Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Sight And Sound SEPTEMBER 2024 - by Sam Davies

BRIAN ENO IN CONVERSATION WITH WALTER MURCH

Gary Hustwit's documentary Eno uses generative AI to create a biographical portrait of the pioneering ambient musician that changes day by day. Here the artist, who has produced David Bowie and David Byrne and written numerous scores for film and television, talks to the sound designer and editor of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The English Patient about the uncanny magic of recorded sound and their shared passion for the art of noise - and silence.

In the mid-1970s, while recording his influential run of solo albums, Brian Eno developed a habit of turning to engineer Rhett Davies at the end of a long session and suggesting they do "the film mix". These mixes would pare away instruments from the day's session, leaving spaces and impressionistic outlines - skeleton songs reminding Eno of the film scores he was increasingly drawn to, and which gave his ears a rest from the clamour for attention in pop melody and production. In 1978 Eno released Music For Films, an LP compiling cues he had designed for unmade, imaginary films. In an early example perhaps of manifesting, almost every track would go on to be licensed for screen use by directors including Derek Jarman, John Woo and Todd Haynes.

Parallel to his career producing Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay, Eno subsequently applied ideas from ambient music (which he had largely defined the sonic terms of with his late '70s and early '80s Ambient series of LPs) to soundtrack contributions for Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, Danny Boyle, Michelangelo Antonioni and documentaries such as Al Reinert's For All Mankind (1989), Sophie Fiennes's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) and Gary Hustwit's Rams (2018), as well as TV projects, including his Bafta-winning theme for Top Boy (2011-23).

It was collaborating on Rams which gave Gary Hustwit the idea that Eno himself could be his next subject. But Eno itself only took shape - and won its subject's co-operation - when Hustwit found an engine to drive the film in the direction of two other Eno passions: generative music and a considered use of chance. The result reimagines the standard biographical retread of the artist documentary, instead taking a deep stack of material (interviews, archive film and video) from across Eno's career, shuffling it, and presenting a new edit to the viewer on each screening. Audiences will be able to watch a different iteration of Eno each day on its UK release: one day it may feature Eno documenting the early '80s 'no wave' scene on the Lower East Side; another day less no wave and more of Eno's video art or his contribution to David Bowie's 'Berlin' trilogy.

To discuss Eno, and matters arising - generative art, musique concrète (which employs recorded sounds as musical material), silence on film, Dogme 95, AI and more - Sight And Sound brought Eno and Walter Murch together for a specially convened conversation. As a student at USC's film school in the 1960s Murch gravitated towards sound recording, working on classmate George Lucas's debut THX 1138 (1971), before bringing a counterintuitive brilliance to the sound design and editing of Francis Ford Coppola's decade-defining run of films from The The Godfather (1972) through The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), for which he won his first Oscar. After directing Return To Oz (1985), he won two further Oscars for sound and editing on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), and oversaw the 1998 restoration and re-edit of Orson Welles's Touch Of Evil (1958).

Their conversation took place via video link between Eno's London studio and Murch's Californian home.

Walter Murch: I saw the documentary last night and enjoyed it very much. I love the whole concept of generative art. The 'long now' that continues long after we have left the scene.

Brian Eno: Long gone.

WM: And the general idea of leaving things for the audience or the listener to fill in from their own experience - that's certainly been my experience in working in film. Because when you turn all the knobs of cinema up to max, it can simply crush the imagination of the audience with its power. So, what I have tried to do in my corner - and I tend to gravitate towards films that do this - is find places that allow ambiguity to happen, where it's not quite clear how something can be resolved. The subconscious of the audience, each individual person, realises this problem and fixes it with something from their own experience. And that kind of pulls their experience into the film. The miracle is that they actually wind up projecting this idea on to the screen. So they see something different than the person sitting next to them, slightly. And it means that they feel the film is talking to them. It's all about finding places for this - escape valves from the medium itself.

BE: This is something I'm interested in as well. Some of my most powerful experiences have been with radio dramas. In fact, the most frightening thing I ever heard in my life was a radio drama. It was for exactly that same reason, I created the terrifying creature in the film all by myself, just given a few cues from a voice. It was a BBC afternoon play, The Rocking Horse Winner. It absolutely terrified me. But the other thing that makes me think of is that T.S. Eliot quote where he says, the poem the reader reads may be better than that the writer wrote.

WM: Yes. An example from my own experience is the murder of Sollozzo and McCluskey in The Godfather. Francis [Ford Coppola], and Nino [Rota], the composer, had decided to have no music anywhere in that scene, to save music for the moments after the murder, and yet it needed something.

