Brian Eno: Taking Manhattan (By Strategy) | Red Bull Music

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redbullmusicacademy.com by Simon Reynolds April 25, 2013

From 1978 to 1984, Brian Eno lived and worked in NYC. As celebrated music journalist

Simon Reynolds writes, the music he helped create there has influenced generations.

It could be argued that Brian Eno is the most consistently creative figure in rock history,

someone whose innovation rate over the decades eclipses even that of his shape-shifting

collaborators David Bowie and David Byrne. From his disruptive presence in Roxy

Music to his alternately quirky and contemplative solo albums, from inventing ambient

music to his recent explorations in generative music, its a career that has, well, careered,

zigzagging from extreme to extreme between pop and antipop, between febrile rhythm and

near-immobile tranquility.

Then consider his panoply of partnerships with other artists Devo, Talking

Heads, U2 and John Cale, to name just a few as producer or collaborator/catalyst. Eno is

also a musical philosopher, someone whose interviews, critical writings and sundry

musings about sound, art and culture deserve to be compiled into a book. (His published

diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, was hugely entertaining but didnt capture the full

scope and provocative richness of his thoughts.)

I moved to New York City because there are so many beautiful girls here. - Brian Eno

If theres a golden period for Eno, though, it would have to be between 1978 and 1984, a

period when he lived in New York. Those years represented a surge of music-making,

collaboration and conceptualizing, with Eno burning through ideas at staggering speed. All

through the late 70s and early 80s, New Yorks art scene and music culture were the

climate that stoked his ferment.

Ive got this feeling that I really know New York very well and will be at home there, he

told Disc magazine in October 1972, on the eve of his first visit to the city. I feel there are

two places Im emotionally based in... One is the English countryside, where I was born

and bred, and the other is the heart of New York City. There are perfectly logical reasons

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why Eno would feel a profound attraction to New York. After all, the two biggest influences

on his approach to music, The Velvet Underground and Steve Reich, came from here. Eno

also intuited that London, pop cultures energy center during the 60s, had ceded that

power-spot status to New York by the 70s.

Within a few years of the Disc interview, he was spending extended periods of time in

Manhattan. Then he moved wholesale and made New York his base for over half a decade.

The ensuing period is without doubt the most fertile and impressive stretch of his lifes

work, which included not just music but video art as well. Eno fed off New Yorks border-

crossing artistic energy, while catalyzing and contributing to it. There were also more

playful lifestyle reasons why Eno settled in Manhattan. I moved to New York City

because there are so many beautiful girls here, he told Lester Bangs in 1979. More than

anywhere else in the world.

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Credit: Ebet Roberts / Redferns His first visit in late 72 was with Roxy Music on their

debut US tour. The next couple of trips he came as a solo artist; the second of these, in

1975, was to promote his second solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Eno

was accompanied by Richard Williams, a former Melody Makerwriter (and the first

journalist to rave about Roxy) who had become an A&R man at Island Records. Williams

had heard the buzz about Television, so the two Britons headed down to CBGB to see them

perform. Although Eno at this point had zero pedigree as a producer, he and Williams

ended up working with Television on demo recordings that could easily have turned into a

debut album for Island. But the results failed to capture the fierce majesty of Televisions

live shows. I didnt care for the sound he got on tape or the performance much

either, Tom Verlaine once recalled. The rest of the band felt the same way. So we didnt

finish the album they wanted those demos to be. It was an inauspicious start to Enos

New York period.

Ultimately, it would be not Television but a different CBGB band (also with a TV-oriented

name) who cemented Enos connection to the city. Talking Heads first met up with Eno in

London in May 1977. During this hangout session they discovered many common interests,

both musically and intellectually. Eno played them an album by Fela Kuti and declared

that Afrobeat was the future of music. He suggested that this was a direction he and

Talking Heads could jointly pursue. Later that month, Eno was back in New York, where

he accompanied his friends and intermittent collaborators David Bowie and Robert

Fripp to a Maxs Kansas City gig by Devo, the hot hype of the season. So captivated was

Bowie by their robotic theatrics and angular sound, he took to the stage to announce

Devos second set of the night. Hailing the Akron, Ohio, band as rocks future, Bowie

vowed to produce their debut album in Tokyo later that summer. (Ultimately it was Eno,

not Bowie, who would produce Are We Not Men? in Cologne the following year.) As for

Talking Heads, the first album Eno made with the group, More Songs About Buildings and

Food, was recorded in Nassau, Bahamas. But the mastering was done in New York and Eno

flew in on April 23, 1978 to oversee the process.

