Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound
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- Metaphors and Images
PoliticsEno has never been a political musician in the sense of someone who believes in and tries to put across in music a certain specific program for social change. Even his solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), which is loosely based on a set of picture-postcards of a Chinese revolutionary drama, is not so much a political statement as it is an aesthetic response to a strange, exotic culture – reminiscent of Debussy’s pentatonic chinoiserie in “Pagodas” and other works. As we have seen, Eno was attracted to Cardew’s experimental piece “The Great Learning”, but Cardew’s later, more overtly political music left him non-plussed: “My personal opinion is that the Maoist thing for him is a very big mistake, and it significantly reduced his music.” When musicians become overtly political, according to Eno, they inevitably begin relying too heavily on language, which is in effect a denial of their real mission. Normally, when people become politically conscious in the way that Cardew did, they ... say, “The job of the artist is to radicalize society,” for example, and they say, “How do you do that?” And so then they start thinking, “Well, you do it by this and this and this” – and suddenly, the music becomes like an advertisement for a doctrine.279 Eno believes that “serious political change is always personal.”280 In spite of his enthusiastic work with punk and new-wave groups in the late 1970s and 1980s (and most recently with U2), Eno rejects the more aggressive political overtones of those movements. In 1982, he criticized “post-new-wave” music for its excessively narrow view of human experience, and in so doing directed a barb or two at Marxist sociologists of rock: It’s such an outmoded view, that grows out of that Western academic idea of reducing everything to economics. There is this terrible spurious socialism that affects so many groups but the music actually belongs to another political standpoint altogether – it’s almost a thuggish, power, me, me position which is the real politics of that music, the real message. To me, my decision to work in the way I do has political resonances. The decision to stop seeing yourself as the centre of the world, to see yourself as part of the greater flow of things, as having limited options and responsibility for your actions – the converse of that “me” generation, “do your own thing” idea – that is political theory: and it’s what the music grows from.281 Eno places little store by the dominant contemporary ideology of materialism and acquisitiveness. When an interviewer posed the unwieldy question, “What’s the most overrated idea currently held by western culture?,” Eno responded: Oh god. Well, in my opinion it’s the idea of the free individual. That’s a very overrated aspiration and American society is full of its symptoms. There’s a very limited sense in which people differ from one another and those differences seem to me to be fairly superficial. There are many more ways in which people are similar but the whole accent of this culture has been to stress those differences and understress the similarities. People are encouraged to want their own this and their own that, and led to believe that those external things are all attributes of their individuality and they aren’t complete without them. And such is the basis of a consumer culture.282 For the most part, specifically political issues are avoided in Eno interviews, when they come up, Eno is liable to put them into some much broader context, or, occasionally, to take a point of view that is detatched almost to the point of being chilling. He showed interviewer Frank Rose a scrapbook of newspaper clippings he had been keeping, one headline read “The War of the Satellites: Pentagon Is Developing Defense Measures Against Soviet Hunter-Killer Spacecraft.” This “sets him off,” according to Rose, “on a 15-minute discussion in which he terms the idea of ritual wars in space involving unmanned craft ‘quite interesting.’”283 Taken out of context, such a remark gives an impression Eno did not likely intend, but it is not difficult to guess what he found intriguing about the prospect of Star Wars: space exploration itself, to which his 1982 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is a tribute, the idea of interaction between vast, impersonal, computerized systems, which are likely to produce completely unexpected results, and the idea of ritualized conflict itself, which he had probed, albeit obliquely, in Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Eno is constantly seeking underlying patterns and principles to gain perspective on the facts and occurrences of human and non-human existence. Metaphors and ImagesIn the foregoing I have attempted to sum up some of Eno’s ideas on a variety of subjects, in order to demonstrate the broad scope and content of his world-view. The style of his verbal discourse frequently relies on metaphor and simile – and on sometimes fanciful, sometimes profound conceptions of cross-connections between diverse fields of knowledge and experience. Eno has acknowledged on several occasions that he is more inclined to think in visual or spatial terms than in a strict linear fashion. We have already seen how he thinks of his creative products as ultimately stemming from a few “meta-ideas,” which in turn spring from a very few “meta-meta-ideas,” in a sort of hierarchical web or matrix. He has been known to doodle incessantly while being interviewed, often producing diagrams that he feels express his thinking better than linearly ordered sentences. He has filled volumes of notebooks with diagrams, sketches, lists, tables, ideas, expressions, and what he calls “amateur mathematics.” Reproductions of a number of these