Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Short Ambient Pieces

There are eighteen pieces on Music for Films, nine per side, Eno is the sole musician on eleven of them. In some respects the sound-world is very similar to that of Discreet Music: few events, very quiet dynamics, diatonicism, repetition, gentle washes of synthesizer colors, merging of foreground and background, frequent lack of definite pulse, a sense of timelessness. Here, however, the actual duration of each piece is reduced, often to aphoristic proportions of less than two minutes. The effect, then, is to evoke a series of miniature worlds, each with a set of characteristics involving tone color and melodic and harmonic procedures.

Begin with a dazzling quartz crystal. Fade up to soft focus on a warm bed being made warmer. Soft sighs heard from beneath the covers are transformed into space meows somehow sensed through the windows of a 747. The plane glides to earth, eventually disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle, where you are seductively attacked by the stewardess in Jamaican chainsaw rhythm. She is easily eluded, however, and you swim to the surface just in time to see your purple-haired secretary teaching the switchboard nursery rhymes. The typewriter on her desk retorts with a funky clavinet imitation. You walk out the door and are immediately sizzled by a sunshower. When your eyes can focus again, you’re back at home, staring at your smiling turntable as the needle returns to play the side over again, refusing to reject the record ... If you want logic, go carouse with Kraftwerk.³⁷²

The critical response to On Land – the last Eno solo ambient album to generate much attention in the press – was split along the lines I have already described. Jon Pareles continued his love-hate relationship with Eno’s music and ideas, chastizing him for theoretical unoriginality while grudgingly admitting to being impressed by the music, though longing for Eno to return to the progressive rock style.³⁷³ Mark Peel offered the condescending put-down: “Brian Eno’s ‘ambient music’ is certainly ambient ... but it’s certainly not music ... I’ll bet plants love it. As for me, I’m just going to let it lull me to sleep.”³⁷⁴ George Rush, while rendering an enthusiastic account of Eno’s career, thought that at times, the music “narrowly escapes schmaltz ... In several places he employs the worst B-movie sound effects – the ominous haunted-house drone, bird squawks, and frog croaks.”³⁷⁵ Robert Payes and Glenn O’Brien found On Land’s enveloping environments powerful and satisfying.³⁷⁶

Of Music for Films, Vol. II, released in 1983 as part of the boxed set Working Backwards, Eno explained:

I released the first volume of Music for Films in 1978, and it contained samples of my work, spanning the period 1975-78. This second volume picks up where the first left off, but it is somewhat different in that it contains fewer pieces with a greater average length.³⁷⁸

Eno himself wrote five of the thirteen compositions on Music for Films, Vol. II; the others are collaborations with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno. Seven of the pieces were taken from the Apollo album. The upshot is that Music for Films, Vol. II contains only three new “solo” Eno compositions. It is interesting to note, however, that of the pieces borrowed from Apollo, Eno changes the length of all but one. That is to say, since these pieces are of the continuum type, it appears that their actual duration is incidental. With regard to classical compositions, it is sometimes said that the ideal version of a piece exists in the score, not in any particular performance. Of most of Eno’s ambient works, it may be said that the ideal versions exist on one or more hypothetical strips of magnetic recording tape that go on forever, what we hear on the albums are arbitrarily truncated sections of the ideal versions.

These four albums of shorter ambient pieces may also represent concessions to the reality of the market-place. Out of the hundreds of pieces Eno claims to have made and stored away on tape, how many would the public really be interested in absorbing in versions that went on for twenty minutes or more? Eno has chosen a middle path of releasing a few albums of long pieces that afford luxurious stretches of uninterrupted ambiance, and a few albums that tip the balance toward variety over unity. Furthermore, regardless of the ideal of indefinite length, it does make a difference how many pieces are on a record. Earlier I argued that one of the factors that makes Another Green World Eno’s progressive rock masterpiece is the sheer brevity, variety, and number of individual pieces. With regard to the ambient style, I would argue that an album containing four pieces per side, such as On Land, is bound to be heard in different terms than one containing nine per side, like Music for Films. The terms of listening may, of course, depend to a great extent on the listener – the mode of receptivity he or she is willing to adopt and the level of concentration he or she is capable of exerting. But the terms of listening also depend on the character and absolute duration of the material being presented. Adopting a vertical mode of listening – a disposition of one’s faculties of concentration along the timbral rather than the temporal dimension – is positively encouraged in direct proportion to the length of a piece: only after one has gotten thoroughly used to a piece’s surface qualities of tonality, sound types, overall texture, and so on, can one really begin to appreciate the minute deviations that are such an important part of Eno’s music. Nevertheless, Eno has shown that the ambient style is able to accomodate not only varying levels of attention, but varying spans of duration, from the miniature to the “heavenly.” Concerned with both grain of sand and expanse of space, the composer has created a highly flexible medium.

