Brian eno his music and the vertical color of sound

Systems of Composing

Eno has a reputation for being extremely busy all the time, even when not in the studio, he is likely to be experimenting with instruments and tape recorders at home, tapping and banging on found objects to see what they sound like, or recording environmental noises on a portable cassette recorder. The vast majority of the music he has made has never been released on record, in 1983 he estimated that he had about seven hundred pieces stored away on tape, some of which he’d made alone, some of which were leftovers from studio sessions with other musicians. “People would probably be surprised to know my own rejection rate of my work. I must produce a hundred times the amount of music I release.”²²⁷ Evidently putting sounds on tape is far from enough, judgement has to intervene at some stage of the game. One reason Eno saves so many of his sketches, however, is that he is aware that his judgement may change at some point in the future, or that his ear will pick up something on an old tape of which he had not been aware at the time: “Later on you may suddenly realize that there was a secret concern that you weren’t consciously dealing with, but which actually dominates the piece, and that concern might be the most interesting one.” On the other hand, “Sometimes I do things and I know they’re just absolute crap. There’s no point in wasting storage space with those, so those go.”²²⁸ In some sense, then, composing is a near-constant process for Eno – a process that is not always suffused with inspiration. In 1985 he said:

It’s a practice of some kind ... It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. It’s not terribly miserable. It is occasionally for me, but not very often. And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly ... And that seems to be the process.²²⁹

Moments of true inspiration are rare, and their arrival cannot be predicted, Eno has been no more successful than others in trying to coerce his muse to speak to him, but he has found it worthwhile, during the long periods of the muse’s silence, to maintain a state of preparedness:

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. There’s no point in saying, “I don’t have an idea today, so I’ll just smoke some drugs.” You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another.

A lot of factors go toward creating a work: technological considerations that suddenly are a little exciting to you, some feeling or mood, a nice day, you just had a talk with a friend. All sorts of things will coincide – and that moment doesn’t last for long. It’s like things in orbit, they’ll move away again.

The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently – once or twice a year, or even less.²³⁰

For Eno, then, there is much that can be done at a conscious, day-to-day level to enhance one’s chances of coming up with good creative work. In 1980 he stated his belief that imagination and the ability to think independently were things that “you can work at developing,” mentioning that he’d read several books by Edward DeBono and William J.J. Gordon on the subject of ways of prompting creativity. Eno contends that “the process of creating isn’t largely spontaneous: “There are lots of ways that you can interfere with it and make it more efficient.”²³¹ Although Eno’s music does not depend on a high level of instrumental musicianship, his conceptual and practical mastery of the resources of the recording studio and the synthesizer constitute a different kind of craft. He puts it succinctly: craft “enables you to be successful when you’re not inspired.”²³²

Eno is unusually aware of the ebb and flow of his creative energies, and often does specific things in order to influence them one way or the other, such as taking a break from a taxing project:

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing Something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake workwise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.²³³

Even with the application of various techniques of promoting the creative process, it is a day-to-day struggle:

There are some days when my confidence level is so high that I can make anything work. Particularly if you work without a group, as I do, you really need a lot of energy to push something through those first stages, where it’s just a rhythm box going “bump-titta” and a piano going “dum, dum, dum.” I mean, that doesn’t sound terribly interesting, so maintaining the conviction to keep going, in the hope, or in the trust that it’s going to turn into something does require a lot of application. And some days I just don’t have that.²³⁴

The sensation of being engaged in an interesting process, and the attitude of expectant attention as to where it might lead, are central to Eno’s experience of composition. He occasionally puts the whole matter in simple terms: “Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off as just being good fun.”²³⁵ As for specific methods of composing, or making individual pieces of music, his most systematic statement on the subject was in 1978, when he outlined five distinct approaches. The first involves keeping a microcassette tape recorder on hand at all times and recording any stray ideas that hit him out of the blue – a melody, a rhythm, a verbal phrase. Periodically, Eno will browse through the thousands of fragments to “see if any of them fit together.” Those that do may be worked into a preliminary “demo” and stored in his tape library for future use. The second approach is entering the recording studio with no particular ideas, taking stock of the available instruments and equipment, and perhaps hiring a couple of instruments he has a yen to use. “Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture.” At some point in this process, the overall sound-texture may suddenly suggest a geographical location or evoke a childhood scene to Eno, and from that point on the image gains the upper hand in guiding the development of the composition.

