Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Sounds NOVEMBER 26, 1977 - by Hal Synthetic

ENO

ENO INTERVIEW 01 11 1011
HYPOTHESIS: ENO = UNUSUAL PERSON = UNUSUAL MUSICIAN = UNUSUAL INTERVIEW SCENARIO DATA: REALTIME INTERVIEW - 5 HOURS, LENGTH TRANSCRIPTION IN WORDS - 40,000, WORD LIMIT - 2000, REDUCTION RATIO 1:20.
PHYSICAL CONDITION SUBJECT: SUFFERING FROM ADVANCED PHYSICAL/NERVOUS EXHAUSTION. CONCLUSION: IMPOSSIBLE TO USE STANDARD DATA RETRIEVAL MODE. MINIMAX SOLUTION IS REDUCE DATA TO TWO CORE ITEMS CODED ENO ONE, ENO TWO.
ENO ONE: DATA ON SUBJECT'S NEW ALBUM BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE RELEASED 4.12.77 POLYDOR
ENO TWO: SELF-GENERATED CORE EXPLAINING WHY SUBJECT IS MUSICIAN. START RUN...

ENO ONE

"The Americans built an airbase in Alaska and stationed some Starfighters there which are very complex jets and very difficult to service. It required about ten years to train someone to the degree of knowledge to deal with them. They started by taking their own technicians up there, but those kind of men were already scarce and weren't willing to be drafted there if they could possibly avoid it anyway. SO the airforce decided to experiment with local labour who were Eskimos and found that it took about three months to train them to the same level of competence as their own technicians.

The reason for this was that the Eskimos regarded the jet as one unit in the same way as any kind of folk medicine treats the body as one unit. So, if anything went wrong with part of the Starfighter, they wouldn't just get into it with a spanner and start fixing that little bit but would extrapolate a whole thing about the design of the plane and trace the root cause of the problem in the system rather than just curing the symptom. Now, in Alaska they use Eskimo technicians exclusively.

I know Marshall McLuhan is unfashionable, but he said some good things in his time and for me the most important part of his thesis is that the conditions before and after science are identical - post-industrial and electronic societies are tribal.

I chose the example about the Eskimos and Starfighters because I think this is exactly what happened with reggae. In Jamaica there was no recording situation for a long time except the most crude one of a single microphone which the band stood in front of and played. Then suddenly within a year they had 16-track technology.

Here, there was a gradual upgrading of equipment over a long period from 1, 4, 8, 16, 24 to 32 tracks so we always saw it as a quantitative rather than qualitative development. We never had the sudden insight that it was one unit, in Jamaica they did and treated the studio as part of the music just like the guitars and so on are.

When I heard my first dub record I was tempted to give up, really. I thought it was so advanced, electronic music was kids play compared to it. It was a real use of the technology, partly because it contravened the basic rule of 24 track doctrine which is that you use the 24 tracks to add. Instead, they used the fact that instruments were on different tracks to subtract. The whole process of dub is to just play a backing track and say 'this is what we start with, now what can we do with it?' taking the fabric of the music and taking things out selectively, pulling things out and putting them back in the wrong proportion and so on.

If you want an honest assessment, 24-track technology here has given rise to a lot of shit, a system of doing less with more, quite the opposite of the Buckminster Fuller maxim of doing more with less. There are 24 tracks so they are always used to add this external clutter. On that Jean Michel Jarre album Oxygene there's this track that's quite beautiful for about three minutes when there are only about three or four instruments playing. Then obviously he thought 'Christ, you can't make a record of a few instruments playing a simple melody, it's not good enough' and thickened the sound like gravy by adding all this junk. When you've got 24 tracks you can easily cover all your insecurities and delude yourself into thinking you're adding when you're really taking away.

When I called my new album Before And After Science it wasn't to say that I disregard science, I wish it had never happened because it's a terrible thing. It's saying that science is a technique of sorting things out, but like any technique it shouldn't be allowed to assume supremacy. That's a lesson you learn very easily from music. If you watch people working you see people who are abundantly gifted in technical skill who don't contribute anything and other people who aren't and do.

• • •

Most people walk into the studio with a song and structure that has been predecided and so the studio functions more or less as a transmitter in a semi-passive role. It's simply a way of getting it onto a record. What I did on this album was to go into the studio and a lot of the time start from nothing determined not to foist something on it that would thereby limit its potential.

Typically what I'd do is go in, sit down and start fiddling with something until a sound emerged that I liked and then put it down on tape. Then I'd listen to it and it would suggest something else and I'd stick that on top of it and so on. Then the thing would start to have some sort of quality that I liked that would enable me to dispense with the first track. So quite often most of the tracks you hear worked from going record tracks 1, 2 and 3, erase 1, add 4, erase 2 and 3, add 5 and so on. There was, for example, one track that went through 12 distinct stages starting as a very slow instrumental and ending up as a fast song. I continually reassessed them and said, 'Is this still useful, is that? What's it like without them? Can I get rid of it?'

