Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Strange Songs

Eno did not exactly create the strange genre. Precursors of a sort can be found in that perennial presence on the pop charts, the novelty song, of which may be cited examples as diverse as Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers’ “Monster Mash” (1962), Arthur Brown’s inimitable “Fire” (1968) and Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (1966), with its punning “Everybody must get stoned” refrain. There is even a specific “demented” tradition in rock – catalogued, popularized, and celebrated by Dr. Demento for his syndicated radio show, featuring such immortal monuments to musical bad taste and kitsch as “Little Puppy” and “Living with a Hernia.” Analogs to Eno’s strange genre might also be found in nineteenth-century compositions like Liszt’s Totentanz (“Dance of Death”) or in the horrors of expressionist pieces like Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire or The Book of the Hanging Gardens – pieces whose utterly humorless sense of dread in some respects parallels Eno’s strange contributions more closely than does the slapstick grotesquerie of the novelty or demented song.

“Strange” in the sense the term is used here may carry the connotation of the conceptually weird, or it may simply mean highly unusual, highly individuated in a musical sense, the total sound texture owing little to specific generic compositional precedents. It is in the same sense that much of the material on such progressive rock albums of the same period as Gentle Giant’s Octopus or King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic may be classed as “strange.” The conecptually weird and the musically individuated, however, often overlap in the same piece.

Such is the case in “Driving Me Backwards” (Warm Jets). A near-psychotic din is created by Eno’s relentless hammering on a piano that is out of tune (or electronically treated to sound so), the double-tracked vocal (widely used in rock since the early 1960s to add depth and coloration to a single singer’s voice, double tracking here serves as an almost literal metaphor of the schizophrenic personality), the thudding, boomy bass, and Fripp’s metallically treated electric guitar machinations. The lyrics consist of inexplicable, tormented expressionistic outbursts: “Ah Luana’s black reptiles/Sliding around/Make chemical choices/And she responds as expected/To the only sound/Hysterical voices.” Eno’s own exegesis of “Driving Me Backwards,” written some dozen years after the fact, is a model of rationality. He called the song

a mixture of a series of thoughts about controlled existence – the desirability of being stripped of choice if you like ... [The song] has a combination of qualities that would not have been arrived at by anyone else, since it is the product of my musical naïveté on the one hand, and my ability to manipulate extant ideas on the other. In this track as in most of the others [on the album], the musical idea is very simple – there are only three chords, each different from the other by only one note [C minor, A diminished, and Ab major], there are no tempo changes and the tempo [sic] is simply 4/4. I enjoy working with simple structures such as these for they are transparent – comparable to a piece of graph paper and its grids. The grid serves as the reference point for the important information – the graph line itself.³³¹

We are fortunate to have an artist so willing and eager to take us into his workshop, though in this case the contradiction between the strict rationality of the process and the overpowering irrationality of the product may seem extreme to the point of absurdity. Music history, however, shows us numerous composers who have been able to explain and articulate at a very rational level the logic of their techniques – techniques used, however, in the service of a powerfully expressive intent. Alban Berg, with the formidably logical forms and pitch structures of his nevertheless almost wantonly expressionist opera Wozzeck, may be cited as an example.

Not so ferocious as “Driving Me Backwards,” but strange in its way, “The Fat Lady of Limbourg” (Tiger Mountain) is Eno’s contribution to the “spy song” genre that has produced such classics as “Peter Gunn,” “Gold finger,” and “Secret Agent Man.” An air of tongue-in-cheek mystery and spookiness is established through an economical, airy, minimalistic texture in which every isolated musical event can be clearly heard. Single blows on a gong establish a conceptual connection to the “China” theme of the rest of the album, while understated saxophone breaks heighten the low-life atmosphere.

Some of the basic premises of Another Green World as a whole are set out on the first track, “Sky Saw”: active, yet clearly distinguishable instrumental parts, making for sparkling clarity of texture, few words, a simple repeated harmonic framework (||: I | V | bVII | IV :||),³³² using the inverted circle-of-fifths progressions common in rock music at least since Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” of 1968;³³³ and in the realm of tone color, a combination of the familiar and the electronically exotic.