I happened to be in New York during one of the most exciting months of the decade... It

seemed like there were 500 new bands who all started that month. - Brian Eno

He planned to stay a few weeks, taking care of some other pending projects away from UK

distractions before heading home in time for his 30th birthday. But New York provided

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plenty of distractions of its own, and it would be seven months before he returned to

Britain. Recalling his first substantial sojourn in New York, Eno admitted to enjoying the

attention he received as a cult figure operating on the cutting edge of rock. Everywhere I

go, people are running up with cassettes, he told Melody Maker in 1980. The first five

weeks I was in New York this time I had 180 cassettes given to me. But he spoke also of

the stimulating conversations he was enjoying thanks to the crosstown traffic between

different fields of art music, painting, theater, modern dance. A common syndrome

experienced by first-time UK visitors to New York is that theyre electrified by the citys

kinetic (and cinematic) energy, then immediately crash into a depressive slump upon

arrival back in humdrum England. Eno refused to unplug.

By the middle of May 1978, he was ensconced in an apartment in Greenwich Village

subletted from Steve Maas who owned and lived in the apartment upstairs and was in the

process of launching the soon-to-be-legendary Mudd Club. The first time I heard of the

Mudd Club somebody said, Enos got a new bar below Canal Street, lets go, recalls Glenn

OBrien, once the music columnist forInterview magazine and host of the New York cable

music show TV Party. Actually, Eno had nothing to do with it, except I think he consulted

with Maas on the sound system.

Through Maas, Eno met Anya Phillips, who was involved in the initial conception of the

Mudd Club. She hipped him to no wave: a cluster of harsh, dissonant, uncompromisingly

experimental groups (among them The Contortions, whom Phillips man aged, and with

whose frontman James Chance she would later become romantically involved). No wave

had emerged with the express intent of making the first-wave CBGB punk bands seem

pass and mired in rock n roll tradition. I happened to be in New York during one of the

most exciting months of the decade... in terms of music, Eno recalled. It seemed like

there were 500 new bands who all started that month. In the first week of May, Eno

attended a five-day festival of no wave bands at Artists Space, a gallery in Tribeca.

Impressed by the musics extremism, he proposed the idea of a compilation to Island

Records focused on the four key groups in the scene: Mars, DNA, The

Contortions and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Intuitively he grasped that no wave was

destined to be a brief spasm of unsustainable intensity that needed to be documented

before it passed.

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Credit: Julia Gorton Eno had plenty in common with the no wavers. Most came from art-

school backgrounds similar to his own. Like him, they approached music-making with a

conceptual mindset and a dilettantes disregard for craft. The New York bands proceed

from a what would happen if orientation, Eno informed New York Times critic John

Rockwell in July 1978, contrasting their approach with that of expressionistic, emotion-

driven new wave songsmiths likeElvis Costello. In another 1978 interview with Creem, he

praised no wave using terms and concepts that he clearly would like to have seen applied to

himself. These research bands take deliberately extreme stances that are very

interesting because they define the edges of a piece of territory, he said. They say, This is

as far as you can go in this direction. No wave pioneers (and even earlier, the Velvet

Underground) generated a vocabulary of ideas that later artists could use in more

palatable ways and that could ultimately become the basis of mainstream pop in the future.

Having that territory staked out is very important, Eno said. You achieve a synthesis by

determining your stance in relation to these signposts.

But although there was a mutual admiration pact between Eno and the no wavers (who

revered their patron for his work in Roxy Music and his solo output), there were big

differences too. No wave was based around an aesthetic of assault and confrontation.