I grew up in Manhattan, not far from where that restaurant actually is. I knew that part of the world was full of elevated trains, and they make a wonderful screeching sound - it's musique concrète really. So I built that sound to come and go during the scene and to bring it to a maximum in the moments just before the pistol is fired. Yet nothing that you're looking at has anything to do with that sound. Except for the audience's imagination of what's going through Michael Corleone's mind at that point.

That's a good example of that kind of ambiguity - why are we hearing this sound so loud? Well, because this man is not only about to kill two people at close range, but he's going to kill the dream that he told his girlfriend at the beginning of the film, which is, "I'm not part of this family now."

BE: What do you think, Walter, about the Dogme 95 school of not using music, except where it occurs as a natural part of the scene?

WM: Yeah. If you want to really set an audience on edge, don't use any music at all. Because it throws the audience back on themselves in a sense. The Wages Of Fear, the [1953 Henri-Georges] Clouzot film, doesn't have any music except at the very, very end. And it's all about - when is this nitroglycerin gonna explode? Even if you brought in music that was going to heighten the fear, that music is kind of like your big brother putting his arm around you to scare you. You're scared, but it's your big brother, you kind of know him. Whereas when there's no music, you're on your own.

BE: Yeah. That Dogme thing is a little bit dogmatic, but it produced some really interesting results. Sight And Sound asked me if I would choose some films from this century that I liked, or that I liked the musical approach of. So I was thinking about that this afternoon, and I remembered one, Woman At War [2018]. It's an Icelandic-Ukrainian film. I don't know if you've seen it?

WM: I haven't. That's a fascinating combination.

BE: It's a great combination, and it's a really amazing film. What they've done with the music in that is, occasionally you hear music and then the camera moves a little bit, and you realise there's three musicians playing. So it's a spin-off from Dogme, I think, from saying, "OK, if you want to see how the music is made - here it is."

WM: I think that there's also a scene in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles [1974] where as a joke they do that - there's a moment of tension and the camera pans over and you see the band.

BE: That's good.

WM: But that was the physical reality of early film, before there was any multi-tracking, before mixing. So, The Jazz Singer [1927] and those things, the orchestra was right there and everything had to be perfectly balanced because there was no way to fix it. We hadn't yet invented the idea that you could have multiple tracks and change the balance between them.

BE: So that changed in music recording in about the late '40s. Did it change in films at that time as well?

WM: Yep. Les Paul and Mary Ford did some of the first multi-tracking, country and western stuff... Jean Renoir, the French filmmaker, he was Dogme before Dogme. He thought that any tampering with what was recorded on the set at the time was... he said, if we were living in the twelfth century, people who did this would be burnt at the stake for preaching duality of the soul. Because the [dubbed] voice is separate from the face that is making the voice. So I'm doomed, because I do this all the time.

I had been already experimenting with tape recorders from 1953, '54 on, discovering that you could record something, then cut it up and paste it back in different orders. I came back from school one day, turned on WQXR, the classical station in New York, and there were these sounds coming out of the radio that sounded like they had been stolen from my tape recorder, and I thought, "What is this?" So I captured it on tape and listened intently, and it was the [experimental composers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer's] first Panorama Of Musique Concrète. There was a sound in there that sounded like a woman who had been trapped inside a glass bottle. And I was fascinated: how did they get a human voice to sound like it was coming out of a small bottle?

Ever since, my ears have been very attuned to resonances. The sound of my voice in this room, which has mostly bare walls, would be different if I was in the living room next door. So I always try to capture that on film, not only to make it more realistic, but also that gives you the power to invert it. You can have people in a cathedral talking with no reverb at all, and that has an effect. Or you can have somebody in a small room, and their voice sounds like they're inside a cathedral. And that's another one of those ambiguities - the audience says, "Why does it sound like this?" All subconsciously, but it's having an influence on them.

BE: I didn't get hold of a tape recorder until I was sixteen. I had fantasised about them before, and I had asked my parents to get me one, but they couldn't afford one. But I was completely intrigued by two things. First, the idea that you could stretch time - you could slow things down. That seemed to me the most magical thing you could imagine. And secondly, that you could invert time. I just thought, "I want to hear everything backwards." I even learned to talk backwards.

WM: Can you do any of that now?

BE: Eelbarborp. That's 'probably' backwards. I can do it, but it sounds a bit funny. So when I got hold of a machine where I could start doing those things, I knew that this was my instrument, that that was how I could do music. I couldn't play any conventional instruments, but this was just at the time that synthesisers were starting to appear, shortly after tape recorders. And that was the world I entered. It was a lucky choice because there were no rules for the music in that world. I was as well equipped as anybody else in the world to work in that medium.

