Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician NOVEMBER 1993 - by Ted Greenwald

BRIAN ENO: TAKING THE RECORDING STUDIO BY STRATEGY

Where the conceptual meets the practical

"I HATE PHOTOGRAPHY!" Brian Eno fumes. "It's a total intrusion. It's all based on some 19th-century idea about the romance of the artist's personality. Artists are fucking tedious people, and people should realize that sooner rather than later!"

Eno is having something of a tantrum, albeit a quiet one - perhaps the only kind one might expect from one of rock 'n' roll's great thinkers. In a career that spans textbook rock stardom as a founding member of Roxy Music, production work for some of the most respected names in the business (U2, Talking Heads, Bowie, John Cale) and a string of solo records that recontextualize the basic materials of pop, Eno is often identified with aloof abstraction, with arcane concepts and "oblique strategies." But as much as anything, it's sober practicality that characterizes his approach to production, tempered by an extraordinary enthusiasm for aural adventure. Eno is a master of creative problem-solving, finding ways to satisfy material constraints of budget, schedule and instrumentation while introducing creative vectors that tend to explode the artistic scope of the project at hand.

Once dismissed by a prominent critic with the aphorism, "sometimes still waters don't run so deep," Eno is, at the moment, proving himself neither still nor remotely shallow. He is simply annoyed. The crux of the matter is that he loathes photo shoots. They feed the music industry's obsession with personality and lifestyle, obscuring the truly interesting aspects of artistry: the ebb and flow of ideas, processes, sensual experiences. And, one suspects, they bog down an otherwise productive day: While he has little use for photographs, Eno keeps recordings of every interview he gives. They make handy fodder for a book he's been writing.

Having proposed a compromise that would have allowed him to avoid sitting for the camera - the photographer, he suggested, could snap away while the interview is in progress - he has just learned that the shoot will happen separately, in another suite in his posh lower-Manhattan hotel.

"Why is everyone so bad at this sort of thing?" Eno sounds genuinely pained. "It's all so simple. I said I didn't want photographs as a separate thing. Now they're going to be - but they aren't, because I shall leave soon" - the interview/photo shoot is sandwiched between breakfast and a recording session with Laurie Anderson - "so there won't be any photos, unless he does them soon."

It's difficult to square this disdain for photography - for rock 'n' roll iconography - with the fact that Eno is a visual artist of some distinction. His installations, which he refers to as "quiet clubs," have been shown in fifteen countries during the past decade, and a few years back he undertook a tour of lectures that dissected Marcel Duchamp's infamous appropriated urinal, Fountain. In fact, the visual arts do much to inform his understanding of music, especially given his legendary self-description as a "non-musician."

"If you go into an art gallery and look at the work of any twenty contemporary painters," he points out, "you'll see twenty different ways of dealing with surface. Some will be ultra-glossy, sleek, flawless, with no sense of brush or human touch; some will be extremely rough, with tin cans and cigarette ends stuck on in great globs of glue. The range that visual artists work with is much greater than that of musical people.

"But I believe this will all change very soon. For instance, we're now used to seeing, on television news, film shot with home video cameras. Not only are we used to it, but we trust those images more than the ones that are more glossy - they seem more like reality, whereas the other did in the past. I believe this will also happen in music. And I think it is happening. Certainly the movement called 'grunge' represents a change. It's a shift toward confidence in things that apparently haven't been through the studio filter, the technical mill, to turn them into something tamer."

This fascination with the unmediated creative event can be heard in his recent production work for erstwhile Brit-pop dandies James. "Their previous album Seven was a bit of a mess," Eno observes. " It took seven months to make, and it was really overcooked. There was no freshness to it." Like U2 during the making of Achtung Baby and Zooropa and, more recently, Canadian chanteuse Jane Siberry during When I Was A Boy, James invited Eno to throw a spanner in the works.

