Brian Eno's Another Green World (9 page)

David Toop was slated to record with Eno the morning after the accident, and heard the bad news. “I turned up at the studio in the morning and the session was canceled because he was in the hospital,” he recalled. “I went to go visit him and the place smelled like sour milk.” Some milk had spilled on the floor, and Eno was too weak to clean it up. Seeing Eno in such a sad state—lying down, immobile, with head injuries and a bad back—deeply worried his friends. But the forced solitude and contemplation led to a now-famous epiphany about ambient music, shrouded in 30-odd years of myth. In the
Discreet Music
liner notes, Eno wrote:

In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had
failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.

Judy Nylon has a slightly different recollection of the events as they unfolded. Nylon was Eno’s friend, erstwhile girlfriend, and the namesake of the song “Back in Judy’s Jungle’’ on the album
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
.

Nylon was a streetwise Bostonian who moved to England in the early 1970s. She grew up in a series of foster homes, and was mostly self-taught; by the time she was a teenager, she had perused books on science, hung out in the halls of M.I.T., and studied art. She found a book on cybernetics in a box on a street corner. “I’m an Irish townie from Harvard Square,” she said. “The rich kids that came to study at M.I.T. and Harvard threw their books out on the street in a box rather than ship them back home. So we went through the books, and said, ‘Whoa, that’s interesting.’”

Nylon moved to London at the age of 21 and quickly began meeting influential people. She was tall, statuesque, and stunning, and found some side work as a model. When she met Eno, soon after
Here Come the Warm Jets
, they clicked instantly. In some ways, the
two were total opposites—him a bit delicate, deliberate, and very British—while she was exuberant and extroverted, with a decidedly American sensibility. The two bonded over a shared interest in cybernetics and arty German bands like Cluster. Nylon later started a band called Snatch with her friend Patti Palladin, recorded a brilliant sound montage with Eno called “R.A.F.,” and became part of London’s burgeoning punk scene.

According to Nylon, Eno was home, just out of the hospital, laying on a bed on the floor and propped up on a pile of pillows. “The room was grey, the carpet was grey, the light was grey,” Nylon remembered. It was pouring rain. Nylon bought a tape of harp music for him from a street vendor. She wasn’t much into harp music—Eno wasn’t a particular fan either— but she thought, based on her own childhood experiences, that the mellifluous instrumentals might help. She put it on the stereo at a low volume and tried to balance it with the sound of the rain. Eno caught on to what she was doing, and leaned over, helping to balance the soft music with the sound of the pitterpatter of the raindrops. Eno’s fabled ambient-music epiphany wasn’t an accidental mistake; it naturally flowed from the setting.

‘‘As I was lying there listening to the rain I could just hear the loudest moments, just single notes every
so often, or little flurries of notes,” Eno recalled in an
Artforum
interview in 1996 with Anthony Korner. “I started to think that it sounded all right—it was really nice to listen to—and I wondered why no music like this existed. Why couldn’t we buy records that made this beautiful random mixture of things like the raindrops, with little flurries of things within it like icebergs? Listening, I had the sense of hearing the tip of something, and the knowledge that there was more beneath it. And I wanted my music to do this. It was immediately after this, in 1975, that I recorded
Discreet Music
, the first of my records conceived as Ambient music.”

The soft overcomes the hard
.

The slow overcomes the fast
.

The Tao Te Ching,
Chapter 36

If you sit in Hyde Park just far enough away from the traffic so that you don’t perceive any of its specific details, you just hear the average of the whole thing. And it’s such a beautiful sound. For me that’s as good as going to a concert hall at night
.

Brian Eno,
Artforum,
1986

Discreet Music
, released in 1975, was the soothing sound of convalescence. Eno recorded the 31-minute-long
title track, the first half of the album, on one April afternoon in 1975, shortly after his recovery. Side Two, three renditions of Pachelbel’s Canon in D that varied by various mathematical parameters, was co-arranged and conducted by Gavin Bryars and his Cockpit Ensemble, and was recorded six months later.

