Brian Eno – Page 27 – { feuilleton }

20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists and he’d certainly be my candidate for one of the world’s greatest living artists even though the world at large stubbornly refuses to agree with this opinion. Phillips’ problem (if we have to look for problems) would seem to be an excess of talent in an art world that doesn’t actually like people to be too talented at all (unless they’re dead geniuses like Picasso) and a lack of the vaunting ego that propels others into the spotlight.

Phillips is predominantly a painter but a restlessly experimental one. On my journey through the London galleries in May I visited the National Portrait Gallery, a rather dull place mostly filled with pictures of the rich and famous by the rich and famous. There were two Tom Phillips works on display in different rooms, inadvertently showing his artistic range: one, a fairly standard (if very finely detailed) portrait of Iris Murdoch, the other a computer screen showing a portrait of Susan Adele Greenfield which manifested as an endlessly-changing series of 169 processed drawings and video stills. One work was static and traditional, the other fluid, contemporary and unlike anything else in the building.

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Generative culture

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, Laforet Museum, Harajuku, Tokyo.

Brian Eno is in the latest Wire talking about his forthcoming DVD-ROM, 77 Million Paintings. He also mentions coining the term “generative music” in 1995 to a resounding silence. 77 Million Paintings continues the generative project:

This will be available later in the year as a DVD-ROM (which will play on most modern computers) and a DVD featuring Brian talking about the project. It also includes an extensive booklet covering Brian’s long and successful career as a visual artist.

The name 77 Million Paintings comes from the possible number of images that can be created from a huge number of combinations. Anyone familiar with Brian’s audio-visual installations will instantly recognise the inspiration behind the project. The music is from Brian’s installation collection.

Ambient stuff for the eyes, in other words. I’d be looking forward to this if I still had a TV (mine packed up a few years ago) as I used to program my primitive Spectrum computer (which still works!) to generate simple patterns, turning the TV screen into an abstract artwork for a few hours. The difference with Eno’s project, of course, is the greater variety, quality and degree of intent involved. I saw one of his installation works, The Quiet Club, at the Hayward Gallery in 2000 which used similar audio and visual processes. With 77 Million Paintings you’ll be able to turn your living room into a quiet club of your own.

In a similar generative vein, there’s WolframTones: “A New Kind of Music – Unique cellphone ringtones created by simple programs from renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram’s computational universe.” Too complicated to explain; go and play around with it.

Wyatting

These are people after my own heart as this is something I’ve been doing for years with jukeboxes. Usually the challenge was to find the weirdest thing in the whole selection of records which would often be a B-side of some sort. “Wyatting” seems a rather unfair name for something that’s annoying people (although if it’s going to be named something it may as well be after the wonderful Robert). If it’s irritation you want then “Merzbowing” (see below) would seem more apt, not least because of its relation to the Dada works of Kurt Schwitters.

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Wyatting (vb): when jukeboxes go mad by Ned Beauman

Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox. Or it was, until the 21st-century caught up with the noisy machine in the corner. There are now nearly 2,000 internet-connected jukeboxes in the UK, each of which can access as many as 2m tracks – and with them has come Wyatting, which is either a fearless act of situationist cultural warfare or a nauseatingly snobbish prank, depending on who you ask.

The phenomenon was first identified in the New York Times by Wendy McClure. She was in a grimy rock bar when someone pulled up Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, which consists of a single distant piano phrase repeated for more than an hour, and found herself too mesmerised to leave. “Imagine replacing the brass cylinder in a music box with a Möbius strip made from nerve endings,” she wrote. The rest of the bar’s patrons , however, were soon in revolt.

This wasn’t to be an isolated incident. After music critic Simon Reynolds linked to McClure’s article on his weblog, several of his readers wrote in to confess that this is a game they regularly play. Carl Neville, a 36-year-old English teacher from London, coined the term “Wyatting” because sticking on Dondestan, the 1991 avant-garde jazz-rock LP by ex-Soft Machine singer Robert Wyatt, is the perfect way to disrupt a busy Friday night in a high street pub. Other favourites are free-jazz clarinetist Evan Parker and surrealist Japanese noise producer Merzbow. In theoretical terms, Wyatting has been explained as enacting the theories of Adorno, who believed that subverting pop music would help to bring down capitalism. Alternatively, if you listen to Neville, it’s simply “childish, futile, but finally hilarious”. (More.)

