Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician JUNE 1979 - by Brian Cullman

BRIAN ENO: MUSIC FOR FILMS

A music older than film, or maybe even older than music itself, recalling a past that has not yet occurred.

Brian Eno is a good clear-headed producer, a limited instrumentalist, an adequate vocalist, and a less-than-memorable melodist. He has the credentials of a grand dilettante: since leaving Roxy Music in the early '70s he has recorded nearly as many albums as Elton John, composed soundtracks for a number of films, founded his own experimental record label, and has produced albums for David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, Ultravox, Portsmouth Sinfonia & Chorus (an orchestra made up of "avant-garde artists playing totally unfamiliar instruments"), and more than a few others. So how does he consistently make albums of his own that are this charming and this brilliant?

Eno seems blessed with a natural curiosity, a love for the found object, the unexpected sound. This is a man secure enough in his own world that he is perfectly willing to venture out into other worlds and explore the surroundings, knowing full well that supper (or the key of G) will be waiting for him when he gets home.

Music For Films is an instrumental album of incidental pieces, some from unspecified films that Eno has scored in recent years, and some that might simply be homeless without this context to fit into. There are eighteen pieces, mostly multi- tracked recordings of Eno alone at synthesized keyboards, bells, and chimes, though John Cale, Robert Fripp, Phil Collins, and others make occasional appearances on viola, guitar, percussion, and various etceteras. I use the word "pieces," because none of these are actually songs or melodies, nor are they tone- poems. If anything, they are still-lifes of sound, occasionally still-lifes about the motion of sound. The speed of hearing is slowed down, edges evaporate... notes are sounded but are seldom struck. It gets harder and harder to tell the foreground from the background, to tell the man looking out of the window from the window.

It is hard to imagine actual motion, motion on a screen, accompanying this music... how to imagine someone climbing a flight of stairs, a man getting out of a parked car, a woman tasting sand in an unseen desert accompanied by these strange old musics? These are songs of past action, of remembered action, of imagined action, though not songs of nostalgia (unless it's nostalgia for a past that has not yet occurred).

Years ago, I saw an interview with an ageing sitarist. He spoke at length about his home on the coast of his native India, and of how he would rise early in the morning, go down by the beach and tune his sitar to the sound of the wind and the waves. What do you do, the interviewer asked, when you are on tour and you wake up in a hotel room to the sound of traffic and street-noise? "Very simple," he smiled. "I turn on the air conditioner, and I tune to it."

With that one sentence, he solved his problem of tuning, neatly transcended the idea of "natural" and "artificial," and more importantly threw us back into an animistic world, where everything that has a shape has a soul, has a sound. A seashell pressed against the ear gives back the sound of the sea, but it is not the only doorway there. In the electric world, everything is a doorway.

Eno, of course, never content with the merely transcendent, insists on taking that idea one step further, making it a revolving door. With the supreme arrogance of the innocent and the very gifted, he tries to be the air conditioner and the sitar, to be both the sun and the man sitting on the roof getting a tan.

No one gets a warmer, more resonant sound from a synthesizer than Eno (with the possible exception of The Band's Garth Hudson, who could probably get a 200lb block of concrete to sound not only human, but positively exuberant). We are in the presence of machines of loving grace, and Eno is taking us on a guided tour of their circuits, never pretending that steel is not steel, that electrons are not electrons, but showing just where these machines can and cannot go. The fact that Eno himself is not entirely sure of the boundaries is what makes the tour interesting. Where Iannis Xenakis might turn similar motifs into brilliant mathematical exercises, and where Michael Oldfield or Klaus Schulz might expand them into lush monuments of pomp and musical grandiloquence, Eno seems to follow his ideas as if they were fish, allowing ( more than allowing... forcing) you to watch the various twists and turns that his imagination and his sounds take.

Eno is more interested in the act of invention than in what shape the invention actually takes, which turns out to be his tragic flaw as well as his saving grace. It's a flaw because nothing ever seems quite complete, songs border on magnificence and then end before they resolve. This is a world with no beginnings or endings, where the countries have no discernible borders or weathers, and where it is possible to walk into the water and not even know it. It is almost too easy to be hypnotized by the textures and the half-light of the sounds. It is Eno's saving grace that he never manipulates the situation, never capitalizes on the sheer beauty and expanse of the sounds for mere effect. As a result, he allows himself to be fully haunted by, and in the service of, a music which, in its raw form, seems not only older than film but sometimes older than music.

A SELECTED ENO DISCOGRAPHY - Music For Airports / Music For Films / Discreet Music / Before And After Science / Another Green World / Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) / No Pussyfooting (with R. Fripp) / Evening Star (with R. Fripp) / June 1, 1974 / Here Come The Warm Jets