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Brian Eno on art, audio and technology

andreasmaaan

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Came across this great quote from Eno today:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Aside from the minor quibble that there’s no such thing as audible “CD distortion”, I think he inadvertently (as he is talking about production/recording, not reproduction) manages to capture the essence of a lot of the fad-ishness of the audiophile community.
 

NorthSky

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I like Brian Eno's music; smooth spacial electronica, with control, volume and emotion.

 

cjfrbw

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Ambient 1 Music for Airports is an oldie. I bought that record in New Orleans in the lat 70's. It became a casualty of the digital age and was donated to a library. When I got back into vinyl, never bought it again.
 

Cosmik

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Came across this great quote from Eno today:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Aside from the minor quibble that there’s no such thing as audible “CD distortion”, I think he inadvertently (as he is talking about production/recording, not reproduction) manages to capture the essence of a lot of the fad-ishness of the audiophile community.
It sounds to me as though he understands how gimmicks are often used as a substitute for genuine content.

The pop and rock recordings of the 70s were beautiful; they were done to the highest 'production values' possible - I mentioned before my penchant for Rocket Man by Elton John as a demonstration of a beautiful studio recording. Those producers would be appalled by the idea of passing the whole mix through a 'cassette plug-in' or whatever people think is a substitute for soul these days.

If the recording is pristine, there's nowhere to hide: the music has to be good enough to carry the whole thing. As he says, if you record it as a 'grainy, bleached out photograph', you are hoping that random, disconnected artefacts of the medium are interesting in themselves. They might be, as a novelty, but they don't satisfy the listener for long.
 

Xulonn

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Although I have a number of ripped and downloaded electronic music CD's in my digital music collection, my biggest collection is what I stream-ripped from Bluemars: Music for the Space Traveler - 400 mp3's from the Bluemars stream and 200 from the Cryosleep stream. Bluemars.org is still up, and the link in the previous sentence still works, but the only page with content is the "Artists" page, part of which is in the image below.

The Bluemars and Cryosleep playlists each have one Brian Eno track. For many years, I have played random tracks from Cryosleep softly in the background as I go to sleep with the timer set at 16 minutes. I usually fall asleep during the first few minutes, but upon rare occasion, I am still awake when the music stops.

Since the original mysterious (French?) Bluemars website streams disappeared for good in 2013, another fan - who like me, apparently also stream-ripped the content, is still streaming the old Bluemars and Cryosleep playlists at a website named Echoes of Bluemars - LINK.

Easy automatic stream-ripping has pretty much been defeated by some of the more sophisticated streaming music websites that use piracy-fighting expensive software, but apparently there are still ways to grab even that music via soundcard-based rippers. The real problem is that with cross-fading and other gapless streaming music, there is no space to I.D. and separate the tracks. The stream-ripping add-on utility for WinAmp and a couple of other rippers look for the metadata and "guesses" where the tracks end. This leaves artifacts of other songs at the beginning and end of many of the tracks, which can be edited out with an MP3 editor. However, doing that, and then artificially fading in and out with bits and pieces missing from the beginning and end of songs does not leave pristine "complete" tracks.

Stream-ripping is a legal form of "time-shifting" radio/TV/cable station content for personal use, but for music you end up with imperfect copies. Although their are other ways to download music - legal and illegal, I have a feeling that some of the electronic music and chanting (Voices from Within - the third channel) at Bluemars is obscure and not available commercially anywhere. The original Bluemars DJ solicited music directly from artists, and as a result, some tracks may be available only at Bluemars.

I started writing this response listening to "Singtree" by Solar Quest, and am finishing while listening to "Hummel" by Spacecraft.

Bluemars Artists Page.JPG
 

NorthSky

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NorthSky

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Ambient 1 Music for Airports is an oldie. I bought that record in New Orleans in the lat 70's. It became a casualty of the digital age and was donated to a library. When I got back into vinyl, never bought it again.

Carl, I kept mine for nostalgia and music history/evolution inventory sake.
It's in the same box as Philip Glass albums.
 