I usually read the script, talk to the people making the film, and I produce a sort of Chinese restaurant menu of music. I produce a lot of music, and then I say to the sound editor or the sound designer, "Here, try some of this." And they then try it and fit it to the track, and they might come back and say, "We've got a problem here, it doesn't quite work there." So I'm not really a film score composer in the normal sense. I depend very much on there being an intelligent sound editor there to do quite a lot of the work for me. But there is something else behind that as well, which is that I generally don't get asked to make the kind of films that would want really highly synchronised music. And I don't like making that kind of music anyway. I'm slightly anti-Hollywood in that sense, in that it just tires me out. It exhausts me to watch films that have so many edits and so many perspective shifts in such a short time.

WM: Silence is a useful way of subverting [the image], unanticipated silence. You can take whatever the sound environment is away and leave the audience in this strange place, where they have to figure out why there is no sound. You have to be careful because if you do it slightly wrong, they think the projector broke, or there's a technical issue. There's a great Bála Balázs quote about how to use silence in film: "In silence... objects seem to look at you with wide-open eyes." Cinema is the first art to really grapple with the possibility of long silences. In silent films, it was never silent, there was always music going along with it. But sound came along; now you had the opportunity to invert the expectations of the audience and have silence where they thought there should be sound.

BE: That's an interesting thought, that cinema is the first artform to actually make use of silence in that way. I'd never thought about that. The other thing is that sometimes to create the feeling of silence, you have to have some sort of sound to remind you that the projector hasn't broken down, that you are still in a place. Those kinds of sounds are interesting as well, the hum of a fridge or something like that.

WM: We had a similar silence problem in The English Patient where people are in the desert and there is no sound other than maybe wind. But if there's no wind, it sounds, in a weird way, artificial. So we would modulate the silence with tiny, tiny sounds. We would joke saying, "Oh, I want just the sound of grains of sand rubbing against each other," or tiny little weird unidentifiable insects that are not really perceivable as such. But they took the edge off the kind of the brutality of the silence that you actually hear when you're in the desert.

BE: They draw your attention to the fact of that silence. They say to you, "Your ears are still working, you are just in a very quiet place." There's something Buñuel said: "Every object obscures another." I've taken that as a sort of dictum all my life. Every new sound you put into a piece of music is standing in front of another one, every new object you put in covers something else up. This is the premise of minimalism in a way. Don't put too much in. Let the thing stand clear. And this is why I probably don't do that many Hollywood films. Because they want a lot of stuff in the films. Always.

WM: That's right.

BE: Value for money. You know, "We're paying you all this money and you're only giving me two piano notes?"

WM: I enjoyed the generative editing in Eno. On the other hand, I would have to watch it again in another iteration to really appreciate that because as I was watching it, there would be these places where the film would have a seizure, so to speak, with all of the text and graphics - and I thought, "Oh, that's probably the signal for one of the generative moments." I'm partial to the idea. We tried to do this on Apocalypse Now Redux [2011] when we were adding scenes to Apocalypse Now [1979]. We thought, "Let's do a branching version of the film that is different every time you watch it, some kind of DVD thing" - but the technology of the time wasn't up to it.

BE: I know there are scenes at the beginning and end that are common to all versions, but I think everything in the middle - the other eighty-five per cent or so of the film - is variable. So if you watch the film six or eight times, you probably see most of what was in it. Though you might not see it in the same order, which is interesting to me as well.

One of the things I like about the film is that it doesn't follow a chronological sequence, it jumps back and forth. I usually really hate films about artists. I can't think of more than a couple of good ones. You are always given the impression that the artist has this vision and it's all planned out in advance, and all they've gotta do is produce it. Nobody I know works like that. Everybody is improvising the whole time. And it's very difficult to get that sense of improvisation into a film. You almost can't help creating a narrative structure that looks like cause and effect, cause and effect. Whereas what you were talking about, Walter, this branching, is so much more likely to be what happens. Just sheer luck: one day I got into a train where I met so-and-so, who then asked me to join a band; another day I didn't get on to that train. There's so much complete randomness within a life. And the film shows that quite well.

WM: Oh yes. I have generally followed the principle of lots of preparation, then you jump off the cliff and allow chance things to happen. And you're happy to do that because you've done your preparation. It's that peculiarity of the human brain that we can understand more of a foreign language than we can ever speak. So when we're working on something, we're trying to listen to the work: what does it want to be? Chance allows you to hear different juxtapositions that you haven't imposed on the work. Because when you do that, you're speaking to the work and telling it what to do.

BE: Yeah. There's that thing that Louis Pasteur said: chance favours the prepared observer. You have to be ready for it. And Picasso said something similar as well: inspiration happens, but it has to find you working.