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Lyrically, it stretched from deadpan nihilism (James Chance) and tortured expressionism

(Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus) to explorations of psychotic states (Mars). There was a

huge gulf between no wave and Enos alternately quirky and placid music, especially the

proto-ambient directions he pursued on Another Green World and Discreet Music. Lunch

speaks warmly of Eno today but at the time she made a number of public jibes, describing

Enos music as something that flows and weaves... Its kind of nauseating, she said. Its

like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but its very smooth going down.

Yet Eno-fication is strikingly absent from the compilation No New York. Theres nothing of

the blurry, aqueous sound applied to certain songs on Are We Not Menor More Songs

About Buildings and Food, which clearly bore Enos production fingerprints. [No New

York] was done totally live in the studio, just like a document, says Chance. Mars, the

most forbiddingly abstract of the no wave outfits, benefited from a smidgeon of Enos

studio sorcery: for Helen Forsdale, Eno recalled that he put an echo on the guitar parts

click and used that to trigger the compression on the whole track, so it sounds like

helicopter blades. DNAsArto Lindsay was actually infuriated by Enos hands-off

approach: He was reading some studio instrument magazine while we were recording and

I wanted to throttle him! Lindsay hastens to add that Eno is a fabulous man. He was

generous. I was dead broke, and he was such a gentleman he would call me up and say Ill

buy you lunch. As a relative veteran of the music industry, Eno also dispensed advice:

Lindsay recalls Chance showing Eno a contract that hed been offered by Michael Zilkha

of ZE Records. Brian said, Nobody would sign that but a desperate man. James

immediately signed it!

Brian said, Nobody would sign that but a desperate man. James [Chance] immediately

signed it! - Arto Lindsay

At the end of 1978, No New York slipped out into the world via Islands jazz

subsidiary Antilles to meager fanfare. No wave had already splintered, with most of the

groups heading toward more accessible music. But the record would gradually accrue cult

status, as much for the challenge of getting hold of a copy as for the challenging music on

it. The legend of no wave has swollen over the decades, in part because of intermediaries

like Sonic Youth (as Eno predicted, sort of) applying its innovations to pop and rock music;

the movement has also come to represent a musical moment of uncompromising purity.

No wave which lasted barely two years and whose bands didnt make many records or

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find many listeners in their own time has been the subject of no less than three lavishly

illustrated books in recent years.

In the winter of 197879, Eno went peripatetic, spending time in San Francisco, London,

Montreux and Bangkok. When he returned to New York in the spring to work on Talking

Heads Fear of Music, he had the germ of a new approach in his head: the merger of

hypnotic dance rhythms and found voices. Through immersion in Fela and P-Funk, he had

turned on to the idea of densely layered, ethnofunkadelic polyrhythms. On his Thailand

vacation, he had taken with him a recording of British dialects and become fascinated by

the redundant information in these heavily accented utterances. Regional cadences

meant that the speech contained its own musicality, something that he thought could be

combined excitingly with dance grooves. This merger of found voices and trance rhythms

would become the governing concept for much of the music he made in the next few years,

both solo and in his increasingly collaborative partnership with Talking Heads.

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Eno and David Byrne Credit: Ebet Roberts / Redferns The first manifestation of his new

obsession was I Zimbra, the opening track on Fear of Music. It bore Enos clear imprint,

from the Afrobeat-style percussion to the use of sound poetry (originally written by the

Dadaist Hugo Ball but here incanted by David Byrne). I Zimbra was pretty much the

reprise of what Eno had done on Kurts Rejoinder from his 1977 solo album Before and

After Science, albeit using a different Dadaist (Kurt Schwitters). But it was Fears closing

track, Drugs, that proved to be most prophetic. Talking Heads tried recording the song,

originally titled Electricity, in the conventional way but couldnt get it to work. So Eno

and Byrne took the accumulated takes and effectively remixed the song into existence. We

kind of deconstructed it, tore it down to its basic elements, then built it up again with new

stuff, recalls Byrne. We took instruments out, replayed bits, added other sounds. It

became a mixture of a live band and sound collage, which was what ended up happening

with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light.