notebooks’ pages were published in 1986,284 and he has occasionally hinted that he would like to assemble a collection of his sketches, ideas, lectures, fragments, and graphs into a book intended to be read not from beginning to end but by choosing various possible “pathways” from one section to another. If in his creative work he is free to operate within a spatial or hierarchical frame of reference, he also happily accepts the challenge of framing his thoughts in linear, verbal form, and has found a suitable medium – the interview. For Eno, being interviewed means putting himself in a situation where he is forced to articulate his ideas. A particularly good example of the way in which visual and spatial images and patterns form the substance of Eno’s way of thinking is provided by his account of walking past “an enormous rubber plantation in Malaysia”: It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I thought it strange that they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at one point could I see that. Particular ideas create a point of view that organizes something that, from any other angle, is chaotic. The same is true of memories. You think of your past as a kind of jungle. Suddenly you’ll have what I call a crack in time, where you can see right through the gap to the field at the other end.285 Eno has used an elaborate visual metaphor to illuminate the contrast between the mechanical noises frequently produced by musicians using synthesizers and the kinds of sounds he tries to draw out of them. The typical sounds produced by synthesizers, he says, are like the synthetic designer material formica: elegant from a distance, but rather boring and regular when viewed close up. Acoustic instrumental sounds, and synthesized sounds properly treated, are more like a forest, which is beautiful and complex at any level of magnification: viewed from miles above, from the level of the treetops, each individual tree and leaf, and the microscopic, molecular structure of the plants themselves. “The thing permits you any level of scrutiny. And more and more, I want to make things that have that same quality ... things that allow you to enter into them as far as you could imagine going, yet don’t suddenly reveal themselves to be composed of paper-thin, synthetic materials.”286 Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes Eno’s best ambient music from the vast majority of superficially similar electronically-based pieces in the “space music” genre is precisely this sense of depth and complexity at any number of audible structural levels. (We shall return to this point in Chapter 10.) Another striking and even more extended metaphor is what has been called Eno’s “hologram theory of music.” He begins by describing Samuel Beckett’s Company, a book about 90 pages long printed in very large type. In typical Beckett style, Company contains a few phrases that are endlessly repeated, permutated, said over and over again in slightly different ways. “Once you’ve seen the first two pages, you’ve effectively read the entire book.” This reminded Eno of the Catholic doctrine he learned in school to the effect that the host – the bread wafer received at Holy Communion – “could be broken into any number of minute parts and ... each part was still the complete body of Jesus Christ.” Later Eno learned about holograms, the specially engineered plates that reproduce a three-dimensional image. Holograms, he discovered, were a concrete, physical analog to the doctrine of the host, for when a hologram is shattered, each piece still contains an image of the whole, though it is indistinct and fuzzy. He observed something of the same phenomenon in his study of a series of Cezanne paintings: “You could take a square inch of one of those Cezanne paintings and somehow there was the same intensity and feeling and style within that one piece as there was within the whole picture.” Eno’s conclusion from all these observations was simple, yet it has affected much of his music: “I thought, this is really how I want to work from now on. I don’t want to just fill in spaces anymore ... I want to be alive every stage of doing any project.287 Eno relied on a more down-to-earth metaphor in responding to an interviewer who said to him, “As somebody who is so frequently ‘borrowed from,’ I would think you’d have mixed feelings about new artists doing something that really isn’t new art”: I think of it as compost. If you think of culture as a great big garden, it has to have its compost as well. And lots of people are doing things that are ... not dramatic or radical or not even particularly interesting, they’re just digestive processes. It’s places where a number of little things are being combined and tried out. It’s like members of a population. We’re all little different turns of the same genetic dice. If you think about music in that way, it makes it much easier to accept that there might be lots of things you might not want to hear again. They happen and they pass and they become the compost for something else to grow from [laughs]. Gardening is such a good lesson for all sorts of things.288 Another image from the natural world Eno has drawn upon in explicating his ideas is that of the sea, although, true to his rock roots, he pictures a surfer riding the waves: I don’t just want to see a good idea or a clever use of materials. One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you’re actually out of your depth, where you’re uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you’re generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they’re doing, is the surfing.289 The image of the surfer resonates with Eno’s creative philosophy of “riding on the dynamics of the system” as opposed to making up rigid theories and taking ineffectual actions in attempts to control.
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