Exposure by Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp’s 1979 album, Exposure (DGM0601), was intended to form part of a trilogy together with Peter Gabriel’s second solo album and Sacred Songs, by Daryl Hall. Fripp produced all three albums and also plays on all three. As things turned out, the scheme was too much for “dinosaur” (Fripp’s term) record company executives, they regarded Hall’s album as uncommercial then buried its release.

Exposure is (for me) the most successful of the three. Although it mixes styles and vocalists (Daryl Hal, Peter Hammill, Terry Roche and Peter Gabriel singing his own Here Comes The Flood), it manages to maintain a consistent atmosphere very much influenced by Fripp’s life in New York and his connections with the NYC New Wave of the time (he played on Fade Away And Radiate by Blondie). It also forms the bridge between the King Crimson of old and what would become the Eighties’ Crimson. Fripp’s experimental side is to the fore here, with the first showcasing of his “Frippertronics” in a musical setting and many taped conversations being mixed into the music.

The new CD set released this week manages to reinvent the album to some degree, presenting the original album on one disc then a whole disc of different vocal mixes on the other, some of which use different singers, such as Daryl Hall singing on tracks that featured Peter Hammill originally. The sound is also considerably enhanced, making the heavier pieces sound especially ferocious. An album that’s nearly thirty years old suddenly sounds fresh again.

More details after the jump.

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My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Brian Eno and David Byrne’s 1981 album gets a remastered reissue this month, something I’m looking forward to hearing as all the early Eno albums sounded pretty crappy on their initial CD release. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is being given an added publicity push this time round with much being made of its status as an inspiration to later generations of musicians and DJs. The album site includes tracks that will be available for anyone to download (after signing a Creative Commons form) for purposes of remixing.

While the album’s wonderful grooves certainly deserve their reputation, I still get rather aggravated by claims made for its landmark status as “the first sampling album” or similar. These assertions derive from the way most of the tracks mix recordings taken from American radio or from Arabian “world music” albums in a manner that was unusual at the time, but certainly not without precedent. I think Eno and Byrne would be first to acknowledge that they were popularising a technique that already existed, just as Eno brought Terry Riley’s tape loop experiments to a wider audience on recordings such as (No Pussyfooting), Evening Star and Discreet Music.

There are at least two Terry Riley-like figures behind the genesis of My Life…. One is Holger Czukay, bass player from the German band Can, and editor and tape collagist for all of Can’s music. Czukay released a solo album in 1979 called Movies which does exactly what My Life… does but considerably better for the most part (there’s even a track entitled Persian Love that mixes Middle-Eastern radio singers with Czukay’s guitar). My Life… overlays the voices (almost all from a single source only) on the music in a manner which isn’t particularly inventive; Czukay on the other hand not only interleaves multiple recordings across his tracks but even makes it sound as though the radio recordings have been made specially for each track. Cool in the Pool contains a lengthy sax solo taken from the radio that matches Czukay’s music so perfectly he must have planned the entire track around the place where the solo would occur. Eno would have been well aware of this album seeing as he’s a lifelong Can aficionado and played with Czukay on a couple of the Cluster releases in the late-Seventies.

The other eminence gris behind My Life… is Jon Hassell, a composer and musician I’ve had the good fortune to work as a designer recently. Eno was very impressed by Hassell’s early “Fourth World” albums and helped Hassell produce the third of these, Possible Musics, in 1980. He also invited Hassell to play trumpet on Houses in Motion when he was producing Remain in Light for Talking Heads in the same year. Hassell has always maintained that My Life… came out of this period of his association with Eno and Byrne and that the album was originally intended to be a three-way Fourth World collaboration. Whatever the veracity of this, Peter Gabriel recognised the lineage in 1982 when he compiled the first WOMAD album, Music and Rhythm. Among a number of acknowledged talents from different countries playing what people still class as “world music”, there was Jon Hassell with a version of Ba-Benzélé from Possble Musics, and Holger Czukay with Persian Love. Oh yes, and a piece by David Byrne…

If this sounds like a denigration of My Life… it isn’t intended as one. I bought this album when it came out and still have the original vinyl copy. The criticism is addressed to lazy journalists whose assertions about musical history don’t always stand up to close scrutiny. To his credit, Paul Morley in the sleevenotes to the reissue acknowledges both Can and Jon Hassell but then he always was a journalist capable of thinking for himself, rather than parroting the platitudes of others.

Finally, here’s my copy of the book that gave the album its title. I’ve had this for years and still not read it. Maybe now would be a good time.