Bassist Tina Weymouth acidly claimed Eno and Byrne had merged into a symbiotic unit,

even wearing similar clothes like some post-punk Gilbert & George.

But there was a problem with the studio as compositional tool concept, at least when

applied to a rock band: it empowered the composer (the producer/arranger) at the expense

of the musicians. Eno and Byrnes expanded authorial role on Drugs effectively relegated

the other members of Talking Heads to session-musician status, something that caused

enormous friction on the next album, Remain in Light. The burgeoning friendship

between Eno and Byrne didnt just unsettle the balance of creative power within the band,

it frayed emotional ties. Bassist Tina Weymouth acidly claimed the pair had merged into a

symbiotic unit, even wearing similar clothes like some post-punk Gilbert & George. Byrne

himself talks about the relationship as mutually beneficial and codependent in a way. We

had musical things to gain from one another each one could offer something slightly

different to the other.

Eno expounded on his new theories in July 1979 when he gave a lecture entitled The

Studio As Compositional Tool at the New Music New York festival. Hosted by The

Kitchen, this ten-day event was a triumphant end-of-decade celebration of a varied yet

cohesive movement of downtown Manhattan composers defining themselves against the

uptown classical music establishment (where European-style dissonance still held sway).

Reporting on New Music New York, Village Voices Tom Johnson identified two distinct

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waves of downtown music: the founding minimalist elders (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry

Riley, Robert Ashley) and a new generation forging connections between composition and

popular music (like Laurie Anderson, who used elements of performance art, video, and

electronics; or Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, who deployed amplified electric guitars).

Eno fit perfectly smack in the middle of all this. He was profoundly influenced by Reichs

repetition and use of tape-delay loops, but also embraced dance rhythms, electric noise,

and the sound-sculpting possibilities of the recording studio, just like emerging downtown

composers Arthur Russell, Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem.

Alongside the polyrhythmic groove music he made with Talking Heads and David Byrne,

the other major strand of Enos musical output during the New York years consisted of

idyllic-yet-eerie ambient soundscapes. The Plateaux of Mirror, his collaboration

with Harold Budd, began with the LA-based pianist sending his compositions to Eno in

New York, but the actual recording was done in late 1979 in a studio in Daniel Lanois

studio in Hamilton, Ontario. Around that time Eno also produced Day of

Radiance by Laraaji, a zither player he discovered in Washington Square Park. A spiritual

seeker exploring yoga, tai chi, and Eastern philosophy (he currently holds workshops

in laughter therapy), Laraajis quest for cosmic music had taken a decisive turn in the

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mid-70s when he traded his guitar for an autoharp, which he then adapted and electrified.

He came to believe that metallic chimes bells, gongs, cymbals, gamelan ensembles, and

his beloved zither and hammered dulcimer put the listener in touch with the higher

presences. In Tibet they are used to break up concentration, get you outside linear time,

into a trance state, he explains. Laraaji had been playing in the same spot in Washington

Square Park for a few years, sitting always in the lotus position with his eyes shut, when

one day he opened them to see that someone had left a message in his buskers hat. It was

from Brian Eno and it said Would you like to meet to consider a recording project? he

recalls.

We would hole up and make fake ethnographic records, with the sleeve notes and

everything, Wed invent a whole culture to go with it. - David Byrne

In their post-Eno careers Budd and Laraaji would both go on to make music so tranquil

and gently rhapsodic it verged on New Age. But Plateaux and Radiance Ambient 2 and

Ambient 3 in the series of releases launched by Enos Music for Airports have a certain

uncanny edge. In both cases Enos role largely consisted of creating the ambience in which

the compositions were situated, using reverb, harmonizer and other studio techniques to

smudge the edges of the sound into oneiric soft-focus. Both projects prefigure the

preoccupations that would lead to Enos other supreme masterpiece of the New York era:

1982s On Land.Plateauxs track titles Above Chiangmai, Among Fields of Crystal,

Wind in Lonely Fences speak of Enos mounting interest in creating the musical

equivalent of landscape painting, while Meditation #2, the final track onRadiance, is

based on Laraajis mental image of New Yorks Central Park Reservoir on a moody winter

day.