Leaving aside for now the question of the effect of duration on perception, let us delve further into the musical characteristics of the ambient style on these four albums. Although the collectively-authored compositions share many of the same traits, I shall restrict this discussion to the thirty pieces composed by Eno alone. Texture and timbre may be of the essence in the ambient style, but a few generalized remarks can be made with regard to the style’s use of rhythm and harmony. Although they may appear a bit naked or technical in the abstract, these observations may suggest some of the variety of effects that Eno manages to eke out of a rather severly limited repertory of traditional musical materials.

Of the thirty pieces under consideration, eleven dispense with pulse altogether, the rhythm consisting of a gentle ebb and flow of instrumental colors. (Listen, for instance, to “Inland Sea,” “Lizard Point,” or “The Lost Day.”) Nine have a steady, slow overall rhythm in which the pulse is more or less coordinated amongst the various parts. (“Always Returning,” “Roman Twilight.”) Seven employ an indefinite, fluctuating pulse which typically results from the striking of a bass note or chord at an approximately designated point in time. (“Climate Study.”) Two have a steady pulse in the bass only, with free rhythms in the other parts. (“A Measured Room,” “Two Rapid Formations.”) Finally, one piece (“Patrolling Wire Borders”) manifests two distinct, uncoordinated planes of pulse.

Eno’s most common type of harmonic ploy is to use a repeating chord progression, nine pieces share this trait. Such progressions may be simply alternations of two chords (minor i and minor ii in a Dorian mode in “A Measured Room”, major I and major VII in a Mixolydian mode in “M386”, I7 and IV in a major mode in “Strange Light”), or they may be somewhat more involved (||: I | 6 | bVII | IV:|| in “Patrolling Wire Borders,” or ||: i | iv | i | iv | i | v | VII | VII :|| in “Sparrowfall”). Non-repeating, weak and tonally ambiguous progressions in which the chords are taken from within the range of two keys are found in one or two pieces (“Slow Water”). In another piece, two major chords a whole step apart alternate at a very indefinite, langorous pace (“Events in Dense Fog”). The remaining compositions use static or ambiguous harmonies, sometimes suggestive of chords but just as often consisting of nothing but a drone with seemingly stray pitches drawn from a diatonic pitch set appearing and disappearing overhead. Seven of these pieces (for instance “Aragon” and “Inland Sea”) can be classed as being in the minor mode, though “mode” here emphatically denotes a pitch set only, not a point of arrival or a set of melodic formulas. Three pieces are based on a complex major chord with added notes. (See “From the Same Hill.”) Two are diatonic yet use neither drone nor tertian harmony. (“Sparrowfall [2].”) The rest represent individual tonal orientations: a rotating set of pitches alternately suggestive of an F minor seventh chord and a Db major seventh chord (“Unfamiliar Wind [Leeks Hills]”), a static Mixolydian pitch set (“Two Rapid Formations”), a spare usage of pitches suggestive of the Phrygian mode (“Task Force”), a chromatic, unclassifiable pitch collection over a constant drone (“Alternative 3”), a predominantly Mixolydian pitch set with, however, variable third, sixth, and seventh scale degrees (“Tal Coat”), and a shifting harmonic entity involving a minor seventh chord with a prominent fourth above the tonic and thus open to a quartal interpretation (“Lantern March”: F-A<-C-D + & = C-F-&-E<-Ab?).

