CHAPTER ELEVEN: COLLABORATIONS

With Robert Fripp

It takes many words indeed to describe a musical process that, once heard, is immediately and intuitively grasped. Side One of No Pussyfooting is a twenty-one-minute piece called “The Heavenly Music Corporation” made in one take, using the process described above, with Fripp providing the motivic input and with Eno “playing” the tape recorders – determining the rate of the layered motives’ march into oblivion, creating new acoustical room when necessary or desirable, and adjusting the density or saturation of the timbral space. Contrary to what one might hear in a superficial listening, there is nothing mechanical about this process. Fripp and Eno needed to be in creative synch with one another in order to build, tinker with, and dismantle, in real-time, the musical structures we perceive.

“The Heavenly Music Corporation” begins with a single sustained note on electric guitar that is looped back on itself to form a continuous drone. After a time, upper harmonics, notably the fifth and minor seventh, begin to emerge. Listening to this drone, the mind’s interpretive mechanisms are apt to undergo changes. For a period, we are bound to hear “just a long note,” and impatiently wonder what, if anything, is going to “happen.” But after a certain point, given the lack of obvious musical activity, we become aware that the single note is an incredibly complex entity in itself: that it is not staying the same at all, that there is rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre wrapped up inside it – that, in short, it is vibrantly alive, and does not need anything else added or changed to be enjoyed, to be experienced musically.

After several minutes, more things do start to happen in a conventionally musical sense. A slow, concentrated, intense guitar melody emerges, phrase by phrase, consisting of isolated notes, short motives, glissandi, or longer linear improvisations. Some of these phrases are allowed to enter into the signal loop, becoming “accompaniment” on their recurrences, at other times, the melody becomes a “solo,” detached from the loop, just riding a crest on top of the palpitating mass of sound. The only consistent pulse in “The Heavenly Music Corporation” is of the length of the signal loop, and at about three seconds, this is rather too slow to perceive as a pulse or beat in the traditional sense: it is more akin to the experience of breathing than the heartbeat.

The harmony of the piece is not functional, nor is it particularly triadic, it is based, rather, on the totality of tones that are prominent in the waves of sound at any given moment. The closest term for this kind of harmony in traditional music theory would be “pandiatonicism.” As in Terry Riley’s In C, however, the tonal center and modal type shift over periods of time, here from F# dorian to A major, finally settling into D major towards the end. Within this general tonal framework, Fripp feels free to borrow notes from outside the prevailing modes: scale degrees three, six, and seven in particular may be played in their natural or flatted (minor) forms. Given the retention, in the loop, of many previously heard tones, maneuvering the overall modal impression takes considerable skill – it is a bit like steering a battleship.

Although the tonal architecture of “The Heavenly Music Corporation” must be credited to Fripp, who supplied the pitch material, Eno himself was to use pandiatonicism and the drone idea extensively in subsequent works. If there is a major conceptual difference between this piece and Eno’s later extended works, it has to do with teleology. This piece develops, however slowly: it has a definite beginning (the drone), middle (characterized by rhapsodic guitar solos), and end (a long cadential section marked by a repeated and varied slow glissando to the tonic). Eno’s later extended works, to the contrary, tend to be non-developmental or cyclic.

In a number of other important general ways, though, “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” as a system, anticipates Eno’s own ambient style. First of all, the piece is a system, or process: it represents a way of making music, a concept of music-making, as much as it represents a composition in the traditional sense. The process allowed Eno to operate in his favored gently guiding, rather than authoritarian role. Making the piece required thought and attention, Eno had to contemplate and inspect the sound as it rolled by, making changes and adjustments. The process, meanwhile, yielded maximal output (a lengthy, complex piece of music) from minimal input (selection of pitches and switches). Finally, the signal-loop procedure itself, with its gradually decaying tone quality, exemplified one of Eno’s cherished axioms: “Repetition is a form of change.”

Eno has explained the title of “Swastika Girls,” the long piece that comprises Side Two of No Pussyfooting:

I was walking to the studio one day and there was a piece of magazine someone had ripped out from some porno film magazine, I guess, and it showed a picture of a naked girl with a swastika on her arm giving a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute ... I stuck it on the console and we were just kind of vaguely looking at this and talking about this as we were recording that piece, and so that became the title.³⁸³

“Swastika Girls” was recorded in two days at Command Studios in London, about a year after Eno and Fripp made “The Heavenly Music Corporation” in Eno’s home. If it is less successful than the earlier piece, it is because of the much greater overall saturation of the acoustical space: continuous fast guitar picking on a single chord (E major with added sixth and ninth) and an incessantly busy synthesizer sequence present the backdrop for Fripp’s metallic E-lydian melodic guitar lines. There seems to be a perceptual rule that possibilities for appreciation of timbral subtleties decrease in proportion to the rate of actual notes being played. The frenetic quality of the accompaniment on “Swastika Girls” shows that Eno and Fripp had not yet understood the full weight of this principle, it would be nearly a decade before Eno was able to formulate it simply and elegantly – “Every note obscures another.”