Side One was elegant and economical in its simplicity; Eno put his system in motion and let the tape machines do the work. Two interrelated melodic lines fed through a long delay loop system that Eno devised—a similar setup to the tape-delay system he’d used with Robert Fripp on the album
No Pussyfooting
, which, in turn, bore some similarities to Terry Riley’s “time-lag accumulator” system, and Steve Reich’s tape loop experiments in the 1960s.

In 1965, a decade before
Discreet Music
and
Another Green World
, an American composer named Steve Reich recorded a piece called “It’s Gonna Rain.” Reich was 28 years old at the time—a musician with a philosophy degree and a budding interest in tape recorders.

A year earlier, at the tail end of the mass hysteria surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reich ran into a black Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter, who was dishing out a sermon to passersby in San Francisco’s Union Square. Brother Walter delivered a speech packed with fire and brimstone to anyone who
would listen. Reich had a tape recorder on him, and started recording.

Brother Walter’s fervent ranting was mesmerizing on multiple levels. First, there was the speech itself— doomsday rhetoric about how the world was ending, using the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark and endless floods as a starting point. Second, and possibly even more transfixing, was the rise and fall of his booming voice, the rhythmic repetition and emphasis on certain words (“It’s gonna RAIN! It’s gonna RAIN!”) and the urgent tone of his delivery. It almost sounded, well, like music.

Some months later, in 1965, Reich cut two tape loops from Brother Walter’s sermon and tried to overlay them using two mono reel-to-reel tape recorders. “I made identical loops and I thought I would line them up in a particular relationship,” said Reich in an interview with Jason Gross in
Perfect Sound Forever
in 2000. “Mainly with ‘it’s gonna fall’ on top of ‘rain’ with the two channel result being ‘it’s gonna … it’s gonna … rain … rain …’ with 180 degrees separation.” But a small error led to a major epiphany.

Thanks to the slight difference in the motor speed between the two tape recorders, Reich accidentally stumbled on an acoustic phenomenon called phasing. When two loops fall out of phase with each other and then slowly lock back into phase, they generate
complex sounds as they mesh in and out of each other. Reich discovered that if he used phasing as a compositional technique, he could start with simple building blocks—two identical tape loops of someone talking, for instance—and end up with something that was far more intricate. In addition to generating an interesting product, it also revealed an elegant process—an economical and minimal design that “grew” itself into something more interesting the longer it played. And because it was all based on tape loops, the piece didn’t require any conventional virtuosity on the part of the performer; there were no guitar solos to jam out, no ivories to tickle. The piece literally played itself.

For Eno, “It’s Gonna Rain,” and a related Reich piece called “Come Out,” would be a signpost for a different way of thinking about music, an escape valve from the bounds of overblown pomp-rock. First, the idea of music made with tape recorders seemed naturally appealing to Eno, an avowed “non-musician.” But in contrast to the European avant-garde tape composers of the
musique concrète
movement—who laboriously treated and spliced samples of trains, whistles, and other found sounds to knit constructions of boggling complexity—Reich’s method of using tape was more appealing. His tape recorders composed their own music, once you got them in motion. All you had to do was set them up, and listen.

“I heard [‘It’s Gonna Rain’] in the early 1970s, which was just at the time that most of the people that I was involved with were doing exactly the opposite thing,” said Eno to John Cage, in a conversation orchestrated by Rob Tannenbaum for a 1985
Musician
article. “Twenty-four track recorders had just become current, and the idea was to make more and more grotesque, Gothic pieces of music, filling up every space and every corner of the canvas. And to hear something that was as alive as this Reich piece, and so simple, was a real shock to me.”

On the sleevenotes on the back of the
Discreet Music
LP, released in 1975, Eno wrote: “If there is any score for the piece, it must be the operational diagram of the particular apparatus I used for its production. The key configuration here is the long delay echo system with which I have experimented since I became aware of the musical possibilities of tape recorders in 1964. Having set up this apparatus, my degree of participation in what it subsequently did was limited to (a) providing an input (in this case, two simple and mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a digital recall system) and (b) occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer’s output by means of a graphic equalizer.”

