Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

New Musical Express APRIL 24, 1982 - by Richard Grabel

ENO: THE SOUL INSIDE THE SHADES

Richard Grabel practises the pussyfoot with Brian Eno, the father of electronic pop.

Brian Eno's SoHo New York loft, where he plays with his videos and light machines, had been invaded by workmen doing remodelling, so the Eno interview takes place at photographer Joe Stevens' studio. Eno arrives at the door wearing shades, a beret, carrying a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and smiling. He's friendly, definitely not cold, not pretentious in the more obvious ways, not like the promoted media image.

As he faces the camera pressed close up to his face, he says:

"Is that a wide-angle lens? Don't make my nose look too big. Photographers always make my nose too big. Ever since I got to New York the photographers have been making me look progressively more Jewish."

Eno cracks jokes - I wasn't expecting that.

In fact, after reading so many interviews in which Eno went on endlessly about his musical theories, Oblique Strategies and technological expertise, discoursing at length and seemingly setting himself up as God's intellectual gift to modern music, I was prepared to believe he was something of a prat. He isn't.

My copy of On Land, Eno's new album, came with an essay by him about the record. The last time this happened was with Talking Heads' Remain In Light, with which David Byrne sent along along a press release-essay about African music advising critics to consult the works of John Chernoff, a writer introduced to him by Eno. Eno's own essay explains that On Land is an attempt to apply some of the methods of painting to the creation of music, to create a kind of aural landscape in which there is no strict distinction between foreground and background.

My own reaction to On Land is that it is more interesting as an idea than as something to be listened to. Its sounds are intriguing but not compelling: the sounds drift on without event. This, apparently, was Eno intention.

For Eno the interview was an occasion to explain and promote the record to the public. Any revelation of his personality comes outside the formal encounter. Like the moment when he started licking his cigarette ash into his trouser cuffs, saying he preferred them to an ashtray.

During the course of the interview itself Eno consumed ten or twelve cups of camomile tea, six True cigarettes, and one and a half C-90 cassettes.

GRABEL: Are you concerned with the ability to get accurate information?

ENO: Yes. Especially here, because this place is so insulated. In New York you get the feeling that the world ends at the piers. This is the most parochial place in a way. It has its own values, its own stars and its own villains, and they mean absolutely nothing to anyone else. There's something nice about living in a place like that, there's a sort of buzz of gossip about things. Which isn't the case in London, London doesn't have anywhere near such an intact sense to it. Not in my experience, anyway. Maybe upper class London does.

Some of your music - Remain In Light or My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts - presents fragments of information about various places in the world, and editorialises about the information.

They also have a political idea in them, which is an idea of inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. It's an idea of music being a cauldron where you can draw things together, and hopefully come up with some useable synthesis, with the idea that this exercise might be extended to your everyday life.

Actually music is always political, there's no doubt about it. Most of the music which is described as 'political' is called that because of the lyrics, but to me that's the least important part. Lyrics don't matter. I think the real political material of music is at a structural level and a level of procedure. Most of the people who espouse political music in an obvious way, what they've done musically has been completely reactionary. Heavy metal. That politically is a very old message. It's a message of simple power and domination.

The people who have made interesting political music have often been unaware of it, or argued that wasn't what they were doing.

For example Cornelius Cardew, an English composer who died around last Christmas: in 1979 he became a Maoist and denounced all his earlier work as being bourgeois and so on. In fact that had been his most interesting work, where he was playing with structures and instructions that seemed very loose but would in fact come out a certain way. Later he was writing pieces that had lyrics about working people and just like The Clash. The classical version of The Clash. 'Classical Clash', that could be another hit album. Hooked On Clashics.

From that moment on his music was uninteresting, it was just Lisztian piano heroics, whereas before it had been so odd and strange.

You seem to feel that the process by which you create something is a part of what the creation is saying.

They're so intertwined that I don't even separate them now. Actually one of the reasons I've become less and less interested in pop music is that I can see the limit to the amount I can mix those things, procedure and result, and I'm just not interested anymore. I don't listen to pop music anymore, and I have no inclination to make it. Everyone says to me, When are you going to make another one of those records? When are you going to make another album with songs? Well, I'm probably not, so I'll make it clear here and now that I shall probably never do another one. Then maybe they'll stop asking me about it. They're going to be stuck with this funny ambient stuff or something like it for the rest of time.