Another inspirational collaborator Eno hooked up with in 1979 was Jon Hassell, whose

post-Miles, raga-influenced music Eno had encountered when the trumpeter/composer

performed at The Kitchen that summer. Hassells knowledge of exotic ethnic sounds and

his concept of fourth world music (hi-tech modernity meets pre-industrial tribalism)

would be massively influential onMy Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Indeed, the album was

conceived as a three-way collaboration. Byrne recalls all hanging out together, talking and

exchanging records. At his Tribeca loft, Hassell played Eno and Byrne field recordings on

ethnomusicological labels like Ocora. The idea emerged that we would hole up and make

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fake ethnographic records, with the sleeve notes and everything, says Byrne. Wed invent

a whole culture to go with it.

In August 1979, Hassell and Laraaji were both present at the first sessions for My Life in

the Bush of Ghosts. Also contributing to the dense mix of sound was Van Tieghem whom

Eno had seen doing a gizmo-based piece called A Man and His Toys at New Music New

York and two bassists: Tim Wright from DNA and Bill Laswell, then in playing Zu Band

(later to mutate into Material). What was so weird was that at first I thought Id wasted

my money, Eno would wryly comment of these early sessions. I just couldnt understand

it at all. But gradually, sculpting down this barrage of instruments playing all the time,

an audio concept emerged of a jungle music sound, embedded in a spacious widescreen

production hed never achieved before. Profiling Eno for Musiciantoward the end of 1979,

Lester Bangs got advance glimpses of the work-in-progress: It sounds like nothing weve

ever heard from Brian Eno before; like nothing ever heard before, period. The influence of

the move to New York is unmistakable: a polyglot freneticism, a sense of real itching rage

and desperation... It gives intimations of a new kind of international multi-idiomatic music

that would cross all commercial lines, uniting different cultures, the past and the future,

European experimentalism and gutbucket funk.

Working in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while before returning to New York, Byrne

and Eno added an extra element to the mix: alongside field recordings (Muslim devotional

singing, the gospel chants of Sea Islanders off the coast of Georgia), they found themselves

increasingly obsessed with the ranting and raving of talk-radio hosts and evangelists. This

proto-sampling approach would be hugely influential on later sound-bitebased genres like

hip hop and jungle. Whats less well known is that Bush of Ghosts was itself influenced by

very early hip hop more so breakdancing than early rap records. Ironically, this

connection with hip hop would be forged not in New York but when the duo were out in

LA. Brian and I met Toni Basil, a choreographer who later had a hit single with Mickey,

recalls Byrne. She was working with this street dance group theElectric Boogaloos and

was going to do a whole show based on popping and locking. Brian and I thought it was the

most amazing dancing wed ever seen. In a way, some of the music we were making we

thought was slotted for her to use in a television program with these dancers. But it never

happened. Eno thought that the future of video, a form with which he had just started to

experiment, would involve either ambient imagery (close to stationary) or dance (extreme

kineticism). Both would be endlessly rewatchable, because ambient images would become

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like dcor while the fluid intricacy of experimental dance would be so sinuously complex

you could never get bored with it.

Byrne and Enos work on Bush of Ghosts was interrupted when they joined the rest of

Talking Heads during the sweltering hot New York summer of 1980 to start work on the

groups fourth album. Initially titled Melody Attack, the album quickly became a pop

version of the ideas being explored on Bush of Ghosts ideas like the Fela-meets-Terry-

Rileys-In-C approach of having lots of instruments all playing very simple parts that

mesh together to create a complex track, as Eno explained to one interviewer. For

example, there were five or six basses on Born Under Punches each doing simple bits.

