Brian Eno's Another Green World
Brian Eno’s Another Green World
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Brian Eno’s
Another Green World
Geeta Dayal
2009
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80, Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
33third.blogspot.com
Copyright © 2009 by Geeta Dayal
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-2786-1
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai,
India
Printed in the United States of America
To my grandmother, Shanti Duseja,
who taught me everything I know
about cooking and gardening
Table of contents
Preface
Introduction
1 “Into the impossible”
2 “Trust in the you of now.”
3 “Turn it upside down.”
4 “Courage!”
5 “Abandon normal instruments.”
6 “Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them.”
7 “Ask people to work against their better judgment”
8 “Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor.” / “Don’t be frightened of clichés”
9 “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”
10 “Remember those quiet evenings” / “The tape is now the music” / “Gardening, not architecture”
11 “Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.”
12 “Is it finished?”
Bibliography
Preface
A few years ago, I thought it would be fun to write a short book on Brian Eno for the Continuum 33 1/3 series of music books, and that fateful pact I made weighed on my psyche like a ten-thousand-pound albatross ever since. I wrote, rewrote, and threw out the entire book more than once. I tested out different approaches. Every idea fanned out into ten other intriguing ideas, and eventually I found myself enmeshed in a dense network of thought. Finally, I realized I had to conceptualize the book in a more linear way, or risk never being finished.
I used a deck of Oblique Strategies cards—originally released by Brian Eno and his friend, the late artist Peter Schmidt, in 1975—to help me make key creative decisions while writing this book. Sometimes these cards led me in intriguing new directions. At other times, the cards reinforced my tendency to procrastinate. “Do nothing for as long as possible,” was one particularly seductive instruction. “Overtly resist change,” read another card. “Don’t break the silence,” read another. Sometimes the cards kept me in stasis; at other times, the cards sparked radical changes. One night, I drew a card that read “Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate.” In response, I tore up an entire chapter I had been working on and started over, which may or may not have not been the best idea at the time. Some of the other cards seemed to taunt me. “Is there something missing?” one card beckoned. “Is it finished?”
Other cards were more useful. One particularly helpful oblique strategy was “Work at a different speed.” For some chapters, I cogitated endlessly, laboriously chewing over the subject matter and getting very few words down. After I drew that card, I attempted to write down my ideas extremely fast, at an almost breakneck pace. This broke me out of a mental rut. Another creative obstruction I faced while writing this book was the intimidation factor. I cursed myself for agreeing to write about Eno, particularly about a storied record that was nearly 35 years old, with the whole dusty weight of history attached to it. “You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas’’ and “Trust in the you of now’’ were some of the strategies that encouraged me to continue.
“Take a break,” read one card. I stopped thinking about Another Green World for a little while and read about other things that interested me—cognitive neuroscience and physics, for instance. The U.S. elections. Film and video: I inherited an old video projector from 1995, aimed it at one of my slanted ceilings, and used the hazy flicker of old videos to light my 200-year-old apartment in Boston at night. I read both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking cover to cover and taught myself about béarnaise sauces and soufflés. I attempted to master passages from Horowitz and Hill’s classic The Art of Electronics in parallel with the art of French cooking, in the interests of balance. (I finally learned how an op-amp worked, after avoiding the subject like the plague when I was a student at M.I.T. years ago.) I re-read Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities and Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. I took up cycling, and would go on long bicycle rides to clear my head.
Then, after a dark and dreadful New England winter, I felt rejuvenated, inspired. There were roses blooming on my block on vines so massive they looked like grand old trees. The community gardens in my leafy neighborhood were in full generative swing. I felt inspired by doing interviews; I felt inspired by being able to think about ideas again, and that process of discovery. Part of it, too, was that I began to see connections grow organically, nodes in the circuit where ideas met. I could sketch mental schematics that were going someplace interesting.