In “Sky Saw”‘s overall texture, in spite of the rock-like rhythmic drive, nothing actually remains constant except for Paul Rudolph’s “anchor bass,” which hits the chord roots regularly in a simple rhythmic pattern. On top of this, the other parts are striking for their constant changes, Percy Jones’s fretless bass playing melodic arabesques, Phil Collins’s drumming never falling into a real “groove,” Rod Melvin’s Rhodes piano hitting notes that are panned rapidly back and forth between left and right stereo channels, John Cale’s violas entering late in the song with downward-careening glissandi, and Eno’s own “snake guitar” and “digital guitar” supplying the indescribably rich, overtone-flexing “melodic” grating sounds that represent the “Sky Saw” of the song’s title.

“Sky Saw” is essentially in variation form, the theme being the four-measure harmonic framework, and the variations consisting of timbral and textural elaborations. Within this scheme, additional formal articulation is provided by the cumulative addition of instruments, rising dynamics, and complication of melodic and timbral interest, all contributing to a crescendo of musical density. Finally, after five instrumental variations, comes the belated entrance of the lyrics: “All the clouds turn to words/All the words float in sequence/No one knows what they mean/Everyone just ignores them.” These words, which comprise the totality of the coherent text, indicate Eno’s growing dissatisfaction with lyrics in general (he was to abandon them in his solo work after one more album of songs, Before and After Science of 1977), while simultaneously embodying his philosophy of lyric-writing, which valued the sheer sound of the words over the semantic meanings of their combinations. In the context of “Sky Saw,” Eno highlights the equivalence of words and music by singing, “All the clouds [of sound] turn to words...,” phrases emerging out of what the listener had suspected would be an all-instrumental piece, and as if to confirm the idea, the text proper is accompanied by background voices singing strings of phonetic, free-associative nonsense poetry: “Mau mau starter ching ching da da/Daughter daughter dumpling data/Pack and pick the ping pong starter/Carter Carter go get Carter,” etc. After the verse are four more instrumental variations. Thus the whole is very nearly symmetrical:

The variation principle, here used in almost classical purity, is one that informs much of Eno’s work, given his overriding concern with color – the “vertical” aspect of musical sound – it is natural that he should find in the variation technique a suitable framework for the working-out of his ideas: the variation form does not get in the way, but readily accepts the content poured into it, sometimes (as here in “Sky Saw”) even proving amenable to the grafting of a quasi-developmental symmetrical form on top of it.

One of Eno’s compositional techniques involves selecting material from his vast library of tapes of his recording sessions and private experiments and working it into new pieces. The “Sky Saw” tapes came in for this kind of treatment:

There are two pieces of mine, “Sky Saw” from Another Green World and “A Major Groove” from Music for Films which are exactly the same track, mixed differently, slowed down, and fiddled about with a bit. I also gave it to Ultravox for one of the songs on their first album. It’s been a long way, this backing track. Listen to all three, and you hear what kind of range of different usage is possible.³³⁴

A completely different approach to the realm of the strange – the realm of the highly individuated composition – is found in “Everything Merges With The Night” (Green World), a song that adopts the harmonic framework of the eight-bar blues, which is repeated six times (the fourth and sixth times without words). And yet there is little else in the song that suggests the blues, either of the original Afro-American varieties or their rock derivatives (though in a sense, of course, this piece is precisely a – very – “white” blues!). The sparseness of texture suggests that this is one of the songs Eno composed as much by subtraction as by cumulation of instrumental tracks. The texture is clear, light and airy, with the various layers working together in contrapuntal fashion without any one overwhelming the others. The elements in this simple yet satisfying counterpoint of layers are: Eno’s voice, Brian Turrington’s bass guitar line, which sometimes doubles the vocal part, Brian Turrington’s piano line and Eno’s strummed guitar chords, which play a few motives heterorhythmically, and two electric guitar parts played by Eno, consisting of long held notes that move rhythmically in tandem with one another, setting up a series of harmonic intervals. The almost child-like simplicity of this succession of different intervals succeeds remarkably in establishing a musical setting of variety within unity. The screeching tone color and sliding attack of the guitar lines is ingeniously offset by the restfulness of the actual lines they are playing: Eno may have been inspired by the guitar work of Procol Harum’s Robin Trower, who often used a similar paradoxical technique – something like Jimi Hendrix in slow motion.

It is probably songs like this that led some critics to speak of a certain “unfinished” quality in Another Green World: to “finish” this song, how easy it would have been to make the guitar and piano strumming continuous instead of stop-and-start, add a drum track, add instrumental solos over the wordless verses. The result of such finishing, though, would be a typically cluttered, undifferentiated, more faceless pop song, and not the economical, justly proportioned, and delightfully minimal piece “Everything Merges With The Night” in fact is.