The producer's solution was to overload the band, to have them make "a very long album in a very short time" so that they would become absorbed in the big picture rather than obsessed with the details. "I got them to accept six weeks as the recording period for what I said should be fifteen to eighteens songs," he recalls. "Then, as soon as I realized they might actually be able to do it, I thought I'd better up the ante a little bit. So I suggested making two albums."

Not a two-record set, not a pair of complementary releases à la Springsteen and Guns N' Roses, but two records of entirely different conception, designed to sound as though they were created by entirely different bands. Record One is Laid, a dreamy collection of neo-folk-rock meditations. Record Two, currently untitled and scheduled for release later in the year, is a spontaneous invention, a suite of in-the-raw improvisations (right down to the lyrics), their tracks processed by Eno's gizmos in a series of one-take mixes.

The producer refers to the latter record as "the jungle version" - the tropics, you know, where there's such a lot of variety and all of these little life possibilities being tried out. By the time it gets to the northern hemisphere, it's settled into a few successful modes. So they're sort of northern hemisphere and tropics, the two records.

"As far as I was concerned," he continues, "the culmination was that the two records would come out together, to show the very exciting possibility that a band can encompass both of these directions at once. I was so excited about this idea. I thought it would be a real coup for James because they would have gotten so much press. And it would have been so controversial. Some people would have loved one album and despised the other." Alas, the idea proved a bit much for James' label, Polydor. "I argued and argued for this," he laments. "But record companies are so incredibly conservative about this kind of thing. Such stupid conservatism.

"Somebody's going to do it one day," Eno adds with a certainty most people reserve for discussions of politics or religion. "And then all the record companies are going to be doing it - you watch. For a year everyone will be bringing out two albums at once, and it will become incredibly brave to bring out just one!"

But for the time being, entrusting Eno with a prize artist must be regarded as an act of bravery for any self-respecting record company. Although his creative indulgences strike pay-dirt at least as often as not - witness U2's The Joshua Tree - his mission is to prod artists into taking risks, an attitude that rarely sits well with record company executives.

"I always make sure to meet with the record company at the beginning of a project," he explains, "and I suppose it frightens them a bit because I always say, 'Look, it's about time these people changed direction. They've got to do something different. There's no use in them carrying on doing what they've been doing.' And, of course, people are always a bit unnerved by that because the past, even if it hasn't been that successful, is at least reliable. But I don't have an enmity with labels or anything like that. I just think that the process stamps out imaginative moves, because nobody really wants to take responsibility for a failure."

As it happens, that's something Eno is perfectly willing to do, and do in a big way: "If you're going to fail," he insists, "it's best to fail very, very badly.

"I'll tell you why: Because a real failure cleans the slate. You're fresh. You can start again. Actually, that was the way James felt after Seven, and the way U2 felt after Rattle And Hum. This is often the point when people want to work with me.

"I often think that my job as a producer is to persuade people to put their confidence in new places. Everyone else - the record label, the public - is going to encourage them to put their confidence in old places."

When it comes to going new places, one major route is Eno's stock-in-trade, familiar to anyone who reads the small print on his album jackets: "treatments." Treatments is Enospeak for processing recorded tracks in any number of ways, from standard digital effects to complex patches involving analog synthesizers and tape loops to piping sounds through plastic hoses in order to take advantage of their resonant properties.

Lately, one of his favorite vehicles is the Eventide H3000-SE UltraHarmonizer. "One of the things I've been doing with that is take one instrument, preferably a percussive instrument of some kind," he explains, "and send it to a series of very short tuned delay lines, so that I can change it into a pitched instrument. Then I can control the pitch, so I can introduce a sort of chord sequence via the kick drum, or something like that."

Eno is a wellspring of similarly convoluted notions, most of them developed during solo projects such as 1992's Nerve Net, which he regards as "R and D" for production gigs. What isn't generally recognized is the extent to which his production techniques depend on psychology and astute observation of the creative process, rather than high tech.