Unfortunately this methodology reduced the other Heads Weymouth, drummer Chris

Frantz, and keyboard player Jerry Harrison to raw content generators, producing

material to be assembled into constructions by Eno and Byrne. There was also a kind of

deconstruction of the band itself, with bass parts being provided by people other than

Weymouth. Roles became fluid and uncertain. Even Byrne himself had to change his

approach: rather than go into the studio with written songs, he improvised clipped,

chanted melodies to suit the roiling rhythmic density of the new direction. His vocals

became increasingly percussive, verging on rapping in sections of Born Under Punches

and Crosseyed and Painless. On the shimmering dreamscape Seen and Not Seen, Byrne

abandoned singing altogether, reciting the story of a man who learned to change his facial

appearance by willpower.

Remain in Light was an artistic triumph, but it was also a disaster: pushing for the new

direction and assuming a vastly expanded degree of creative control, Eno irreparably

damaged what he had earlier described as the best working relationship Ive ever had

within rock music. The members of Talking Heads even David Byrne, his symbiotic

other half started to suspect that he was trying to turn to the group into a new Roxy

Music, except that in this case Eno would be in charge, not Bryan Ferry. The inverse ratio

between the creative fulfillment of the band and that of the producer had been apparent to

Eno as early as More Songs. The songs that were least complete going into the studio

came out best for me, he told Melody Maker of that album. Fear of Music was better still

because there were even fewer complete songs at the start of the recording process,

leading to the formation of a group mind, a recording identity with Eno at the

center. Remain was the culmination, resulting in music so complex that its live

performance required the expansion of Talking Heads into a nine-piece.

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Despite his steering role in the project, Eno had his own misgivings about Remain he felt

the album could have been taken much further. Those frustrations would take on a bitter

edge when My Life in the Bush of Ghosts came out within a few months of the

extravagantly praised Remain in Light. (Originally Bush of Ghostswas meant to come out

first, but it got delayed due to sample-clearance issues). Although Bush of Ghosts is now

revered as a groundbreaking classic, at the time it received a mixed critical response,

suffering from a post-Remain backlash and having its thunder stolen by the innovative

Talking Heads LP. Some critics accused Byrne and Eno of being cold-blooded eggheads

and, worse, neo-imperialistic appropriators of world music.

Eno was on the couch reading the English music papers and he had the most downcast

expression on his face. - Michael Beinhorn

One day in early 1981 I arrived at the studio and Eno was on the couch, recalls Material

keyboard player Michael Beinhorn, then participating (with his band mates) in an

amorphous Eno project. He was reading the English music papers and he had the most

downcast expression on his face. The reviews of Bush of Ghosts were out... My sense is that

Brian at that point decided, Im never going to make rock music again. Whether it was as

clear cut as that after all, hed already been making ambient music and ethno-grooves for

years it does seem that the lukewarm response to Bush of Ghosts encouraged Eno to

move even further from song-based pop forms and into atmospheres and soundscapes.

That trajectory reached its pinnacle with the ambient On Land, an album whose genesis

can be traced back to the Material sessions of January 1981.

On the first day of those sessions which took place at the newly equipped studio in Red

Hook, Brooklyn Eno arrived with photographic slides he had purchased that morning at

the American Museum of Natural History. He called me on the way over, asking if I had

white sheets because he wanted to project images on the walls, recalls Materials

soundman Martin Bisi. Eno turned up in a cab with his German friend Axel Gross, whose

rsum includes experimental post-punk projects Les Vampyrettes and Biomutantes, and

promptly set up projectors all around the room. The idea was to play music and record

surrounded by images of animals like impalas and water buffalos. Landscapes too

Kilimanjaro, the savannah.

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The session wasnt very productive. Bisi, by his own admission, was an amateur sound

engineer in those days (he would later become an accomplished, in-demand producer) and

he annoyed the typically calm and mild Eno so much that he hurled a chair. Material

bassist Bill Laswell would ultimately make ambient records himself but his background at

that point was playing in Southern funk bands and he couldnt get into the Eno vibe.

Laswell and Beinhorn are actually given co-writing credits on Lizard Point, but Beinhorn

says, I cant pick out a note that actually comes from me. Maybe its in there as halfspeed

tapes or processed in some way. Most likely the co-credits are Enos way of honoring the

first stirrings of a direction that developed during the month-long session. One thing that

definitely made it onto the record was a tape of frog sounds recorded in Honduras by

Laswells friend Felipe Orrego, heard on Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills).