Compared to nearly everything else I hear at the moment it sounds rather sparse, I can imagine people listening to it and saying it sounds a bit skeletal, reviewers will say its unfinished. You can hear that there were lots of other things I could have done but I did them all at some point and it didn't make them any better.

I learnt this technique from Sly Stone. On his early albums he used to use a very interesting method where he would start with a rhythm box and bass and then would add vocals and horns all playing very percussive roles. Then he would chuck away the first bass and rhythm box track and add bass and drums as the very last item. So the bass player and drummer were not playing rhythm roles because the rhythm had already been invested in the track by what are normally considered the melody instruments.

You see, what happened was that in the beginning rock was structured rather like orchestral music in that you had a hierarchy of events. There were the bass instruments which played constant parts which changed very little; then there were the rhythm instruments, piano and rhythm guitar which were allowed a certain flexibility but not a great deal as they carried the chord information which is a quasi-melodic function; then on top you'd have the lead guitar and the vocals, with the guitar either subsidiary to the vocals or taking the lead in its own little space, this would be the main area of change where most of the information was carried.

So you had this hierarchical ranking of instruments, but what happened quite early is that a current of music emerged beginning with Bo Diddley, which included The Who at some point and extended through The Velvet Underground, who were always experimenting with this ranking system. The Velvet Underground for example used all of their instruments in the rhythm role almost and the singing is in a deliberate monotone which is a deliberate non-surprise so when you listen to the music your focus is shifting all the time because there's no ranking, which doesn't only reflect the internal structure of the music but also the structure of your attention to it.

It's not the extremes of strict ranking and focus or no ranking and disorientation that interest me, but how much of each I want. I want the thing to have a certain amount of 'perceptual drift' where the ranking is being shuffled all the time so at times you're not sure what you're meant to be listening to. This doesn't mean that I go into the studio and sit thinking 'how much disorientation do I want to produce?' It means that I find a level that is exciting to me which later turns out to be a level of disorientation.

The reason this interests me is to do with a theory of art outlined by an American aesthete called Morse Peckham which I found exciting because it was the first one that didn't seem to have to do with some silly ideas about it being the province of civilisation and culture that I couldn't accept.

• • •

One of the interesting things about studying a small amount of anthropology is that you find that all peoples, as soon as they've managed to feed themselves more than a day in advance, start to engage in an activity that you can only describe as art. This gives you the idea that it might well be more than a peripheral concern of culture and more connected to our biological structure.

Human beings, unlike the higher primates like chimpanzees, have successfully managed to generalise their experiences and say, for example, that the stuff that falls out of the sky, that I drink, that puts out fires and that ships float on are all, in a sense, the same. The function of the intellect is to divide the world up into categories of predictable entities that can be dealt with and to establish a code of behaviour that will then be capable of meeting any situation. Of course it can't succeed because when a novel situation occurs it attempts to interpret it using an old set of categories. There are many cases where this isn't important because the detail it filtered out wasn't crucial. When it is you have two choices, you can either go crazy with absolute uncertainty or else 'this is just the same as I've always known it' and retreat.

Neither of those responses seems like a very good solution for living. What you need is to be able to endure the uncertainty and still be able to react. It's Morse Peckham's theory that the function of art is to expose you frequently to a degree of disorientation and uncertainty and to the idea that your codes don't accurately describe the real world. Then, if you're suddenly thrown into situations which you can't face you're rehearsed in this sense of 'I'm going to be uncertain for a while but I can handle it.'

I'd just started art school when The Who released My Generation and I can remember thinking, 'Boy, this is what rock music ought to be doing - a real radical clenched fist shaking you by the collar.' Then after that they brought out a record called Happy Jack and I was really mortified. I thought 'What the fuck are they doing writing silly songs like this, they've really let me down.' So I wrote this really abusive letter to Pete Townsend explaining how he'd sold out and dissipated the vital revolutionary energy of My Generation.

I'm so pleased now that I didn't get around to posting it. At that time I knew that art was capable of changing society in some way, but like the Music For Socialism people I thought that what could change it was the explicit content of the thing which could be bourgeois and reactionary or Marxist and revolutionary. Now I just don't think that's true.

In art, another kind of mechanism is at work which is automatically political. The music itself does the job. The first prerequisite of a work of art is that its exciting, it must interest you, if it doesn't you've failed no matter what else you put into it. The procedure of being attracted into something, surrendering your codes and saying 'I don't know what's happening here' is in itself a radicalising process. The function of art, the reason it exists, the reason we do it, the reason we look at it, is because we are willing to be changed."