Xulonn

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Rocket Man by Elton John as a demonstration of a beautiful studio recording.

One of the most memorable outdoor concerts I ever attended was Elton John at the Greek Theater at the back of the U.C. Berkeley campus in the mid-1970's. His live performance of Rocket Man made me realize that his band could indeed rock. (I also saw local Latin rocker Carlos Santana and his band, and a few years later, a Pat Metheny in concert at "the Greek", and they were memorable events as well.)

Here is a great picture of the venue at dusk with campus buildings, San Francisco Bay, and San Francisco in the background...
Greek Theater Berkeley.JPG
 

cjfrbw

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I lived for my first two years at CAL at Bowles Hall next to the Greek Theater. I heard Miles Davis from my dorm room once, although I wasn't musically literate enough at the time to know what I was hearing.
 

Xulonn

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Didn't mean to help hijack the thread, but these internet forum discussions often wander from the original subject based on random associations.

However, I got back on track and looked up Brian Eno's history, starting with his musical beginnings as a founding member of Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music in 1971. He was a fascinating and flamboyant character in his youth - he's on the left in this picture.
Roxy Music - 1972.jpg

Eno didn't appear on stage with Roxy Music at first, but worked the mixer and a synthesizer. After two albums with Roxy Music and ego-clashes with Bryan Ferry, he left the band and started his solo career.

In 2010, he rejoined Bryan Ferry (as well as David Gilmour and other well-know musicians) for Ferry's "Olympia" CD.

Back about 1983, I bought a copy of the very successful Roxy Music "Avalon" album - their last before disbanding - and it is one of my all time favorites, but Avalon was 10 years after Eno left the band. Tonight I will listen to some tracks from the first two Roxy Music albums with Eno, plus Music for Airports and Olympia, and that might illuminate a bit of Eno's evolution as a musician.
 

derp1n

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Aside from the minor quibble that there’s no such thing as audible “CD distortion”, I think he inadvertently (as he is talking about production/recording, not reproduction) manages to capture the essence of a lot of the fad-ishness of the audiophile community.
Distortion is the wrong word, but I suspect he's referring to the type of glitches you get when the transport fails to read part of the disc. Oval used this effect fairly effectively on 94 Diskont:

Oval received both praise and controversy for its styling methods, such as literally deconstructing music and digital audio by using exacto knives, paint, and tape to damage the surfaces of compact discs, only to stitch the sound back together in loops of melody punctuated by the disc's physical skips.

 

Guermantes

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With "CD distortion" he may actually be referring to digital clipping. Usually considered negatively (nasty) in comparison to the softer clipping of analogue tape saturation (nice), he is saying that it, too, will become aesthetically desirable.

I've always liked the way Eno has poked and prodded the cracks in technology to find veins of colour, as in his signature Yamaha DX7 patches in the '80s.

Favourite Eno albums for me:
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (with David Byrne)
Fourth World Possible Musics Vol.1 (with Jon Hassell)
Ambient 4: On Land
The Pearl (with Harold Budd)
Thursday Afternoon
Another Day on Earth
 

JJB70

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I love the soundtrack for the movie "For All Mankind", it is a wonderful movie and the soundtrack complemented the visual imagery beautifully. That was an Eno - Daniel Lanois collaboration. Well worth searching out for any not familiar with either the movie or the soundtrack.
 

Furio

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I love a lot of Brian's music.
I like a lot when he states that he is not interested to play an instrument, he wants to play sounds.
He never became a "virtuoso" or an instrument slave, like many keyobard heroes of prog rock history; he was and is still interested only in finding new sounds and new textures.
Where "distortion" or wrong recording effect is part of a new sound discovery.

Being a studio freak, he knows very well how first CD players and recordings were playing in the 80's, you hifi guys forgot how bad the first anti-alias filter effect was on some CD releases.
I still have in my living room some first copy editing of rock masterpieces.
Take a listen on first release of Police CDs to know what I mean: pure shit, Copeland's cymbals are awful!
Older SACD remastering made justice, of course you can listen a better recording also on downsampled CD of this late edition...

