Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Music Express FEBRUARY 1991 - by Tim Powis

BEFORE AND AFTER POP

Brian Eno says he's not really a musician, and he doesn't like to perform. Nonetheless, his cool, cerebral approach has had a powerful influence on music, from his days with Roxy Music in the early "70s through producing Talking Heads and U2, his ambient musical landscapes and his latest work, which includes an actual "pop" record with John Cale and a project that will somehow unite West African rhythms, '70s fusion, dance and "space music."

Few artists working in the fragmented world of rock music are as downright contemplative as Brian Eno is. Name another musician who, in the press release for his new album, allows how he normally enjoys interviews but worries that the questions about this album could get too predictable - then solves that problem by answering the obvious queries ahead of time.

In this case, the new album is Wrong Way Up, a collaboration with Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale on Eno's Opal label. Eno hadn't worked with Cale for a long time (until 1989, when he produced the latter's Words For The Dying), so one obvious question was: "Why did you work with John Cale?" Another was: "How come you've gone back to writing songs again?"' After all, it's been twelve years since Before And After Science, Eno's last album of "pop" songs, came out.

Since then, Eno's own recordings (as well as his ventures with "Fourth World" trumpeter Jon Hassell and keyboardist Harold Budd) have fallen into a category he's dubbed Ambient Music - atmospheric soundscapes so subtle that they can, according to the artist, either be listened to or ignored. (He wasn't kidding when he called one album Music For Airports.) Meanwhile, he produced Talking Heads' milestone Remain In Light, and later (with Daniel Lanois) U2's The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. He's also exhibited audio-visual installations in art galleries around the world, including the recent Prismatic Audio Sculptures one of which he describes thusly: "You walk into a dark room and there are several seductively beautiful objects which gradually go through very complicated color mutations. There's sound coming from lots of directions. And you stay in there for a long time."

Ever since he emerged on the pop scene in the early '70s, as a member of Roxy Music, Eno has maintained that he's not really a musician; although he has a knack for coaxing unusual sounds out of synthesizers, he sees himself as more as a musical conceptualist.

This interview was done on the phone to New York City, where Eno had just lectured at the Museum of Modern Art. He was looking forward to returning home to England and resuming work on a pair of new recordings.

What have you been lecturing about?

I was lecturing at MOMA on high art and low art. I was talking in other cities, as well, just rambling on about music and art and how culture evolves.

Do you see a distinction between high and low art? If so, would you like to get rid of it?

Essentially, I think that low art is an inclusive type of art. It works by creating large audiences. It has to do with a lot of people feeling, on a sensual/emotional level, the same way about something. In general, high art is exclusionary and kind of hermetic. It's rather a private experience. What I think should be shattered is the social status that evolves around them - the snobbery that attaches to one and the contempt that attaches to the other.

Of course, they're not water-tight distinctions. There are lots of things in between that are blends of those - my work, for instance. Most of the people I work with are somewhere in between. High art/low art can almost be characterized as a mind/body split, and in the West we have a lot of respect for anything to do with intellect and no respect for anything to do with bodies. I think that's changing We're evolving away from those old sort of Renaissance stereotypes of the brain being the organizing factor and the body being this lustful piece of baggage that we have to drag around.

Maybe some of what you're talking about can be qualified in terms of the new record with John Cale. You mention in the press release that you have a shared concept of the social significance of pop music Could you explain that?

I think we share a concept of where pop music sits in our culture, and where it could sit. We have an idea of pop music as a very powerful and under-exploited vehicle - not the sort of derivative, reiterative thing that high-art people always make it out to be.

So you do see Wrong Way Up as a departure from your other work in the last decade?

Oh, sure. It's not so much a meditation study. It has a certain kind of... "Hey, fuck it, let's get up and dance," as well. It engages the body a lot more. And because it has a voice, it has personality. One thing I was trying to avoid for a long time was the idea of personality in music. I wanted to make music that almost didn't sound like music, that sounded like landscape, that invited the listener in by not having a personality. There was nobody in there already. so you became the person in the piece.

But for the last couple of years, I've found myself enjoying singing again and coming back to pop music with a feeling that this is a great music that just doesn't run out of ideas. It has periods where it gets a little tedious, but it revives again.

I know you've listened to a lot of gospel and Arabic music lately. Is there anything else you've heard that might have inspired the songs on the new album?

I can't think of anything in particular, but I've been listening recently to this song called Soon by My Bloody Valentine, which I find very, very intriguing. It really is a new frontier in pop music, I think. It's one of the vaguest things I've ever heard [laughs]. It's very ambient in a certain way, but very strong and aggressive. It's a lot to do with the way they mixed it. Things that other bands might have brought forward, they've buried in the background, so the whole thing is a single wall of sound. The vocals are very repetitive and indistinct. You don't even know if they're singing words or not. It's the closest thing to a pure texture record I've heard for a long time.