Beyond musical affinities, Eno had opted to work from the groups base in Red Hook

because of a longstanding inclination to avoid expensive recording studios, where time-is-

money pressure could paralyze creativity. Eno gave aspiring producer Bisi, then only 18, a

months advance, enabling him to equip the place. After that session, however, Eno created

his own workspace in his new apartment, a large loft on Broadway and Broome that he

bought with his girlfriend Alex Blair and their cat Poo-Poo. Although there were other

sessions at proper studios in New York, Ontario and London much of the work for On

Land was done in this mini-studio.

The albums working title was Empty Landscapes. But the African mise-en-scne that was

the backdrop of the Brooklyn session faded as an inspiration, a residue of

the Remain/Ghosts phase. (Eno had even talked to interviewers at the time of wanting to

move to Africa.) Instead, the landscapes gradually took on a decidedly English atmosphere,

a nostalgic direction influenced by Fellinis Amarcord, with its dreamlike re-enactment of

small-town life in 1930s Italy.

Upon its release in 1982, Eno described On Land as an attempt to conjure the atmosphere

of the Suffolk countryside of his childhood: desolate and melancholy, but also familiar and

comforting, a nice kind of spooky. That mood is very much a feature of the environment

where I grew up, he toldMusician. Its a very bleak place and most visitors find it quite

miserable. I dont think its miserable but its definitely a sort of lost place in a lost time

nothing has changed in this part of England for many hundreds of years. His goal was to

create a heightened version of this landscape from memory, partly by using audio tricks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWP7CchR4WQhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarcord

that were non-naturalistic (a 70-second echo, for instance). He titled Lantern Marsh

after a phosphorescent marsh in East Suffolk that he had seen on a map but never actually

visited. Other titles and sounds had actual memories attached to them. Leeks Hills was a

forest in which he used to play, while The Lost Day featured a little bell sound that

worked on Eno like the aural equivalent of Prousts madeleine. On a Christmas visit to his

parents in Suffolk he discovered the reason he was attracted to it and why it affected him

so much: he went for a windy walk along the River Deben and heard the sound of the

metal guy wires banging against the [metal] masts of the yacht. It was virtually the same

sound that hed generated using a Fender Rhodes electric piano played extremely softly, a

sound that tugged at his buried memories with uncanny power. Hence the title The Lost

Day, so close to Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu.

You can easily live in New York and just see the mess of it. I wanted to make it mysterious

again.

Some of On Lands glinting, diaphanous music soundtracked his first major video work,

Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan, which comprised glacier-slow images of

the New York skyline at sunset captured from the window of his downtown apartment.

Both the audio and video reflected a desire to slow down the citys hyped-up metabolism,

to transform New York against its will into a more tranquil and ethereal place. The word

mediaeval was a sideways allusion to an experience of culture shock and stimuli overload

in Chinatown, where his senses were assaulted by strange smells and sounds. Eno decided

that to survive in the city he needed to imaginatively transform the place into something

less overwhelming; after all, he was a Suffolk native raised amid the aloneness and very

slow pace of things that characterized that sparsely populated coastal region of eastern

England. The idea of New York as a strange, medieval, huge complex town in the middle

of nowhere... suddenly made the place tolerable for me. You can easily live in New York

and just see the mess of it. I wanted to make it mysterious again.

Eno had started messing with video back in 1979. His first installation was accompanying

a Frippertronics performance at The Kitchen (Robert Fripp dubbed it video Muzak). The

early roofscape work was also shown at Grand Central Terminal in early 1980 and at

LaGuardia Airport to accompany an airing of Music for Airports. Eno also used a Polaroid

snap of video feedback, created by pointing the camera at its own monitor, as on the

cover for Bush of Ghosts. He was interested in creating video painting: something that

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could be left playing in someones living room, watched inattentively or not at all, working

(like ambient music itself) as a tint in the environment, closer to perfume or incense than a

narrative-based art form. The concept was hatched partly in opposition to how rock videos

had evolved. According to Eno, directors of pop videos misguidedly believed that to make

a thing interesting [they should] put more and more action into it. But that just gives you a

blur, which takes maybe five watches to work out, and after that you dont want to see it

again. My solution to this problem was to take the video away from being a short film, a

little story, and turn it into something beautiful to look at, like a picture.