WM: That's it.

BE: I've been working with AI-like software for quite a long time actually, and particularly with Markov chain generators, which are very interesting ways of creating sequences of language. They can generate books and libraries' worth of language for you, but then you have to go and find the bits that do something interesting. So there's a lot of human input and engagement in it. And if there isn't, in my experience, ChatGPT and Dall-E and those various drawing programs are astonishing when you first see them and boring in about half an hour. You very quickly start to notice that they have a style. If you try to get poetry out of it, it's always kind of Hallmark. This might change, but so far to make it interesting, you have to be pretty much part of the process. It's not automatic.

WM: There's a variation on this in terms of new technology. People who were listening to early recordings in 1927 said, "I cannot tell the difference between this recording and reality." We listen to those recordings today, and we just hear an old 78rpm, you know? So what is it that allows us to think momentarily, this is unbelievably real, when we're seeing a new technology? It's that moment which we're experiencing with AI, where we're experiencing this new technology for the first time, and our eyes and ears are excited.

BE: I think I have an explanation for this. Thomas Edison wanted to show the first gramophone, and he hired Carnegie Hall and had a big curtain across the stage, and behind the curtain was a pianist at a grand piano and a gramophone with a piano record on it. A lot of the audience said they couldn't tell the difference. Now, you and I would easily be able to tell the difference, but if you've only ever heard a grand piano and not any copies of it, anything you hear that sounds a little bit like a grand piano in your mind must be a grand piano. You don't have another category. It's only after listening to lots of copies, lots of pianos, that you realise that isn't a single unique sound in the universe, that the other versions of that sound probably mean it isn't a real grand piano, it's something else. That's exactly where we are now with AI. We are still sort of stunned that it can do anything at all that's slightly human thinking. So we don't notice the difference yet.

WM: I think you're right. A counter example to that, interestingly, was the novelist Maxim Gorky, who was a young reporter in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. The Lumière brothers came to town to show their stuff and he sat in the audience and an image appeared on the screen, a street scene in Paris. And he wrote, "I've seen this before." Then it flickered to life and everything started to move, and he immediately got depressed because, he said, it's been drained of colour and it has no sound. So despite seeing this miracle of motion photography, he fell into what we now call the 'uncanny valley', which is something that simulates life, but doesn't quite go far enough.

BE: That phrase is interesting because I think we at first don't recognise the uncanny valley, but when I'm working with the AI systems I've played with in the last couple of years, I quite quickly discover I am in the uncanny valley. At first I think, "This is interesting, this is nice." And then I think, "Oh, shit, I'm in the uncanny valley again, and I want to get out." The other problem with AI-generated stuff is that there is no intentionality there. This is the problem with truly random material as well. Truly random isn't a very interesting place to be for very long. We are pattern seekers. We like patterns, and we like to create or think we are finding connections that are meaningful. If the connections are truly random and you start to realise that, it loses interest somehow.

I mean, I work with randomness more than most composers, but it's a technique for getting somewhere new that is meaningful to me. It's not a kind of god in itself. John Cage was so fascinated by randomness that that became the whole point of some of his pieces. It's just, for me, a way of getting somewhere new. I keep throwing the dice until I get a combination that works. I don't throw the dice and say, "Oh, that's the sacred ritual done. Now I'm stuck with that." I'm pragmatic about it, really.

WM: I love what you were talking about, Brian, in the documentary, that the age we're living in - this huge expansion of human potential, simultaneous with these looming crises that are happening on the environmental and the political level - is a challenge, let's say, for everyone. Particularly for artists, because what can we do? How do we respond to that? Can we make any difference or is there no difference? All of those questions are desperate but fascinating at the same time.

BE: Well, just up the coast from you lives a friend of mine, [the tech visionary] Stewart Brand. And one of the things he says, which I really like, is, "We are as gods and we better get good at it." We are as gods and we're fucking bad at it.

WM: [The writer H.L] Mencken said it's impossible to conceive of an all-knowing, benevolent god, a single God, but it's very easy to conceive of a board of gods who are all arguing with each other about what should happen.

BE: Yeah. That's kind of where we are. We can change the future in dramatic ways, and in fact are doing so. But we are also less responsible than we've ever been. If you think of our ancestors, they had to think about the future a lot more than we have to. They had to think about how things were gonna be for their crops, their children and so on. And most of us don't have to do that. Somebody else is dealing with that problem. We are the great specialists. So you could spend your life playing with sound, I can spend my life playing with songs. And we outsource every other thing, getting food, finding shelter, our health - everything - to other brains. Our great strength is that we can do that. Our great weakness is that we've stopped thinking about the consequences of what we do, because we think somebody else is looking after them.