Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Far Out OCTOBER 28, 2022 - by Jordan Potter

BRIAN ENO IMPARTS MUSICAL WISDOM AT THE BARBICAN

Brian Eno, the highly-revered musician, composer, producer and multimedia artist, has many respectable attributes to his name, yet they seem to fall short of describing just how unique he is as a figure within the creative industry. After a flurry of success as Roxy Music's founding synth player, Eno spread his colourful wings, embarking on a solo career that would begin with avant-garde rock music and eventually branch out into ambient composition as a central focus.

Throughout the 1970s, Eno seemed to shake hands with the most salient dignitaries of the music industry. Due to his progressive sound production and compositional ideas, Eno fell into the orbit of John Cale, David Bowie and David Byrne in the mid-to-late-1970s and helped bring a platter of trailblazing art-rock albums to fruition. Over the subsequent decades, Eno secured highly successful collaborations with the likes of U2, Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode and Coldplay.

Earlier this month, Eno released his twenty-second solo studio album, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, which saw a welcomed return of his vocals as an accompaniment to the characteristic ambient proceedings. This was the first time we had heard Eno's voice since 2005's Another Day On Earth, and it came with a grave, eco-conscious message for mankind.

On Sunday evening, I was fortunate enough to bask in Eno's wisdom for an hour and a half during his Space Music talk at the Barbican. Having listened to FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE and followed its concept of armageddon and ecological degradation, I imagined that Eno might have arranged this audience to deliver a more candid and elaborate version of this important message.

I arrived at the Barbican a little early, and with some time to kill, I met up with Eno's PR for a drink. It was quickly apparent that very few among this growing congregation of devout Eno fans knew what to expect; the PR said it should touch upon Eno's approach to three-dimensional sound but to expect absorbing tangents.

After filing into the woody auditorium, we waited for a few minutes before Eno took to the stage wearing a smart navy suit with a smartphone peeking out of the breast pocket. As he took position behind his desk and began arranging his papers, I couldn't help feeling we were in the presence of a scientist rather than a musician. "This talk is called Space Music, I'm going to talk about that in four different sections; the first is Physical Space, the second is Space as Absence, the third is Outer Space, and the fourth is Social Space," he said, introducing the lecture.

He began by looking at "music" from an outside perspective, perhaps the perspective of an alien. It would seem strange, he pondered, to note that music has kept its original name through a period of dramatic change over the twentieth century. Concurrently, theatre and cinema have been warped through similar degrees of change and are now split into a range of handles depending on the style or conduit, most popularly, movies or film.

Eno argued that, since the music of the early twentieth century, which would have been widely limited to live concerts of classical or jazz, had now been transformed into such a vast plethora of styles during and after the recording revolution, "music" is perhaps no longer such a concise term.

In an age where computers and studios are used as instruments in themselves and Dolby Atmos technology can give us three-dimensional sound, a new term might be necessary. Eno turned on his projecting desk camera and wrote the word "NUSIK" as his suggestion to a round of concurrent laughter from the audience.

Beginning in the 1920s, Eno pointed out that recorded music began with just one microphone. Original monophonic records were pressed from live performances where the singer would be positioned behind the microphone and the various band members at varying distances behind them, depending on their prevalence in the mix.

Eno went on to describe how recording methods developed over the early twentieth century. He discussed how reverb, introduced in the 1950s, became one of the landmark moments in recording history and opened up a whole new world of sonic possibility. "This was an interesting moment in music when people started to realise that instruments were unfinished," he added.

Picking out The Ronettes' Be My Baby as a prime example of early reverb, Eno highlighted the production genius of Phil Spector and offered an explanation for why people enjoy reverberated sounds over their cleaner counterparts. Because reverb echoes the sounds of a few microseconds prior, it prolongs the present. The listener also knows the sound of the present will be echoed imminently, so reverb stretches the present both into the future and past, creating a broader sense of now.

Eno continued to describe how music changed throughout the 1960s, revealing that, despite being early proponents of echo chambers, reverb and other progressive sounds and recording techniques, Spector and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys were against the idea of stereo as an alternative to mono. They understandably feared the listener might not experience the record as intended if they were sat closer to one of the two speakers.

Later, Eno highlighted the importance of silence in music in the 'Space as Absence' section. "What happens when we leave something out? When we leave an empty space. So, in 1973 I think it was, I heard this record for the first time. It blew my mind, I have to say. And it blew my mind because it has some big spaces in it..."

Eno then played a section of Lee 'Scratch' Perry's Bucky Skank, commenting afterwards: "That was Lee Perry, one of the greatest producers of all time. I remember hearing that and thinking, 'Jesus! How did he do that?' And I remember taking it around to a group of NME writers who shared a house near where I lived in Maida Vale, I was very excited, and I played it, and they all said, 'What the fuck is that?' And within two years, they were all walking around with what they called Kingston Carrots in their mouths listening to Lee Perry."

Later, Eno transgressed seamlessly into the Outer Space section of the talk, in which he introduced the idea of Space Music as a vague genre and discussed the effects that create the cosmic sound. He showed the audience an example of music played by use of a theremin, a strange electronic instrument played by hand without physical contact.

In this section, he humbly offered a few examples of his own ambient productions. Most memorably, he played Deep Blue Day, which was released in 1983 on Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. The song was originally created with space on the mind. Despite the fact that sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, we associate a sparse reverbed sound with outer space. The echoes simulate the vastness of the open universe.

"That was originally composed to accompany the Apollo capsule going underneath the moon, and it ended up being used in Trainspotting as the guy goes into the toilet [laughter]," Eno captioned the song. "It just shows you how amazing music can be... How we can have those completely different interpretations."

After treating us to a few blinding live Omnichord demonstrations with the peculiar white instrument on his desk, Eno moved on to the fourth and final segment of the talk. Having circumnavigated the topic of politics throughout the talk - apart from the brief mention of the "bunch of gibbons" that govern us - Eno identified himself and most of his fans as on the left side of the political spectrum.

He pointed out that one of the left's failings, however, is that they are so quick to bicker and divide into marginally different, fragmented schools of thought. Meanwhile, the right tends to have a greater sense of unity and coordination en masse. Eno pointed out that if the left is to rise above the right, or the world is to rise to the climate challenge and fight injustice, we need a greater sense of community and collective morale.

As a musician, Eno naturally sees things from a musical perspective. Recognising the power of music, he asked the audience to name songs that could be used to unite people around the world in the face of the climate crisis and widespread political instability. Legendary wars were emblemised with chants and victory music, and empires had national anthems. So why, Eno asked, does the battle against climate change not have an anthem too?

After posing his question, members of the audience began shouting out suggestions. ""Heroes" by David Bowie," said one person. Another shouted out, "Come Together by The Beatles." At this point, Eno grabbed his pen and began making a list of the audience's suggestions. A few others suggested some of Eno's songs, but he explained that his music wouldn't work - there had to be catchy and abundant lyrics.

As the shout-outs began to subside, Eno suggested that people continue to list their ideas on his Facebook and Instagram pages. I'm not much of a shouter, so I kept shtum during the talk, but my suggestion for Eno would be Primal Scream's Come Together from the 1991 Screamadelica album. On the evening, someone else actually suggested Primal Scream's Movin' On Up, but I feel the powerful gospel aspect of Come Together has what it takes to unite the world.

After taking down a few more great suggestions from the audience, Eno thanked us for attending with a roar of reciprocated appreciation. He left the stage with a wave of the hand, and just like that, our evening with the musical David Attenborough had come to a close, seemingly just as it had begun.