Recalling Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan in a 1989 interview, Eno said,

Like the music that accompanies them, the films arise from...a desire to make a quiet

place for myself. They evoke in me a sense of what could have been and hence generate a

nostalgia for the future. But in truth they seemed to be more simply a product of

homesickness. While still living in downtown New York and even dabbling a little on

Wall Street after eavesdropping on brokers conversations at the gym Eno was little by

little absenting himself from Manhattan. He started to lead an increasingly reclusive life,

spending most of the day in his apartment holed up in the small studio, which he described

as a sort of sacred space somehow. He would tinker with music, experiment with

perfumes (one of his obsessions), read and think. Picking up on this cloistered

vibe, Peoplemagazines Arthur Lubow described a typical day in the life of Eno as self-

indulgent and monastic, and wrote of his musics drift toward an Arcadian kind of

yearning. Alex Blair spoke of Enos social claustrophobia. He doesnt like sitting around

gabbing, she said.

Back in 1972 Eno had told Disc that hed always been attracted to whatever place on the

planet seemed to be the center of the most tension and energy. London had been that

place; now it was New York. By the 80s, it seemed that all the things he once found so

magnetic about New York the border-crossing conversations, the musical ferment had

become negatives, a form of mental crowding threatening to his own creativity and

equilibrium. His last North American musical projects Apollo: Atmospheres &

Soundtracks, made to accompany Al Reinerts film about NASA and the moon landings,

and The Pearl, made with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois were both recorded in the

relative seclusion of Hamilton, Ontario. There was also a video painting of a nude woman,

shot in San Francisco and designed to accompany his most vaporous ambient album

yet, Thursday Afternoon. Then a burglary at the Broome Street apartment sealed the deal

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of his utter alienation from New York. In the middle of 1984, Brian Eno returned to his

homeland.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in

New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.

Bibliography

Roxy Music interview, by Lisa Robinson. Disc magazine, October 1972.

Odyssey of Two British Rockers, profile of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, by John

Rockwell, New York Times, July 23 1978.

ENO=MC, interview by Lee Moore. Creem, November 1978.

Brian Eno: A Sandbox In Alphaville by Lester Bangs, chapter from his unfinished

book Beyond the Law: Four Rock 'n' Roll Extremists. Written 1979/80, published online

August 2003 by Perfect Sound Forever.

The Studio As Compositional Tool, 1979 Brian Eno lecture, as reprinted inDownbeat,

date unknown.

Eno interview, by Lester Bangs, Musician, 1979.

Eno interview, by Richard Williams, Melody Maker, January 12th 1980.

Eno: The Electric Boogaloo, interview by John Orme, Melody Maker, February 14, 1980.

Eno: Voyages in Time & Perception, interview by Kristine McKenna, Musician

Magazine, October 1982.

Eno profile, by Gene Kalbacher, Modern Recording & Music, October 1982.

Eno profile, by Arthur Lubow, People, October 11, 1982. Vol 18. No. 15.

Eno: Only The Small Survive, interview by Dave Rimmer, The Face, July 1983.

Brian Enos 1986 sleeve notes for the re-release of Ambient 4: On Land.

Thoughts, Words, Music and Art. Part One, by Mark Prendergast. From Sound On

Sound, Vol 4 Issue 3, January 1989.

Robert Quine interview, by Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever, November 1997.

Brian Eno, Tribute to Robert Quine, Perfect Sound Forever, July 2004.

On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, by David Sheppard (London:

Orion Books, 2008)

Header image credit: Marcia Resnick

redbullmusicacademy.com by Simon Reynolds April 25, 2013

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