Brian Eno's Another Green World
Read Brian Eno's Another Green World Online
Authors: Geeta Dayal
Another Green World
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Another Green World
Geeta Dayal
2009
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80, Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
33third.blogspot.com
Copyright © 2009 by Geeta Dayal
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-2786-1
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai,
India
Printed in the United States of America
To my grandmother, Shanti Duseja,
who taught me everything I know
about cooking and gardening
8 “Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor.” / “Don’t be frightened of clichés”
10 “Remember those quiet evenings” / “The tape is now the music” / “Gardening, not architecture”
Preface
A few years ago, I thought it would be fun to write a short book on Brian Eno for the Continuum 33 1/3 series of music books, and that fateful pact I made weighed on my psyche like a ten-thousand-pound albatross ever since. I wrote, rewrote, and threw out the entire book more than once. I tested out different approaches. Every idea fanned out into ten other intriguing ideas, and eventually I found myself enmeshed in a dense network of thought. Finally, I realized I had to conceptualize the book in a more linear way, or risk never being finished.
I used a deck of Oblique Strategies cards—originally released by Brian Eno and his friend, the late artist Peter Schmidt, in 1975—to help me make key creative decisions while writing this book. Sometimes these cards led me in intriguing new directions. At other times, the cards reinforced my tendency to
procrastinate. “Do nothing for as long as possible,” was one particularly seductive instruction. “Overtly resist change,” read another card. “Don’t break the silence,” read another. Sometimes the cards kept me in stasis; at other times, the cards sparked radical changes. One night, I drew a card that read “Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate.” In response, I tore up an entire chapter I had been working on and started over, which may or may not have not been the best idea at the time. Some of the other cards seemed to taunt me. “Is there something missing?” one card beckoned. “Is it finished?”
Other cards were more useful. One particularly helpful oblique strategy was “Work at a different speed.” For some chapters, I cogitated endlessly, laboriously chewing over the subject matter and getting very few words down. After I drew that card, I attempted to write down my ideas extremely fast, at an almost breakneck pace. This broke me out of a mental rut. Another creative obstruction I faced while writing this book was the intimidation factor. I cursed myself for agreeing to write about Eno, particularly about a storied record that was nearly 35 years old, with the whole dusty weight of history attached to it. “You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas’’ and “Trust in the you of now’’ were some of the strategies that encouraged me to continue.
“Take a break,” read one card. I stopped thinking about
Another Green World
for a little while and read about other things that interested me—cognitive neuroscience and physics, for instance. The U.S. elections. Film and video: I inherited an old video projector from 1995, aimed it at one of my slanted ceilings, and used the hazy flicker of old videos to light my 200-year-old apartment in Boston at night. I read both volumes of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
cover to cover and taught myself about béarnaise sauces and soufflés. I attempted to master passages from Horowitz and Hill’s classic
The Art of Electronics
in parallel with the art of French cooking, in the interests of balance. (I finally learned how an op-amp worked, after avoiding the subject like the plague when I was a student at M.I.T. years ago.) I re-read Jane Jacobs’
Death and Life of Great American Cities
and Stewart Brand’s
How Buildings Learn
. I took up cycling, and would go on long bicycle rides to clear my head.
Then, after a dark and dreadful New England winter, I felt rejuvenated, inspired. There were roses blooming on my block on vines so massive they looked like grand old trees. The community gardens in my leafy neighborhood were in full generative swing. I felt inspired by doing interviews; I felt inspired by being able to think about ideas again, and that process of discovery. Part of it, too, was that I began to
see connections grow organically, nodes in the circuit where ideas met. I could sketch mental schematics that were going someplace interesting.
Part of my problem at first was that I wasn’t that interested in writing a standard rock biography of Brian Eno. That has been done, several times over. There’s a veritable goldmine of interviews and other materials available online, and an even deeper treasure trove if you’re willing to sift offline through teetering piles of rare archival materials, as I often did during my research. Some good books that cover Eno’s career include Brian Eno and Russell Mills’ 1986 book
More Dark than Shark
, Eno’s 1995 diary,
A Year with Swollen Appendices
, Eric Tamm’s
Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound
, and most recently, David Sheppard’s exhaustive Eno biography,
On Some Faraway Beach
. Retreading some of the basic facts and well-known stories about Eno, his life, and his work was inevitable. Whenever possible, I tried not to overlap too much with other books, trying very hard to use different anecdotes, quotes, and sources.
One way to understand where you’re going is to figure out where you aren’t going. To offer a visual analogy, sometimes a good way to begin a drawing is to carve out all of the negative space. So I will start out by telling you what this book isn’t. This is not a behind-the-scenes book that meticulously documents
every step of the making of
Another Green World
. Nor is it a book that dwells very much on Eno’s personal life. It certainly touches on both of these things, to the extent that they are useful in creating a larger picture. This is a book about process. How did these songs grow from kernels of ideas into fully-formed pieces? How were these kernels of thought formed in the first place?
So I attempted to write an exploratory book on the ideas underpinning the music, instead of a straight biography. For this reason, the book does not follow a strict chronology.
Discreet Music
was made prior to
Another Green World
, but in this book, I write about them in the reverse order. I also jump around a fair bit between various points in Eno’s life.