Brian Eno's Another Green World Page 3

  Eno’s future friend and collaborator Harold Budd recalled Cage’s impact on his thinking at around the same time. “I went to a concert by Cage and David Tudor called ‘Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?’ It was not exactly a concert, but it was more like an installation/lecture/performance piece, and it really changed my mind immediately. I thought, Jesus Christ, I wanted to go in that direction. It seemed heavy with the art part, if you know what I mean. It was heavy anti-academic, anti-Germanic, anti-European modernism, which at the time we were all scared to death of; we were all scared to death of Boulez and Stockhausen. Anyway, Cage was not an antidote to that, but just a different monetary value altogether. Printed money in a strange language, which seemed more valuable than the old ones.”

  After two years at Ipswich, Eno switched to another art school called Winchester. His painting work got increasingly conceptual, and he became more and more invested in sound. He was getting obsessed with tape recorders, amassing dozens of reel-to-reel tape machines at thrift stores and garage sales. He experimented with building “sound sculptures,” and played in two bands—an experimental troupe called Merchant Taylor’s Simultaneous Cabinet, and a rock band, The Maxwell Demon. Performances by Eno during this time included a cover of George Brecht’s Drip Music (Drip Event), a piece which instructs the performer to find an empty container and a source of dripping water, arranging it so that the water falls into the container.

  Brecht was a key member of the Fluxus movement, a ragtag group of conceptual artists in the 1960s and early 1970s who were heavily inspired by Cage. The group was most famous for staging “happenings,” but there were many other aspects to their work. Drip Music was a Fluxus “event score,” one of Brecht’s conceptual innovations. “Event scores” were usually pretty minimal; the score often involved nothing more than a card inscribed with a few lines of text and a title. Another Brecht event score, composed in

  1966, was titled For a Drummer, Fluxversion 2. The entire score read: “Performer drums with sticks over a leaking feather pillow, making the feathers escape the pillow.”

  At around the same time, Eno staged a performance of minimalist composer La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt, a composition which involves playing a sound, or group of sounds, for as long as the performer sees fit. Eno played X for Henry Flynt on a piano, slamming down on a cluster of keys 3,600 times. Though he tried to hit the same notes each time, he began noticing the minute variations from one crash of keys to the next, leading to the later maxim that “repetition is a form of change”—which later found its rightful place on an Oblique Strategies card.

  Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avantgarde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called The Great Learning. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own.

  “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each of which has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful— each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound.

  “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to regulate themselves; the idea of a self-regulating system was at the very heart of cybernetics. Another appealing facet of “Paragraph 7” for Eno was that it was both process and product—an elegant and endlessly beguiling process that yielded a lush, calming result. Some of Cage’s pieces, and other process-driven pieces by other avant-gardists, embraced process to the point of extreme fetishism, and the resulting product could be jarring or painful to listen to. “Paragraph 7,” meanwhile, was easier on the ears—a shimmering cloud of sonics.

  In an essay titled “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,” published in Studio International in 1976, a 28-year-old Eno connected his interest in “Paragraph 7” to his interest in cybernetics. He attempted to analyze how the design of the score’s few instructions naturally reduced the “variety” of possible inputs, leading to a remarkably consistent output. In the essay, Eno also wrote about algorithms— a cutting-edge concept for an electronic-music composer to be writing about, in an era when typewriters, not computers, were still en vogue. (In 1976, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were busy building a primitive personal computer in a garage that they called the Apple I.) Eno also talked about the related concept of a “heuristic,” using managerial-cybernetics champion Stafford Beer’s definition. “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer’s concept of a “heuristic” to music. Brecht’s Fluxus scores, for instance, could be described as heuristics.

  Cybernetics was famously defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948—coincidentally, the same year that Eno was born—as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “the science of control” may seem to have sinister overtones, but at its core, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. Cybernetic systems were used to model practically every phenomenon, with varying degrees of success—factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains—and Eno became a big fan of linking its powerful toolset of concepts to the studio environment, and to music composition. Eno was nothing if not interdisciplinary, and cybernetics may be the one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised. Its theories connect engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably trickled into the arts. “It’s very useful in the arts to have certain sorts of systems, [particularly] if you’re working with something that doesn’t have immediate limitations because you don’t have enough money,” said Judy Nylon. “Sometimes not having enough money is good, because you don’t end up throwing a million dollars at a five-cent idea. But [what] if the idea doesn’t require any money? How do you actually stop yourself from putting too much into an idea that’s too small? You find an external system. And some of the best systems in the world come out of physics, the sciences. Math.”

  Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno’s thinking on Another Green World and, especially, Discreet Music, in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too.

  Eno drew a great deal of inspiration from the high halls of the avant-garde, starting in art school. In the mid-1970s, he would even start his own record label, called Obscure, to help bring some of his favorite experimental composers to a larger audience. But he straddled two worlds. He admired Cage and Cardew, but he also loved doo-wop and The Who. He enjoyed cogitating about cybernetics, but he also really liked hitting on girls. In the late 1970s, Eno would argue at the “New Music, New York” festival—a water
shed moment for experimental music—that the music wasn’t “sensuous” enough. “Avant-garde music … is a sort of research music,” said Eno in an interview with Robert Sandall in Q in 1990. “You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it. It’s similar to the way I’m very happy people have gone to the North Pole.”

  One of the best mergers of the two sides of Eno’s personality was his work with the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Eno played clarinet with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, a lunatic hybrid of orchestra and comedy troupe that remains, to this day, a sort of British in-joke that never quite reached American shores. The group played A.D.D.-friendly two-minute long tunes—only the biggest choruses of the biggest classical hits, like the most famous parts of Beethoven’s Fifth, for instance. In contrast to the grandiose guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, the Portsmouth Sinfonia were perhaps the most punk-rock of them all. The group’s 1974 album Portsmouth Sinfonia Performs the Popular Classics, produced by Eno, is almost completely unlistenable.