The second side of Evening Star consists of a very long Fripp/Eno composition, “An Index of Metals,” recorded at Eno’s studio with much the same straightforward tape signal-loop apparatus as “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” but with Eno providing input from a synthesizer in addition to Fripp’s electric guitar input. Seen in the context of Eno’s ambient music as a whole, “An Index of Metals” is remarkable for two factors: its high dissonance level and its developmental nature. Insofar as it consists of tones (as opposed to noises or unpitched percussive sounds), Eno’s ambient music tends to be very consonant, providing a restful ambiance – even if sometimes tinged with an undercurrent of tension or melancholy. In “An Index of Metals,” the sense of a sinister, intense ambiguity found in many of Eno’s strange progressive rock songs comes to the forefront. It is as dark and foreboding as “The Heavenly Music Corporation” is contemplative and rhapsodic, and it acheives this effect largely through heavy, close dissonances.

Some of the highlights in the piece’s strategy of continuous development or continuous variation may be sketched out here. It opens with a high, metallic-sounding, ringing Eb-G diad, possibly strummed quickly on guitar strings. Like the drone that opens “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” this ringing sound is timbrally complex, with a great deal of inner motion. After about three and a half minutes, some dissonant, complex guitar-produced noise – resembling mosquitos or metallic butterflies – suddenly enters, and is looped. The tonal situation becomes very uncertain, and the timbral balance shifts from tone to noise. About six minutes into the piece, a characteristic sustained, fuzz-tone Fripp guitar melody enters, playing individual notes that become part of the loop. Around the middle of the eighth minute, an F-B tritone predominates the harmonic proceedings, which develops into a dissonant F-B-C chord, a couple of minutes later, E and Eb have been added, raising the level of dissonance to even greater heights. The maneuvering of the atonal battleship continues in this general manner, with emphasis on minor seconds and tritones, until during the twentieth minute of the piece a fade-down takes place, the existing signal loop being allowed to run its course with no new inupt. Eventually, the ringing sound from the beginning comes in again in a more complex form – so complex that it is difficult to make out individual pitches – and becomes the most prominent feature of the texture. From about the twenty-sixth minute to the end some three minutes later, little or no new input is added, but Eno adjusts and manipulates the long fade-out of the looped signal, which, owing to the analog nature of the process, becomes ever more noise-like, gradually losing high frequencies and general tonal definition.

In all, “An Index of Metals” is bound to strike the listener not so much as a musical development as an almost tangibly sculptural process, Eno and Fripp using electronic tools to give shape to the invisible black marble of silence. During this period, they occasionally gave live performances together of music that sounded much like what we hear on No Pussyfooting and Evening Star. The rock press paid less attention to their collaborations in this vein than to Fripp’s work with King Crimson or Eno’s solo rock albums. One critic wrote a sympathetic review of a Fripp/Eno performance at the London Palladium in June 1975 that included the comment:

There was such variety in the textures created that, depending upon the degree of individual concentration, one could focus on one of any of the levels of sound patterns. One therefore became a participant in the creative process, creating through individual selection individual compositions for oneself, rather than blindly accepting an already well-defined and regulated musical formula.³⁸⁴

Fripp was to undertake a global tour in 1979, performing alone in small venues and record stores with his guitar and two tape recorders set up as Eno had taught him, he would repeatedly stress the importance of the audience’s creative listening contribution.³⁸⁵

In 1973, Fripp’s reputation and standing in the rock press and among a large following in Great Britain and the United States was, if controversial, already firmly established through a string of diverse and original King Crimson albums. For Eno’s budding career, the release in the same year of the contemplative No Pussyfooting and the frenetic Here Come the Warm Jets was a risky move, but one that set him on the eclectic course he was to follow. As he explained,

The difference between those two albums created a kind of confusion about my image, which my managers bewailed. But it proved to be the best move I could have made – and it was quite by accident. It put me in a position where I don’t have to be consistent. I can start each record anew, without having a trademark.³⁸⁶