You've mentioned that one reason you overdubbed your voice into so many layers on Wrong Way Up was to eliminate a single vocal personality. But aren't you magnifying your personality by however many times you overdub your voice?

That could be a problem [laughs]. It doesn't do that to me. To me, it seems to turn the 'I' into 'we'. And I like that. What I want to do is make texture with voices, make them more like musical instruments, take them away from the function they're always given by critics word-producing machines. I have nothing against words, but think writers always write about them a lot. always think 'Why don't you write about music?' I don't mean, 'Oh God, the guitar's fuckin' great, I mean about structure in music.

What does one type of structure mean rather than another? What does it mean if you mix bass and drums very loud as opposed to very quietly? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself, and it doesn't seem like people who write about it ever do.

The structures on Wrong Way Up are actually quite simple, some songs are built on two chords. It's the way you embellish things that's complex.

Yeah, I've always liked simple structures, I don't want an obstacle course; I want something that just has enough energy to keep itself moving structurally, and then to put in a whole snake pit of things above it. If you go and hear a blues band, they're playing the same song twenty times, the same chord sequence. That allows a lot of focus on how you interpolate the melody and what kind of texture you make with the instruments. The aspects of structure that interest other songwriters don't interest me so much.

But doesn't it also allow people to focus on the words - and aren't you trying to get away from that?

I'm not completely trying to get away from focus on the words. I don't hate lyrics or anything; I just like them to be a proper part of the whole experience rather than making the music a support system for this fucking poem that comes out.

I guess that's a characteristic of rap music, in a way. But I tend to listen to what's going on underneath the rap.

Sure, I do too. What they're saying is completely uninteresting to me, but the way it's put together is very engaging. Nearly all the rap records I've heard, they could have said almost any other words. But I've been listening for twenty-five years to pop records of other cultures where I don't understand the words anyway: Indian or West African or Chinese. I've never really cared what people are singing about. If they are singing in my language, I want it at least to be not stupid - not reducible to simple meanings. It's so depressing when you have a musical situation full of interesting tensions and ambiguities, and stuck on top of that is a stupid lyric which kind of completely deadens the whole experience.

In your press release you say it was an absolute nightmare working with John Cale. Was it really?

No, I'm exaggerating a bit. But it was pretty bad [laughs]. Even though I'm now quite an experienced artist, I still have this illusion of cozy, friendly working situations where people co-operate and have great visions together. That sometimes happens, but you're just as likely to get good results when people curse the shit out of each other and have totally different ways of working. This happened to be one of those types of things.

This record was a bit of a risk for me, because | haven't done anything like it for a long time. ! knew it was possible that just as I had reacquired faith in this way of working I could suddenly wake up and say, "What the fuck am I doing this for? This isn't the kind of music I should be doing. I thought if I didn't do it quickly I would get to dislike it. So I was very pleased that we got it done quickly and it sounds fresh; it doesn't sound like it's been pissed about with and overcooked.

You've also been working on a record where you have a small orchestra try to reproduce the sounds of music generated by your synthesizer. What's happening with that?

I'd like to get it finished for release round about March. I'm working on two records together. The other one picks up on a number of threads that seem to have got lost a bit. One is this mid-'70s West African rhythm playing. what was called 'Afro-Beat' in its time. Another is early-'70s fusion: the Miles Davis stuff around then, Mahavishnu Orchestra, that kind of thing, which I always had a real feeling for but thought was being played by musicians who were too clever for their own good.

Another thread is dance music, so I've been working with some extremely high-powered funk drummers and bass players. And the last thread is space music. I don't mean outer space necessarily; I mean music creating a sense of spaces, different acoustic landscapes. So I'm trying to combine all these things. In my mind I call it 'Juju Space Jazz,' but I'll probably change that name (laughs].

Are you doing any work as a producer?

I might work with Annie Lennox, but I don't think it'll be exactly as a producer. A consultant, you might say. She's been writing some songs for a solo record.

Do you have plans to perform live?

None. I did a performance last year in Japan, but I really don't like it. It's a real waste of time for me. I'm not a skilled instrumentalist. I can sing, but most of the music I've ever recorded is unperformable, or at least didn't result from performances; it was sort of put together synthetically. And to perform it would probably require rethinking it, because performance has different terms and different strengths and limitations. I wish somebody else would do it for me [laughs]. I've never been that attracted to performance, to tell you the truth.