Part of my problem at first was that I wasn’t that interested in writing a standard rock biography of Brian Eno. That has been done, several times over. There’s a veritable goldmine of interviews and other materials available online, and an even deeper treasure trove if you’re willing to sift offline through teetering piles of rare archival materials, as I often did during my research. Some good books that cover Eno’s career include Brian Eno and Russell Mills’ 1986 book More Dark than Shark, Eno’s 1995 diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, Eric Tamm’s Brian Eno: His Music and the Ve
rtical Color of Sound, and most recently, David Sheppard’s exhaustive Eno biography, On Some Faraway Beach. Retreading some of the basic facts and well-known stories about Eno, his life, and his work was inevitable. Whenever possible, I tried not to overlap too much with other books, trying very hard to use different anecdotes, quotes, and sources.
One way to understand where you’re going is to figure out where you aren’t going. To offer a visual analogy, sometimes a good way to begin a drawing is to carve out all of the negative space. So I will start out by telling you what this book isn’t. This is not a behind-the-scenes book that meticulously documents every step of the making of Another Green World. Nor is it a book that dwells very much on Eno’s personal life. It certainly touches on both of these things, to the extent that they are useful in creating a larger picture. This is a book about process. How did these songs grow from kernels of ideas into fully-formed pieces? How were these kernels of thought formed in the first place?
So I attempted to write an exploratory book on the ideas underpinning the music, instead of a straight biography. For this reason, the book does not follow a strict chronology. Discreet Music was made prior to Another Green World, but in this book, I write about them in the reverse order. I also jump around a fair bit between various points in Eno’s life.
I did learn some very fascinating things about the way that Another Green World was put together in the studio. But I was also very interested in Discreet Music, which came out the same year (1975); I was interested in Evening Star, Obscure Records, Harmonia and Cluster, analog machinery, gardening, painting, cybernetics, and televisions turned sideways. But instead of my base of information getting too unwieldy—like my overgrown garden yard, which is bursting with so much entropy right now that it’s practically impossible to see the stone paths that wind through it—I actually felt calmer and more focused.
One of the great gifts of writing a book on Brian Eno is interviewing some of the very interesting people that he has worked with over the past 30-odd years. Practically every week I heard from an Eno collaborator or friend who had useful advice or a unique perspective to offer. I wasn’t just interested in talking with his collaborators on Another Green World; I wanted to learn more, in a general sense, about how Eno worked with other people.
For inspiration, I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects—from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno’s methods, past and present, are not really about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Stafford Beer’s The Brain of the Firm, and John Cage’s Silence. What these books have in common, besides being books that Eno rates highly, are that they connect a variety of seemingly disparate things, and they lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking—such as the Oblique Strategies cards.
Of course, there is the music. In the chapters that follow, I delve into the many unique sounds on these records. This is not any kind of formal musicological analysis. What it is, instead, is an exploration of the sonics—the timbres and layers of shifting textures. There is not much literary analysis here; Eno has stated many times that lyrics, especially at this time period of his life, did not interest him very much. But that does not mean that the words do not serve an important function. I look at two different properties of Another Green World. The first, as Eno himself has pointed out, is that only five out of the 14 tracks on the album have words, but that listeners tend to perceive the album as a “song record,” not an ambient record. Each song with lyrics “bleeds” into the surrounding ambient tracks. How does this effect work in our heads? The second phenomenon has to do with another type of sleight of hand—how chains of words, even nonsense words that do not make any sense in sequence, can nonetheless profoundly affect our emotions, trigger memories, and generate very powerful images. For this reason, I spend considerable time exploring Eno’s often elaborate, suggestive song titles.
One of the most instructive things I did was to listen to Another Green World at a number of different speeds. Each time I heard something new that I had not heard before—a new sound that was buried in the mix, for example, or an effect, a heavily layered backing vocal, an abstruse lyric. Speeding up and slowing down Discreet Music taught me a lot, too; the title track of Discreet Music, or “Side One’’ if you happen to own the vinyl copy, is recorded at half-speed. So I listened to it at double-speed, to gain some insight into what the original material might have sounded like before Eno slowed it down. I also listened to it at quarter-speed, which I liked even more than Eno’s half-speed version.