The result of this tape-loop system, slowed down to half-speed, was a hypnotic, meditative etude that
gently built on itself, growing subtly more complex as it continued playing. “Side One sounds like eavesdropping on the brainwaves of a sleeping computer,” wrote James Wolcott in
Creem
in 1976, calling the album “the first pop masterpiece of inertia.” Lester Bangs joked that the album was “the garden without the sombre reptile that is Fripp,” and was on the fence as to whether he was bored or bemused by it.

The tales of
Discreet Music
’s role in the recovery of its listeners are legion. David Bowie apparently soundtracked his own recovery from drugs in the mid-1970s by listening to
Discreet Music
. Letters from fans poured in from all over, claiming that the album’s quiet power helped them heal. ‘‘I got a letter from a woman in Cleveland who works with autistic children,” Eno said to the
NME
in 1977. ‘‘She had one child who never spoke; he had never made a single vocal noise in his life. Another one wouldn’t sleep; he was ultra-nervous, in a wretched state. She put
Discreet Music
on one day, and the kid who had never slept just lay down on a concrete floor and went to sleep. So she went to the group where this other kid was, and she kept playing
Discreet Music
. And this little child—not only because of the record, I’m sure, though the other one was—started talking.”

The album itself had practical, functional origins. Eno had been preparing for some live shows with Fripp which
used films by the experimental filmmaker Malcolm LeGrice. “Discreet Music,” the 31-minute-long track that comprised the first side, was originally intended as background music for Fripp to play guitar with. Eno made a tape for Fripp, and slowed the tape down to half speed. He liked the result so much that he left it as it was, and that afternoon’s work became
Discreet Music
’s title track. It was 31 minutes long because it was the longest possible track that Eno could squeeze onto a record at the time. “What I liked about it was the idea that, by fading it in at the start and out at the end, you get the impression that you’ve caught part of an endless process,” Eno said in a 1998 interview with Andy Gill in
Mojo
. “That’s always been a key condition of ambient music for me, that it’s something that is going on anyway, when you enter and leave. Also, the sounds being out of earshot, so you can hear things near and far away and, you suspect, there’s stuff going on outside too. So you’re hearing a partial experience, in two senses.”

The back cover of
Discreet Music
sported an operational diagram of
Discreet Music
’s chain of effects. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to plaster this sort of huge, nerdy gear diagram on the back cover of your record. The ‘‘Discreet Music’’ diagram, depicted on the LP as a stylized feedback loop, bore a striking resemblance to the block diagrams of cybernetics.
Eno was also inspired by the dub and reggae producers of the time, who propounded his basic philosophy of “the studio as musical instrument.” “You get an album like, say,
King Tubby Meets the Upsetter
where on the back of the album you get a picture of the consoles instead of the ‘stars’,” enthused Eno in an interview in 1975. “It just says, ‘King Tubby’s console and the Upsetter’s console’.”

Over the early 1970s, there was a gradual erosion of Eno’s image from the front cover of his solo records. On the Eno/Fripp record
No Pussyfooting
, you can see Eno’s image reflected over and over on the striking hall-of-mirrors cover. On
Here Come the Warm Jets
and
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
, he’s prominently displayed on the front cover. On
Another Green World
, he’s on the back cover. (He’s in the painting on the front cover, too, if you believe, as some do, that the boy in the painting wearing the red beanie is Eno.) But
Discreet Music
, and the Eno/Fripp record
Evening Star
, which incorporates elements of
Discreet Music
, have no images of people in them at all. The front cover of
Discreet Music
depicts a stunning colorized backdrop of stormy clouds and twilight-tinged sky that takes up 90 percent of the frame, with the tiniest images of buildings underneath. Perhaps those buildings have people in them, but we’ll never know. The background and the foreground are one and the same.