A third way of working is from deliberate non-musical constraints, for instance by saying, “Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it’s going to have changes here, here and here, and there’s going to be a convolution of events here, and there’s going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it.” Sometimes Eno uses graph paper when working like this, since it tends to be a visual process for him. The fourth approach is the kind that typified the studio sessions for his progressive rock albums: Eno would “gather together a group of musicians who wouldn’t normally work together” and generate ideas from the unexpected interactions between them. Finally, Eno says he has “also worked from very mathematical and structural bases, but in general that hasn’t been so successful.”²³⁶

When asked in 1985 what his first steps were in beginning a piece, Eno approached the issue from a somewhat different angle, outlining three forms of motivation. The first is practical: if he has accepted a commision, for instance, he has to start worrying about the piece because he is obliged to. “The second is arriving at it from an intellectual position of considering what I’ve done, sifting through and rearranging it, and trying to include more. That’s designing a piece of work and saying this is the kind of method I’m going to use.” The third way to initiate work on a piece is to play around with something specific, whether that be something concrete like a new piece of equipment or a more abstract entity like a particular modal scale.²³⁷

Images of partaking in a natural process – of watering a garden daily, of riding on the dynamics of the system, of letting oneself be led rather than pushing, of writing music by interfering as little as possible – abound in Eno’s discussions of his creative work. Clearly this whole idea owes much to Cage and his chance operations, his ideal of letting the sounds be themselves, but it stops short of the Cageian ideal of writing music that is completely untainted by history and personal psychology, for as we have seen, Eno has quite specific compositional aims, specific emotions he wishes to arouse in the listener, specific geographies to evoke. Active judgement and discriminating listening are very much part of Eno’s approach, no matter how much he simultaneously tries to adopt the attitude of an onlooker. There is an active interaction with the growing work of art, but in this interaction the artist’s will and aggressively creative intentions should not predominate. In most of his creative work, Eno perceives two phases, pushing and letting:

Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop. You don’t know what to supply. And it’s at that stage that I will pull one of the cards out.²³⁸

This brings us to one of Eno’s most curious inventions, the deck of Oblique Strategies, subtitled Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.²³⁹ The deck, which Eno developed and produced in collaboration with his painter friend Peter Schmidt, is a set of oracle cards modelled philosophically on the ancient Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes.²⁴⁰ While still in art school, Eno had taken to formulating aphorisms to aid him in the creative process, to give him a new perspective on working when he would get bogged down in specific details, unable to maintain a large perspective on what he was doing, and thereby losing a sense of his creative options. During the Roxy Music period, he wrote these down on cards he placed around the recording studio. It subsequently developed that Schmidt had been doing much the same thing, with a little notebook he kept for the purpose. When Eno and Schmidt compared notes, it turned out that many of their aphorisms were substantially identical. They decided to put the aphorisms on stiff paper the size and feel of playing cards and to market a limited edition of 500 copies in 1975. Several thousand were sold in revised editions of 1978 and 1979, after which it was decided not to produce any more. The deck comes in a handsome black cardboard box with gold-embossed lettering, and contains the following description and instructions:

These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

The short messages on the cards are varied, evocative, and often intentionally cryptic. Some examples, randomly chosen from the deck: “Would anybody want it?” “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” “Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do.” “Only a part, not the whole.” “Retrace your steps.” “Disconnect from desire.” “You are an engineer.” “Turn it upside down.” “Do we need holes?” “Is it finished?” “Don’t break the silence.” “What are you really thinking about just now?”

The aphorisms are remarkably well-crafted in the sense that it is easy to imagine how each one is applicable to any stage of or particular problem arising in the course of the creative process. Eno consulted the Oblique Strategies extensively in his creative work of the mid­ and late 1970s, and may have continued to do so into the 1980s, though he has not talked about it in interviews in recent years. Random selection of a card and reflection on its message often provided fresh and unexpected resolution of a compositional quandary.

The I Ching was a partial inspiration for the deck of Oblique Strategies, Eno called the latter “an attempt to make a set that was slightly more specific, tailored to a more particular situation than the I Ching, which is tailored to cosmic situations, though I suppose that with sufficient skill one could use the I Ching in the same way.”²⁴¹ Eno pointed out that it was not necessary to believe that anything supernatural or paranormal was taking place in the use of the Oblique Strategies in order to derive creative benefits from using them: “you can believe that they work on a purely behavioral level, simply adjusting your perception at a point, or suggesting a different perception.”²⁴² The concept behind the Oblique Strategies fits smoothly into Eno’s overall empirical, in-studio compositional approach: the aphorisms enabled him to get beyond his linear thinking process, especially in the early, formative stages of a work, and provided an aura of a sensation that he was indeed riding on the dynamics of some greater system that logic alone could not penetrate.