I still haven’t gotten tired of these albums, though it’s possible that I may have listened to Another Green World more times than Eno has. I become more drawn to these records the more I listen. Recently, I put the album on after not listening to it for a while. I was really moved by it, playing it over and over and hearing something new in its flow each time. It was like I could see the pathways of all of the electronic music that came before it and after it, traveling through that record like so many streams.
I often think that Another Green World’s longevity comes from its innate ambiguity. The more you listen, the more beguiling and open-ended the album becomes. In contrast to many other albums from the mid-1970s, the record doesn’t sound dated at all. Another Green World isn’t stuck in the past or fixated on the future—it continues to live its life in the fabric of the present.
Introduction
Many casual listeners who have heard of Brian Eno know him best as a legendary rock producer—a pivotal force behind classics like David Bowie’s Low, U2’s The Joshua Tree, and Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. Others, especially in Britain, know him as a key member of the trendsetting art-rock band Roxy Music in the early 1970s. As a solo artist, he’s best known for being a pioneer of ambient music; his bestselling solo record is still his 1978 ambient album Music for Airports. But that’s barely scratching the surface; unraveling the myriad twists and turns of Eno’s life could be a fulltime occupation. His sprawling discography, with its intricate network of genres, collaborators, and endless projects and side-projects, reads a bit like the history of rock and experimental music of the last four decades collapsed into one giant list.
At the time of this writing, Brian Peter George St Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is 61 years old. Many musicians of Eno’s generation are now traveling museum pieces, dusting off their greatest hits catalog for yet another reunion tour. Eno famously hates to tour, and chances are good that you will never see him perform. Despite nearly 40 years of convincing work as a musician and producer, Eno still likes to refer to himself as a “non-musician’’; he once even lobbied to get “non-musician’’ listed as his job on his passport. For him, the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history; he has long since moved on, and is not terribly interested, for better or for worse, in resuscitating his storied past. These days, you are more likely to find him arguing about politics, mulling a grand unified theory of culture, testing a chime for a clock designed to ring once every 10,000 years, or coaxing his iPhone into producing generative music.
Writers use various metaphors to describe Eno’s working method; a popular one is that Eno is a musician who “paints with sound.” It’s true that Eno looks at sound the way a visual artist might; he has a painterly sensibility with his ambient music, and he studied painting at art school. But the painting analogy tends to conjure up the mental image of a lone genius cloistered in a garret. Eno didn’t create Another Green World in isolation, daubing his sonic canvas in solitude. The album was recorded in a London studio with a hodgepodge of performers and instruments and ideas, with Eno at the helm of the ship.
Many years ago, Eno coined a term he called “scenius” to describe how large groups of people, not simply lone misunderstood geniuses, generate creativity. “Sce
nius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene,” Eno has said. “It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” While there wasn’t exactly a burgeoning “cultural scene” in London surrounding Another Green World—it was a singularly peculiar record for the year 1975, by any metric—the album shared connective tissue with some of the people and ideas bubbling under the surface of popular culture.
Painting is an appealing analogy for Eno’s ambient explorations, but filmmaking is a better model for how Eno works with other people in practice. He has a knack for identifying and assembling the right mix of people to serve a larger vision, and the ability to coax unexpected performances out of these collaborators. He approaches music the way a director might approach a soundtrack—as a means of establishing a mood, a sense of time and place. (Eno himself has a long history of making music for films, both real and imagined.) And, like any great director of the cinema, everything Eno touches bears his subtle but unmistakable fingerprints, regardless of who the stars in the foreground happen to be.
“Into the impossible”
A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things—these little details—to create that sense of place. It has a lot to do with light and sound. The sounds that come into a room can help paint a world there and make it so much fuller.