Although specific tone-color combinations remain as elusive as ever to capture in words, two principles of texture can be formulated that apply to many of Eno’s shorter ambient pieces: the principle of layering and the principle of timbral heterogeneity. Each piece tends to use a different combination of tone colors or sound-types, striving for a unique timbral identity. The types of sound themselves can perhaps be visualized as falling along a continuum between pure sine tones and pure white noise. But such visualization may be deceptive, in the sense that many of Eno’s tones and noises move and change, they are not static shades of color as seen in a paint catalog, but have an inner life of their own. Take a single note: Eno will run it through his treatments, adding or subtracting harmonics (filtering or equalization), enhancing its spatiality (delay, reverb, echo), altering its attack-decay envelope, adding subtle or wide vibrato (or asymmetrical frequency modulation effects), subjecting it to amplitude modulation – the list of procedures goes on and on. When Eno is finished, the “single note” may be a very complex and active entity. Some of the sound-types Eno uses are recognizably produced by acoustic or electric instruments, though often treated to give them a strange, other-worldly quality, bass guitar, acoustic piano, and electric guitar are probably the most common traditional instrumental sound-sources in Eno’s ambient music.

“Synthesizer” means nothing as a sound-type in itself. Among the classes of sound Eno is fond of producing with synthesizers and tape machines are the following, descriptively indicated: tinkling, glass-like, swooshing, ocean­ or wind-like, complex, irregular, bell-like harmonics, clanking, metallic, water-drop-like, gurgling, jet-plane-like (involving a systematic development or continuous variation of the harmonic structure of the sound), brass-like, string-like, organ-like, and piano-like tones, an array of “beeps and boops” – rapid successions of sounds with quickly changing pitch-profiles and ADSR envelopes³⁷⁹ associated, for instance, with both the Columbia-Princeton RCA Mark II Synthesizer in the early 1960s, and the synthesized “voice” of robot R2D2 in the Star Wars movies of the late 1970s and 1980s, paper-shuffling-like, low-volume, high-density, complex, saturated, aggregative, machine-like, mechanical, “backwards” (sounds with a very slow attack and very fast decay), and animal­ or insect-like – elephants, frogs, birds, mosquitos, crickets. Another class of sounds is those produced by treated or untreated drum machine, but these are present in only a few of the pieces under consideration.

Any given piece is liable to consist of several – say approximately three to seven – distinct, heterogeneous timbral layers. There are notable exceptions to this rule – for instance, the relatively homogeneous blend of organ-like sounds in “An Ending” (Apollo), a hymn-like piece, or the women’s voices of “2/1” already discussed. But by and large, Eno is at pains to select sound-types that will not obscure each other, that will be different enough to stand out from the others and yet preserve the transparency of the total sound. A typical ambient texture might consist of the following heterogeneous sound-types: a very-low-frequency drone with a rich and active set of upper harmonics, intermittent animal-like noises, a few long, sustained, motivically-related melodic phrases of flute-like tones, with pitch material selected from a certain mode, each note being surrounded by a halo of reverberation, and a recurring yet aperiodic water-dropping sound. Nothing here can be confused with anything else, every element will always be clearly audible. It may have been Eno’s desire for a separation of each type of sound which led to a his creation of a number of pieces in which extremely distinct, timbrally unique events occur just once over a more or less constant ambient background. The norm, however, is a continuum of regularly or irregularly spaced repetitions of events or at least classes of events.

Several further points may be noted regarding such layered, heterogeneous textures. First, the atmosphere of each piece tends to be subtly yet decisively colored by a particular kind of drone and/or soft background noise layer. The drone is likely to be in the low register, though tenor and alto range drones are also found, and it is usually on the tonic note, although frequently enough it occurs on the fifth above the tonic, creating a continuous tension, a “six-four” type of effect. The background noise layer is likely to consist of some sort of gentle, pervasive, barely audible swooshing or gurgling type of sound, or some variety of active, treated white or pink noise (white noise sounds like a continuous hiss, with all audible frequencies present, pink noise is white noise with some of the highest frequencies filtered out). The background noise layer usually sets up the impression of immense, oceanic spaciousness – the feeling that the music is located in a large cathedral, the outdoors, or even outer space. Examples of both “swooshing” and “gurgling” noise layers can be heard in “Slow Water.”

Second, aside from the drone or noise layer, which gives a pervading tint to the overall atmosphere, the density of events tends to be low, further enhancing the impression of the existence of plenty of black space around individual sounds. For all their constant, subtle activity, Eno’s short ambient pieces sound remarkably uncluttered, clean, and geometrical. Such a texture of sparse melodic events over a floating harmonic background is used in “From the Same Hill.”

