Occasionally I will do a deep dive on a favourite artist's discography and collect my thoughts on a hashtag. I think this is all of them so far? 😁
#FSOLTime - The Future Sound of London
#SloanTime - Sloan
#BjörkTime - Björk
#EnoTime - Brian Eno
#AFXTime - Aphex Twin
#TMBGTime - They Might Be Giants
#HevyDevyTime - Devin Townsend
Good morning my little biggest ones! Last time on Evilchili Listens to A Large Discography and Toots About It, I had a look at the mighty Future Sound of London on #FSOLTime. We've also had some good #SloanTime, #BjörkTime, #EnoTime, and #AFXTime and maybe more I'm forgetting? Time is an illusion and toots doubly so.
Today I'm going to listen to some of my favourite records by They Might Be Giants. Why? Because I like fun. The book is long, friends: 34 albums and 15 EPs across nearly 40 years of recording, and if you're the casual listener who thinks the two Johns stopped being interesting when they put the band together, no! Get ready for a long tall weekend of great music: if you use your phone power to follow me you will surely glean how wonderful these records are. So if you've got the spine, join us on the flood of #TMBGTime!
(Or if you're already tired of me, join the eacape team and bury my murdered remains under a muted hashtag.)
Okay, my final selection for today's #EnoTime exploration of Brian Eno's ambient works is... not an Eno record! Well, sort of.
In 1998, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Ambient #1: Music For Airports, the New York ensemble Bang On A Can released a cover of the entire album performed live with acoustic instruments and voice. This isn't an arrangement or an orchestration: it is a transcription, seeking to replicate the original exactly. It is so successful that Eno himself praised the work, suggesting it was superior to the original. Opions differ on that point, and I love both, but for me Bang On A Can's performance is affecting in a way the electronic version is not.
1/1 is performed on piano, bells, xylophone, percussion, strings, winds, and brass. That sounds like a lot for what is essentially a 6 note phrase repeated ad nauseum, but the players have successfully replicated every texture, every interjection, every sigh of the original recording but with greater expression and dynamic range; where Eno's original evokes whimsy, this recording grants me moments of real, unbridled joy.
1/2 is predominantly a coral piece here, and least essential, but lovely.
2/1 is slightly more ornamented than the original, with vocal lines weaving in and out of the winds and restrained swells of brass. My favourite part of this piece is the surprising, sneaky plucks of a pipa, a Chinese stringed instrument similar to a lute. In this instrumentation 2/1 feels like drops of rain clinging to the edge of a leaf.
2/2's reliance on strings is cheating. Who isn't moved by shimmering, harmonic overtones of a bunch of string instruments stacking up chords? It is the biggest deviation from the original, with a more developed arrangement and less sparse as a result, but as the harmonies remain tied to the root, and ii-V-I excursions are brief, the composition's sense of calmness, of being contentedly at home, remains, despite the ornamentation.
Ultimately this performance recontextualizes the original, creating something designed for active, attentive listening; rather ar odds with Eno's original manifesto. For that, the original remains and stands alone, but if I want to hear Music For Airports, this is the one I'll reach for.
Going to move on to my final #EnoTime selection in a minute but before I do I'm giving his cover of the Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free a spin because it's brilliant. The whole of The Ship, upon which it appears, is brilliant.
Whenever it's #EnoTime and I sit down to listen I have the same debate -- Neuroli or Thursday Afternoon? Though very different these two records offer a similar listening experience, as they are both examples of Eno at his most minimalist: both are lengthy pieces organized around simple, repeated musical phrases that float untethered across textured atmospherics. Of the two I prefer Neuroli, which hangs suspended on a fifth for an hour and sounds like I imagine laudanum to feel. But I spent years falling asleep to Thursday Afternoon, no doubt much to the irritation of my brother with whom I shared a bedroom. 😁
But for my third choice this morning I am instead selecting 77 Million Paintings, a 44 minute snapshot of music output by generative compositional software, something Eno had been experimenting with since the 80s. The software contains hundreds of original audio and visual works which are combined randomly to produce an endless, non-repeating experience. You should read up on it because the whole project is bananas and has been projected on the Sydney Opera House and performed live in Second Life of all things.
This version is found on disc 2 of the Music For Installations compilation. It is built on fat, round orchestral chimes and bassy sine waves through which cut vocoder-distorted sung notes and stacked harmonies, scratchy percussive textures reminiscent of Matmos (who were surely raised on Eno), and warbly synth lines that are equal parts electronic bird calls and wind. There are elements here that recall the stretched, distorted piano tones of Thursday Afternoon and the unreal ocean shores of On Land. My son remarked that something he just heard sounded like a seal. It is unhinged, formless, infinite. Love it.
Next on #EnoTime is Ambient #4: On Land. Some consider this his defining statement on the ambient concept; Eno himself has said it is among his favourite works. It's not my very favourite (we'll get to that later) but I do find it very, very moving. Unlike Discreet Music's A side or the seminal Ambient #1: Music For Airports, which were designed to complement an existing space and color inside its lines, On Land conjures spaces which do not exist and drag you into them. It's easy for me to lose attention when Discreet Music is on, but On Land makes me *nervous*, heightens my alertness and demands my attention.
There are no melodies here, and almost no harmonic information: this is a record about texture and timbres. So just how each piece manages to be so evocative is beyond me. Lizard Point is a cave system on a rocky shore, full of unsettling movements of creatures you can hear but not see, the wind and dripping water and burbling of tide pools around you in the dark. Lanten Marsh is how I imagine Tolkien's Dead Marshes to sound.
And in my first #dnd campaign, when a party member was killed their soul would be transported to The Shore - a vast beachhead of black sand abutting an ocean of black water, under a black sky, there to encounter Death or assorted other mystical beings. A transitional, unreal place between life and what comes after, I designed it to feel unstable; unmoored from the reality of the PC's world; weird. It was directly inspired by the final track on this record, Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960, which I always played when we had a scene there.
I'm beginning #EnoTime with 1975's Discreet Music. Eno was already exploring atmospherics and drones at this time, especially on his collaborations with Robert Fripp. But it was on this record that we find him developing the notion of composition not as the output of a singular, intentional act of creation, but the consequence of stable systems consisting of closed feedback loops he termed "self-generating."
Discreet Music's A side is 30 minute recording of two independent synth lines being fed through a tape loop, echo distortion and graphic equalizer, the latter of which Eno would occasionally tweak as the loop repeats. The lines themselves are simple noodling around a major triad that on one line oscillates from (I think) the 6th to the 5th, and from the 2nd to the root. As the two intersect and overlap, it creates this stasis in which tiny moments of tension are immediately released, over and over, in stochastic but pleasing harmonies. The tuning slides around the tonal center somewhat, causing strange, liminal overtones that will occasionally grab your attention just as the piece has fallen out of your attention. I love this piece for its stasis, its satisfying, dependable resolutions, and its surprises. Like, somewhere around minute 27 the tonal center shifts entirely, and I *think* we end up in a new key? The hell?
Side B explores similar concepts but with live instrumentation: here the system is a string quartet given a set of instructions, and the input is a fragment of Pachabel's Canon in D. My wife hates this music because the result is rapid decomposition of a familiar phrase into functional harmonic madness. I find it fascinating as an experiment in game theory, but it's less successful and less moving than other examples (such as Zorn's Cobra).
evilchili