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WD_415/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.9 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 455 | | Catalog #: | WD_0415 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Album liner notes -
Never one to be short of things to say, Brian Eno often accompanies his albums with short essays explaining the techniques used in composing them, or even (in the case of On Land) demonstrating how to build an ambient music system.
* liner notes from Discreet Music
* liner notes from Music For Airports
* liner notes from On Land
* liner notes from Thursday Afternoon
* more notes from Thursday Afternoon
* liner notes from Neroli
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
liners.html
Discreet Music -
"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
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
discreet-txt.html
Music for Airports liner notes -
These are the liner notes from the initial American release of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports / Ambient 1", PVC 7908 (AMB 001)
AMBIENT MUSIC
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
BRIAN ENO
September 1978
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
MFA-txt.html
Ambient 4: On Land -
Brian Eno
1982 release
AN AMBIENT SPEAKER SYSTEM
I regard this music as environmental: to be experienced from the inside. Accordingly I considered releasing a quadrophonic version of it, an idea I abandoned upon realising that very few people (myself included) own quadrophonic systems.
However, I have for many years been using a three-way speaker system that is both simple to install and inexpensive, and which seems to work very well on any music with a broad stereo image. The effect is subtle but definite - it opens out the music and seems to enlarge the room acoustically.
In addition to a normal stereo hifi system all that is required is one extra loudspeaker and some speaker cable. The usage of this speaker in the three-way system is such that it will not be required to handle very low frequencies: therefore a small or "mini" speaker will be adequate.
As shown in the diagram, the two terminals of the new speaker are connected to the two positive (red) speaker connectors on the amplifier. This speaker is located somewhere behind the listener - at the apex of a triangle whose base is formed by the original loudspeaker set-up. One of the unexpected benefits of this system is an increase in the usable listening area - almost any point in the room will yield good (although not necessarily "accurate") stereo sound.
I arrived at this system by accident, and I don't really know why it works. What seems to happen is that the third speaker reproduces any sound that is not common to both sides of the stereo - i.e., everything that is not located centrally in the stereo image - and I assume that this is because the common information is put out of phase with itself and cancels out.
More technically, the lower the impedance of the added speaker, the louder it will sound. If it is found to be too loud (although this rarely seems to happen), you can either insert a potentiometer (6-12 ohms, at least 10 watts) into the circuit, or move the speaker further away.
Ambient Sound System Diagram
© Brian Eno 1992
1986 release
The idea of making music that in some way related to a sense of place - landscape, environment - had occurred to me many times over the years preceding "On Land". Each time, however, I relegated it to a mental shelf because it hadn't risen above being just another idea - a diagram rather than a living and breathing music. In retrospect, I now see the influence of this idea, and the many covert attempts to realise it, running through most of the work that I've released like an unacknowledged but central theme. This often happens; you imagine a territory rich in possibilities and try to think of how you might get to it, and then suddenly one day you look around and realise that you have been there for quite a long time.
My conscious exploration of this way of thinking about music probably began with "Another Green World" (1975). On that record I became aware of setting each place within its own particular landscape and allowing the mood of that landscape to determine the kinds of activity that could occur. Working from the realisation that my music was less and less connected with performability but was created in and of the studio, I took advantage of the fact that music produced in recording studios (rather than music reproduced by studios) has the option of creating its own psychoacoustic space. Most frequently this has been achieved by mechanical or electronic echoes and delays: short repeat echoes connoting rectilinear urban spaces, for example, and until recently, these possibilities have been used "realistically" to evoke spaces that were recognizable. From "Another Green World" onwards I became interested in exaggerating and inventing rather than replicating spaces, experimenting in particular with various techniques of time distortion. This record represents one culmination of that development and in it the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of; instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background.
In using the term landscape I am thinking of places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke. And of expanded moments of memory too... One of the inspirations for this record was Fellini's "Amarcord" ("I Remember"), a presumably unfaithful reconstruction of childhood moments. Watching that film, I imagined an aural counterpart to it, and that became one of the threads woven into the fabric of the music.