Third, and again augmenting the sense of spaciousness, the use of echo effects tends to be pronounced. Eno has taken full advantage of the development of digital delay equipment, which typically allows independent adjustment of delay time (the time between the moment the signal is input and the moment the delayed signal is sent out), the delay depth (the strength of the delayed signal), and the repeat level (the number of times the delayed signal will be heard). Long delay times, full delay depths, and high repeat levels, particularly when used in conjunction with sounds or pitches that have long attack and decay characteristics, can result in the creation of vast fictitious acoustical spaces. Echo, reverb, and white noise effects are evident in a piece like “Inland Sea.”

Fourth, in many of the shorter ambient pieces, one hears numerous events that are just barely audible. Eno has planted all manner of little quirky sounds in these records, to the point where the attentive listener often finds himself not quite sure if a noise came out of the speakers, from somewhere else in the house, or from outside the windows. The music of the pieces seems to blend by imperceptible degrees with the sounds of the environment – which is, of course, precisely what Eno intended. Listen to “The Lost Day” at low volume for a subtle study of events at the threshold level of perception.

The final trait of the ambient style which should be mentioned is the very low degree of “liveness” of sound that characterizes many of the pieces. There is little if any sense that what we hear on these albums is a performance that has been captured through sound recording. We are presented, rather, with an entirely fictitious aural tableau. It makes no sense to imagine a group of performers playing this music together in real-time – and that is certainly not how the music was made. Our sense of hearing and previous experience with musical instruments tells us that this sound was made with an electric bass guitar, that one with a piano. As to the origins of many other sounds, however, we are not quite sure. Is that a tape of bird-song, an airplane, an organ, a human voice? Or have these sounds been synthesized ex nihilo? The answers are not really relevant, for the total sound is profoundly “artificial,” in the sense of something that has been created by artifice, by the systematic application of human intelligence to a set of sounding materials. The natural habitat of this type of music indeed seems to be not the concert hall, but the art gallery (where the original actions of the artist/performer are hidden from view, divorced from the present by time and space), the public space (where the observer/listener is not constrained to make an effort to actively engage his aesthetic faculties), or the home (where privacy provides perhaps the ideal situation in which to move in and out of the music according to the psychic metabolism of the moment).

A signal of Eno’s impact on and growing stature in the modern art world was the publication of a full-length interview in the prestigious Artforum International in 1986.³⁸⁰ The magazine’s cover featured a striking glossy color photograph of a detail of one of his video sculptures, Living Room: the image of gently shaded rectangles of color on a pitch black background showed the influence of one of the composer’s early heroes, the painter Mondrian, in its geometrical purity. For students of Eno’s music, however, the real bonus of the Artform issue was a new recording, pressed between the pages on a transparent tear-out floppy 33 1/3 rpm disc.

The new composition, Glint (East of Woodbridge), is, at present, Eno’s most recently released recording. Although it shares many of the basic traits of the ambient style, it is tempting to interpret it as heralding a new direction in Eno’s music, hazardous as such interpretation may be at such close range. Glint appears to be composed not so much of cycles of recurring events as of a continuous unfolding of unique events. It also differs from most of the previous ambient music in its greater relative density of events, the higher level of activity. This activity reaches a subdued climax near the middle and then tapers off in a gentle descent – unlike that of the many ambient pieces whose density and texture remain more or less constant from beginning to end. Unusual too are the concentration of pitch material in the middle and low registers, and the dark, Phrygian modality. At eight and a half minutes, Glint” explores a medium range of duration, most of Eno’s previous pieces are less than five or more than ten minutes long.

It is of course impossible to predict the shape of the new musical styles we may yet hope to hear from the forty-year-old Brian Eno. At times he has hinted that an album of a new kind of song may be forthcoming in the next couple of years, although he is evasive on this point, not wishing to raise any hopes amongst his audience of the early 1970s for a return to his progressive rock style. In fact, he is clearly irked by fans who clamor for more “idiot energy” songs. At an Eno lecture at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in early 1988, a member of the audience innocently asked, “Are you still interested in song forms with lyrics, and can we expect any more songs from you in the near future?” The usually loquacious Eno curtly answered, “Yes – and no,” and moved on to the next question.