  Like the Scratch Orchestra, the Sinfonia was open to anyone who wanted to join; a few of the members of the Sinfonia, like Eno, had also been in the Scratch Orchestra. Some members of the Sinfonia couldn’t play their instruments at all, and many of them had obvious trouble playing simultaneously. “Now everyone thinks that the Sinfonia was composed only of non-musicians but it wasn’t actually; it had this open membership so that anyone could join, so some very good musicians joined,” said Eno in an interview with Lester Bangs in the late 1970s. “That was what really made it interesting: this tension between people playing it really well and others making an absolute fuckup of it, but everyone doing it with full seriousness. The concert we did at the Royal Albert Hall was great. There was a girl who had actually trained as a concert pianist for many years, and her career had been ended because she walked through a glass door by accident and damaged her left hand. She knew she could still play very well, but she would never be a concert pianist now. Anyway, she joined the Sinfonia, and we did ‘Pathetique.’ I think with her, it was some Tchaikovsky piece, she was playing these beautiful piano things, and it was one of those where you get the piano and then the orchestra coming in: ‘Pliddl eliddleluddlelidliiidleliddle--BRAANH UHN AHN ER ONNKH!’”

  By 1975, all of Eno’s varied and offbeat experiences—from art school to the Scratch Orchestra to the Portsmouth Sinfonia to Roxy Music to “sound tennis’’ to make-believe houses—would be reflected, somehow, over the making of Another Green World, his third solo record. For the first time, he was planning to go into the recording sessions without any demos—choosing, instead, to wing it on deadline in an expensive London studio with a small army of hired musicians.

  One of Eno’s favorite quotes, from his cybernetics hero Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for the making of the album: ‘‘Instead of trying to specify it in full detail,” Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, “you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.”

  Another Green World , recorded in 1975, would be the fullest realization of Eno’s artistic vision up to that point in his life, and would serve as a proof of concept of his budding compositional strategy. There was just one problem. Eno had recruited a long and impressive cast of musicians, and he had booked the studio time. But he didn’t have songs for them to play. He had the actors, but there was no script.

  “Courage!”

  The music on Another Green World sounds practically meditative—all delicately-textured stillness, introspection and calm repose—but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Eno album to be composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio, over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. Many of the musicians involved didn’t even see each other during the sessions. Like a director, Eno had his shot list; he recorded most of the musicians individually, and then weaved their separate parts into fully-formed tapestries in post-production. He had assembled a crack team of session musicians, and giants like John Cale on viola, Robert Fripp on guitar, and Phil Collins on drums. He also had Rhett Davies on his side—a trusted friend and ace studio engineer who had worked closely with Roxy Music. “I think he had great confidence in the people he was working with, especially in Rhett, and Rhett would suggest a lot of things that he could do,” recalled Barry Sage, an assistant engineer on the Another Green World sessions.

  Eno had an interesting pool of talent, a general idea for a concept, and ideas for instruments to use, but that was it. “During that time I would book a different instrument each day,” Eno recalled in his conversation with Alan Moore. “One day it would be a cello, another day a marimba. Trombone. Anything. I couldn’t play any of them. But as part of my kit, I would have a little idea I would write for myself. ‘Swing the microphone from the ceiling and hire a trombone.’ So I’ve got two rules I’m going to use that day in the studio, and I’m going to try to make a piece of music.”

  Eno was fond of plucking ideas from experimental music and tossing them into the swirl of rock and pop. Swinging a mic from the ceiling, for instance, was an act immortalized in the piece “Pendulum Music,” composed by the avant-garde musician Steve Reich in 1968—a piece that called for multiple mics swinging above speakers, creating waves of buzzing feedback. Eno’s adventures in mic-swinging and marimbaplaying and trombone-hiring didn’t always work. But they helped keep the vibe loose in the studio, making everyone more open to trying new things. The other happy effect was that when any of these experiments lent an even partly promising sonic result, it fired everyone up, getting them to work harder and faster on that little seed of an idea.

  At a time when anyone can run a serviceable home recording studio on a laptop, it’s hard to imagine how risky it was back then, in those pre-digital days, to make an album this way. Studio time in London was scarce and expensive. According to what Eno said about Another Green World after the fact, the lack of advance planning was all part of a deliberate strategy, designed to give himself more of an artistic challenge. “I found that if you went into a studio with demos, you spent all your time trying to re-create the demos—which was not only extremely timeconsuming, but always prevented you from seeing what was actually happening,” he argued to Ian MacDonald in the NME in 1977. “You might be missing all kinds of things because you had a fixed goal in mind. So I decided to risk going into the studio with no written material. And it’s a real risk because studios are so expensive these days. If it just doesn’t happen to be your day, you can spend £500 for nothing.”

  Many years later, Eno elaborated on this principle, in a conversation with his friend and collaborator Daniel Lanois.

  Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down, and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, that the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives that that’s how things work.

  If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

  Another Green World certainly seemed like an unpromising beginning at first. Even with the impressive roster Eno assembled, and his own burgeoning talents in the studio, the sessions would
either reveal themselves to be encouraging seeds, ready to burst into a resplendent sonic paradise—or a complete, unremitting disaster.

  At the start, it looked to be the latter. During the first few weeks of the Another Green World sessions, there were several agonizing days when it looked as if everything was going to pot. For the first four days of work on Another Green World in July of 1975, nothing—absolutely nothing—came out at all. The pressure to succeed was too intense. Eno was on the verge of canceling the studio time and recording a lot of demos at home and going back to the old ways of doing things.