough to reproduce it on the sleeve:

[NoSleep]

I sincerely hope that's not his imperial majesty Percy Jones you're downgrading to 'Phil Collins' bass player' there.

After all, he had worked with Cliff Richard before then.

[famethrowa]

Interesting how there's been this fightback about how much Brian contributed to the Berlin trilogy, and Low in particular. Back in the day it was assumed that Eno was the mastermind of it all, but now according to Visconti and all, Bri just showed up late in the day to make some tweaks and add some sounds. I think Low was definitely influenced by what he was doing in the previous years, but hey a lot of things were at that point.

[SpiderChrist]

Just ordered Tracks And Traces from my local vinyl emporium, and am currently listening to Fourth World Vol 1 - Oscillations is the gift that keeps giving.

[Hooverbag Sherlocks]

After all, he had worked with Cliff Richard before then.

Did he fulfil the Bez role in The Liverpool Scene?