Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound
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With David BowieBowie, like Eno and Byrne, had a background in the visual arts, his public career has been as much a matter of shrewd manipulation of his ever-changing, chameleon-like image as it has been a musical evolution. His transformations from space-age androgyne to Ziggy Stardust (a “doomed messianic rock icon”),387 to the White Duke (purveyor of funk and disco music to the white masses), to reclusive British expatriate living in Berlin, to straight-ahead dance rocker in the 1980s, have been chronicled elsewhere.388 In all of his manifestations, Bowie has garnered the kind of mass popularity that has eluded Eno, one reason for this is that in his music he has remained closer than Eno to a basic hard rock style. But in their collaboration on three albums between 1977 and 1979, Eno was able to nudge Bowie beyond the limits of rock. According to Eno, Bowie was interested in working with him because he had found himself in a situation where creative ideas were running out. Bowie had heard Eno’s Another Green World and “saw in that an approach he liked.”389 Eno, for his part, had admired Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station. The two got together at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne and set about making Low, which was released in 1977. Low contains eleven tracks, Eno is listed as co-composer with Bowie of only one of them, “Warszawa,” but he was apparently an active contributor throughout. Low may be viewed as Bowie’s Another Green World, except that instead of interspersing experimental instrumentals with rock songs, Bowie segregated the two types on the album’s two sides, furthermore, the pieces are all either strictly rock or non-rock, with no stylistic exploration in between. Side B is the non-rock, experimental, mostly instrumental side. Eno’s musical personality is evident throughout, in an array of metallic and grating sounds, in rhythm-box backings, in the guitar treatments, in the sweeping, string-section-like synthesizer lines. But in general, the music seems very much more Bowie than Eno. Bowie’s style incorporates a penchant for strange harmonic twists of a kind Eno tends to avoid. Moreover, Bowie’s compositions are considerably more “active” in traditional terms than Eno’s tend to be, if not a great deal more linear in a teleological sense: they contain more simultaneous active melodic lines, more counterpoint, more harmonic activity, a greater density of events, resulting in a generally thicker sound texture. Also prominent are such Bowieisms as saxophone and octave-doubled melodies. Eno made the instrumental tracks for “Warszawa” by himself in the studio during a period when Bowie was away for two days. Upon returning, Bowie added the vocals.390 “Warszawa” is a slow, severe, frightening composition based on piano drones and organ-like synthesizer and flute/mellotron tones that set up successions of harmonies quite uncharacteristic of Eno’s solo work. After several minutes, Bowie’s voice enters singing indecipherable words or vocalizations to simple melodies. The whole is very carefully composed, with a great deal of harmonic and structural pre-planning, and shows the influence on Eno of Bowie’s more active compositional style. The whole matter of authorship is complicated in collaborations of this sort. Often, a range of duties seems to be shared by a number of musicians: when there is no neat division of roles (composer, arranger, instrumentalist, and producer), but several people are active in all of these spheres at once, then whose piece it is may boil down to who is paying for the studio time, as Eno has suggested.391 Complex authorial situations arise in many tracks on this disc. “Art Decade,” with whose composition Bowie is credited, is a piece that, if we accept Eno’s word on the subject, he was responsible for saving from the out-take pile: That started off as a little tune that he [Bowie] played on the piano. Actually we both played it because it was for four hands, and when we’d finished it he didn’t like it very much and sort of forgot about it. But as it happened, during the two days he was gone I ... dug that out to see if I could do anything with it. I put all those instruments on top of what we had, and then he liked it and realized there was hope for it, and he worked on top of that adding more instruments.392 On Bowie’s “Heroes” album of 1977, Eno is listed as responsible for synthesizers, keyboards, and guitar treatments, and as co-author of four pieces. One is the title track (lyrics by Bowie, music by Bowie-Eno), a rock-anthem type of song whose desperate theme (“We can be heroes ... just for one day”) recalls both Andy Warhol’s pop proverb that “Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” and the transsexual character in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” who “thought she was James Dean for a day.” The song’s unique sonic character owes much to Robert Fripp’s remarkable sustained three-note guitar obbligato, and to Eno’s background synthesizer noises that sound something like the chugging of an interstellar freight train. Side A of “Heroes” is again all rock, having a sort of futuristic party-dance atmosphere that Eno’s own albums do not. Side B opens and closes with rock numbers, but between them are three instrumental collaborations, leading directly into one another without breaks, on which Eno’s influence is very strong. “Sense of Doubt” is a horrific, minimalistic soundscape with a deep, slow C-B-Bb-A piano motive that keeps returning, under filtered white-noise swooshings and isolated synthesizer chords in A minor, punctuated occasionally by an evil grating sound that can only be described as the yawn of the dead. Bowie and Eno used the deck of Oblique Strategies extensively in the making of “Heroes”, and “both worked on all the pieces all the time – almost taking turns.”393 When they began work on “Sense of Doubt,” each pulled out a card and kept it a secret: It was like a game. We took turns working on it, he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next. The idea was that each was to observe his Oblique Strategy as closely as he could. And as it turned out they were entirely opposed to one another. Effectively mine said, “Try to make everything as similar as possible,” ... and his said “Emphasize differences.”394 “Sense of Doubt” leads into “Moss Garden,” a piece in Eno’s ambient style, featuring continuous synthesizer chords, a high jet-plane sound that repeatedly careens across the field of hearing, and a koto or other stringed instrument providing plucked “melody.” “Moss Garden” revolves around two chords, F# major and G# major, implying a tonic of C#. Finally, “Neukvln” is something like a German expressionist version of the ambient style: dissonant diminished chords evoking a movie-organ atmosphere, saxophone melodies evoking gangster life, and somewhat harsh and un-liquid water-like sounds. Again, Eno alone would not, or perhaps could not, have come up with a chord progression like this.
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