"I often take extreme positions in the studio," he says. "I try to push opinions as far as I can, even to the point of saying, 'This is potentially the best piece of music I've ever heard in my life! And here, next to it, is possibly the worst.' It gets people's blood going, gets them fighting to defend something. I want to find out what they really want from it, what they like about it, what they believe is special about it. If you can figure that out, you might be able to take that aspect and get rid of all the baggage that's coming along with it."

There's a knock at the door. Eno stops in mid-sentence as an assistant pokes his head in to remind us of the impending photo shoot. This occasions more grumbling, but Eno is a good sport. One gets the impression that he had hoped the interview would slip into overtime, leaving the hapless photographer empty-handed.

Upstairs, he poses graciously and does his best to continue the conversation, taking time out occasionally to inform all concerned that he's due at a session momentarily. Considering the studio clock will soon be ticking whether he's present or not, Eno is remarkably calm.

Perhaps he's become accustomed to needing to be in two places at once. "I've started to enjoy the idea of having two studios going at once," he says. "We do it always now with U2. That way, somebody can get left alone to focus on something without having to worry about other people waiting, and the others don't sit around getting bored." Another benefit is the opportunity to step into a new piece of music after hours of working on the same piece. "It's like a whole new world," he marvels. "You can hear all sorts of things that are obvious after you've been listening intensively to something else. 'Oh, that bass is the wrong part. It's obvious!'

"Using more than one studio also means that people walk into something in lots of different moods," he continues. "They don't all stay on the same song all day and get in the same mood. You get people walking in saying, 'God! You should hear such-and-such! It sounds fantastic!'"

But the most common (and the most insidious) challenge arises when it's time to record the lead vocal - for which the words invariably don't yet exist. "That's always the bottleneck," he states. "Everyone I know has this problem: Bryan Ferry, U2, Dan Lanois, James, Peter Gabriel - now there's a lyrics bottlenecker if ever there was one. When it comes to the lyrics, suddenly it's bonk! Everything stops."

The sudden loss of momentum prompts everyone to busy themselves with pointless overdubs while the words are gestating. "It's all down to the singer, so nobody else can really do anything," Eno observes. "The studio is booked. You feel a fool just sitting there doing nothing, so you start dicking around with the material. And, you know, even the best songs get tiring after a time. So you start putting on a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and it gets what I call 'Hollywoodized.' It gets this cosmetic sheen to it, with all these little bits and pieces that really don't make any difference."

The key to uncorking the lyrics bottleneck, he says, is to "separate lyrics from vocals. They are not the same thing. There are all sorts of things you can do with voices other than tell stories. And, in fact, the singers who are interesting are not the ones who tell interesting stories. They're the ones who articulate interestingly.

"What's the difference between one blues singer and another?" he poses. "Articulation and timbre. Blues, basically, is twenty-five million people singing the same song. What one is hearing is not the lyrics - they're trivial except for a few flashes here and there. It's timbre, the actual way of developing sound as a statement, and articulation, the way one person jumps between perfect fourths and another does Arabic undulations and so on. By focusing on those issues and putting the lyrics in the back seat, you find that they follow along. You stop thinking of the lyrics as things that have got to look good on a piece of paper.

"Pardon me, but I have musicians waiting," he interjects sharply for the benefit of the photographer, who is snapping his final frames.

The photo session behind us, we're in the back of a taxi cab barreling up Broadway. "I try to create a climate where people feel happy to change their minds, and not embarrassed that they've defended something for two weeks and now they're going to drop it." Eno enunciates for the benefit of my tape recorder, leaning forward so that the sound of the engine doesn't drown out his voice. "Nonetheless, I want to make decisions as early as possible, because the biggest problem with recording is dealing with the huge number of options. That's why records take so long. Quite early on, I want to cut a lot of those possibilities out so I won't be needing to fix it in the mix."

Eno looks up. "Is this Canal Street? I'll get out here." The cab pulls over as he slides across the seat and out the door. Before closing it, he offers a vague nod. Then he's off, with hardly a goodbye or a backward glance, dodging across the crowded Manhattan street on his way to another day's work.