What qualified a piece for inclusion on the record was that it took me somewhere, but this might be somewhere that I'd never been before, or somewhere I'd only imagined going to. Lantern Marsh, for example, is a place only a few miles from where I grew up in East Anglia, but my experience of it derives not from having visited it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be. We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn't materialize, and with the other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in.
The choice of sonic elements in these places arose less from listening to music than from listening to the world in a musical way. When I was in Ghana, for instance, I took with me a stereo microphone and a cassette recorder, ostensibly to record indigenous music and speech patterns. What I sometimes found myself doing instead was sitting out on the patio in the evenings with the microphone placed to pick up the widest possible catchment of ambient sounds from all directions, and listening to the result on my headphones. The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame; they became music.
Listening this way, I realised I had been moving towards a music that had this feeling; as the listener, I wanted to be situated inside a large field of loosely-knit sound, rather than placed before a tightly organised monolith (or stereolith, for that matter). I wanted to open out the aural field, to put much of the sound a considerable distance from the listener (even locating some of it "out of earshot"), and to allow the sounds to live their lives separately from one another, clustering occasionally but not "musically" bound together. This gave rise to an interesting technical difficulty. Because recording studio technology and practice developed in relation to performed music, the trend of that development has been towards greater proximity, tighter and more coherent meshing of sounds with one another. Shortly after I returned from Ghana, Robert Quine gave me a copy of Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly". Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the "spacious" quality I was after, and like "Amarcord", it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently.
As I made these pieces, I began to take a different attitude towards both the materials and the procedures I was using. I found the synthesizer, for example, of limited usefulness because its sound tended towards a diagrammatic rather than an organic quality. My instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones. Coupled with this transition was an increasing interest in found sound as a completely plastic and malleable material; I never felt any sense of obligation about realism. In this category I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work. As a result, some earlier pieces I worked on became digested by later ones, which in turn became digested again. The technique is like composting: converting what would otherwise have been waste into nourishment.
Brian Eno
1982, revised February 1986
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
onland-txt.html
Thursday Afternoon -
Brian Eno
Despite his considerable and varied musical output, there has been an underlying consistency at the foundation of all of Brian Eno's work. This consistency is the product of his curiosity about the nature of the medium in which he is working - a curiosity that has often succeeded in generating results just beyond current assumptions of what was possible.
This experimental attitude asks several questions: what can be done now that could not be done before? What kinds of music does that suggest? And what kinds of listening behaviour? These questions, in turn, point up a central assumption of Eno's work: not only is music always evolving new forms of structures, it is also continually changing its social function, occupying new niches in the cultural landscape. We make music in new ways, and we hear music in new places. Technological change is, of course, a major factor in this evolution. The development of recording processes extended the cultural niche of music beyond live performance and into all sorts of times and spaces, turning music into a durable, transportable art in much the same way as writing transformed the spoken word. And, besides extending those listening options, specific recording techniques have suggested entirely new ways of composing music.
Much of Eno's work is predicated on an intuitive response to this evolution. "Music for Airports", for example, is a series of pieces that could only have been generated in a multi-track studio and which are designed to take advantage of recently created listening spaces made available for background music. As he has often done in his work, Eno recognised the unused capacity of a new cultural landscape and took advantage of it. "Thursday Afternoon" is perhaps the first recording specifically for the compact disc and it utilized two new freedoms of that format: it is 61 minutes long (a duration that only the compact disc could accommodate) and its is occasionally very quiet (made possible by the disc's lack of surface noise). It seems likely that, just as the 78-rpm record set the scene for the 3-minute song, so the compact disc will foster an interest among composers in long-duration pieces like this one. Perhaps less predictable is how composers will respond to the prospect of silence within recording.