I think Brian recorded many good albums, I don't like at all his producer experience with U2 or Coldplay, probably because I don't like these bands.
I find incredibly good his producer job with Bowie, Fripp, Gabriel, TalkingHeads (many heroes of my Youth).

He was fully artistic responsible, IMHO, of two real masterpieces:
- Before and after the science (1977)
- My life in the bush of ghosts (with David Byrne, 1981)

These two CDs are in my personal best 20 ever.
 

Cosmik

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He was fully artistic responsible, IMHO, of two real masterpieces
- Before and after the science (1977)
- My life in the bush of ghosts (with David Byrne, 1981)
I'd like to know what it is that people hear in this album. It came up in the thread on cultural appropriation which is why I listened to it - didn't do anything for me!
 

Furio

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I'd like to know what it is that people hear in this album. It came up in the thread on cultural appropriation which is why I listened to it - didn't do anything for me!

I cannot be sure to convince you.
There is always space for personal tastes, also for records that can be fundamental for some people.
I already wrote I am not able to listen to any recent U2 or Coldplay CD, I have other well renowned artists that I consider awful.
Millions of people think the opposite.
Trying to explain why I think that it was a masterpiece, and maybe you don't agree.
Absolutely normal.

Brian and David used a lot a strange way to compose: cutting different materials, stretch the frequencies and times using tapes, mix everything together.
Starting from human voices: predicators from long distance radios, politicians on TV, middle east and african singers.
Then funk pulse with synthesizers, landscapes and electronic studio stuff.
Something that 10 years after everyone could do with a software sampler and a computer.
But they did it manually, because digital audio was not possible.

And they made a melting pot of urban cultures, mix of races, blend of sounds and atmospheres.
Also in this case, something that 10 years after everyone would have called "world music"
They set a new standard, invented a new way to produce pop music.
And I still think that this thing was pure genius.
That CD for me is still young and fresh.
Because they use electronics in a hybrid way, making it very human and full of feelings.

When I visited NYC for the first time in the nineties, I saw all those guys taking the metro to go to work in the morning, with different skin and suit colors, traditional and ethnic look.
I was coming from a country where there was only one skin color (not today), and I was surprised by that variery.
Soundtrack for that surprise was that music in my brain .

And that recall from the title, using an ancestral fear of darkness and ghosts, showing the source of humanity as the african jungle, using that electronic funky scheleton: this was so important for a huge community of musicians.
Everyone involved with music creation was touched by that CD, believe me...

As far as hifi is involved: yes, Brian used every way to take advantage from saturation and distortion coming out from audio playing devices, radio, tapes, mixers, in a creative way: and I love that.
 

600_OHM

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Sorry to necromance a very old thread, but maybe for fans this is interesting ...

In this 1974 video from MusiKladen (doing Pyjamarama), you can clearly see the Revox reel to reel rolling.


This is not to record the performance, but was Eno recording all the stuff in between - the ambient and weird sounds from the audience, hall, or just stage noises that he could scour for inspiration for more avante-garde material later.

There are other clips from MusiKladen with some of thir other classic tunes, where you see ENO putting on a show with the EMS VCS3 synth. I'm not sure his heart was in it, it's almost as If can feel a sense of separation happening between the croon-rock style of Ferry, and ENO wanting to go in a different unique direction (which he did).

I sensed he didn't want to end up doing things similar to Keith Emerson, albeit on a VCS3 and not a Moog.
 

600_OHM

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I put Brian Eno into the same category as Bill Nelson of Be-Bop-Deluxe. Artists forging their own path come hell or high water.

Like when Bill drifted away from the "Axe Victim" sound, and got into Drastic Plastic.

I've got a feeling Drastic Plastic is in Brian's playlist somewhere. Kind of a kindred-soul link if you will.

Unless it's just me losing my hearing, this remaster seems to have shadowed the deep breathing pan from left to right during Superenigmatic. I gotta' switch cans, because losing original details like this for Brian and Bill? Shame.

Weird - remaster sounds more "dynamic", but I'm losing notes that have been forever burned into the oxide of my heart and I miss them from the original.

 
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