Compositionally, "Thursday Afternoon" belongs to the family of works which also includes "Discreet Music" and "Music for Airports". Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as "holographic", by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. Eno's intention with these pieces is that they should function as tapestries; large-scale, non-intrusive atmospheres which lend a consistent mood to the environments in which they are heard. Perhaps, then, they should be seen as more closely related to painting (and in particular that school of painting that verges into environmental design) than to any traditional notion of music.
C. S. J. Bofop, August 1985
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
TA-txt.html
Thursday Afternoon -
From the inset in Eno's album "Thursday Afternoon":
The music on this disc was originally recorded for the video made in April 1984 at the request of Sony Japan. The video THURSDAY AFTERNOON is on vertical format i.e. the TV set has to be turned onto its right side. It consists of seven video-paintings of Christine Alicino filmed in San Francisco and was treated and assembled at Sony in Tokyo.
The following is an extract from the video's inlay card:
These pieces represent a response to what is presently the most interesting challenge of video: how does one make something that can be seen again and again in the way that a gramophone record can be listened to repeatedly? I feel that video makers have generally addressed this issue with very little success: their work has been conceived within the aesthetic frame of cinema and television (an aesthetic that presupposes a very limited number of viewings) but then packaged and presented in a format that clearly intends multiple viewings, the tape or disc ... Unfortunately, the cinematic heritage seems inimical to the idea of multiple-view video tapes or discs. It relies heavily for its impact on a dramatic momentum which is sustained by frequent scene changes, fast editing and the narrative development of the plot. As a result, being in some way a function of surprise, this impact is eroded by repeated viewings. The usual response to this problem has been to load the video with more scene-changes, faster edits, stranger camera angles and more exotic special effects, in short, more surprises - presumably, in the hope of delaying the inevitable decline in interest in the work as it becomes more familiar. This is the condition of pop-video, and it has almost nowhere left to go in this direction.
So long as video is regarded only as an extension of film or television, increasing hysteria and exoticism is its most likely future. Our background as television viewers has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between viewer and screen - you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.
BRIAN ENO, 1984
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
thursaft-2.html
: NEROLI : (Thinking Music Part IV)
Composed and performed by Brian Eno
Brian Eno's experiments with 'functional music' really got under way in 1975 with the release of "Discreet Music 1", a thirty minute piece formed from the cyclic overlay and resulting permutations of two melodies of different duration.The result, in that case, was a tapestry of shifting harmonic clusters - a moire', simultaneously static and changing. As a listening experience, it remains distinctive: calm, still and deep, yet always slowly evolving,it gives one the sensation of witnessing the unfolding of an organic process.
It was this organic quality of movement-in- stasis the Eno was to develop in later pieces such as "Muisc For Airports" (1978) and "Thursday Afternoon" (1985). All these pieces are systems based: that is to say, their compositions are not specified in note-to-note detail, but are the results of the operation of particular patterning processes on particular materials. In this sense the works can be seen as modelling themselves on natural processes, or as John Cage put it,"imitating Nature in its manner of operation".
Like many of Eno's systems pieces, "Neroli" is modal. In this case the mode is the Phrygian, whose flattened second evokes the Moorish atmosphere alluded to in the title. In this mode the seventh is also flattened, and the combination of these unusual intervals creates a mysterious tonal ambiguity.This is further emphasised in "Neroli", because the rootnote of the mode is rarely played, whereas the fifth of the scale is prominent. Together, the blurred tonality and the lack of a distinct tonal centre give the piece a hovering, weightless character. The melodic line, with little forward momentum and no sense of pulse, disperses and coalesces into exotic new constellations. Eno says: "I wanted to make a kind of music that existed on the cusp between melody and texture, and whose musical logic was elusive enough to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it". As with his other works in this area, this music readily recedes into pure texture, atmosphere, ambience. And it is in this space- "at the edge of music", as Eno describes it - that there exists the possibility of another kind of music, and other ways of listening.
C. S. J. Bofop, March 1993
-music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/
neroli-txt.html
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