The main reason why an area like that of this new record interests me is that I can't see a limit to it. The territory is always unfolding. It seems to be able to contain everything I want to put into it. For a long time I've been involved with odd bits and pieces, these inventions of mine - light machines, videos, visual art type things, environmental things - as well as making ordinary records, some people say. And, it's a thrill to find myself in an area where these concerns naturally come together, where they are not forced on each other.

I know a lot of people will find this record cold and all the usual rubbish - unemotional, blah blah blah. But for me, this is really my first soul record. Soul music is music that springs from a deep part of you. Electronic music usually springs from a shallow or narrow level. This record for me is as interesting as finding a record I like very much by someone else would be. It's as strange to me as that.

There's a way of making music where you specify exactly what is going to happen, you handcraft everything, so when the record is finished it isn't full of surprises for you anymore. This record was made a different way. It's more like a number of actions carried out near microphones. It's apparently very bland territory at first, but in the way it yields itself it has considerable depth and slowness.

By depth I don't mean profundity, but physical depth. My image was of sitting somewhere, and of hearing sound all around you. Sometimes the sound would fit together in a musical way and at other times they wouldn't.

That's why I called it On Land. I wanted this feeling that you were sitting in the middle of something rather than sitting in front of something. The typical rock and roll production is some human adventure being played out very close to you. The more sophisticated rock and roll production is some human adventure being played out against a backdrop. But there's a strict separation between foreground and background. Well, over the years I was getting more interested in the detail of this background, and trying to sink the foreground into it so that the edges became hazy. Another Green World was the beginning of that, where things are phased together a bit.

Your essay mentions ideas about sound that came to you sitting on a patio in Ghana. How much does travelling affect your work?

It's hard to say. I don't think travelling has affected my work more than staying at home. The things that affect my work are so peculiar. You never really know what they are. The really deep channels of your work, the things that are so ingrained you don't even notice them, have always been there. All that seems to happen is that new experiences offer you new ways of presenting those ideas, other formats. So you take one basic approach and see how it rubs against this part of the world or that part of the world.

Do you romanticise the process of including foreign cultures in your work too much?

It's a dicey thing at the moment, because it's called cultural imperialism to do that. But the strange thing is that it isn't called that when it happens the other way around. When people go to Africa and they find someone who's been heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix, for instance, of whom there are many, they say, Isn't that great?

That isn't cultural imperialism, that way around. So I think that's rather a red herring, that issue. When people are very happy to see the flow go one way, but they're very cautious about It going the other way.

We are in a position where we can't ignore the rest of the world. You've got two choices. You either try to deny the rest of the world, which can be a useful way of working. I'm not saying it can't be. Or you try to accommodate it. And one way of trying to accommodate it is by saying, Does that fit me? Just like trying on clothes. People don't consider you a cultural imperialist if you go to a Chinese restaurant. Why should they think you are if you nourish yourself on African music?

Perhaps our attitudes interfere with our understanding more, the way a lot of us look at the objects of foreign cultures as being more pure then our own.

And probably the reason for that is we don't understand them as well. For instance, you see tourists in Accra, in Ghana, looking at all this work that is done for tourists. African statues and so on. They say, Wow, it's beautiful, and they buy it. Now, I'm not saying it isn't beautiful, but unless you understand the form you won't notice distinctions. So, to you it will be one thing.

Like can you imagine a Chinaman coming here, and he puts on the radio, and everything he hears sounds the same. He doesn't make any distinctions of quality, it all sounds odd and maybe interesting or non-interesting, but he sees it all as a monolithic intact culture. He couldn't be more wrong. All ideas of purity are based on not seeing a thing properly.

Another romance you may have carried too far is the romance of the studio.

Certainly. My main criticism of most recent records is that they use the studio in precisely the way I used to advocate. The material is made in the studio. The problem is that it's dead at every stage. It's dead at inception. It's dead at execution. I think that all the English synthesizer bands - with which I am occasionally dubiously credited with having inspired in some way or other... if that's inspired I don't know what depressed must be - I think their material is empty. I keep listening to bits of it thinking I must not have heard it right.

But, you know how I was saying I want to hear space, I went to be able to wander through it? This stuff is paper thin. They've taken the grossest forms of the simplest ideas and done them in the most unsubtle ways. What isn't there is the feeling that this mattered to the person who made it. Mattered in a real way, not mattered in the sense of whether they can get on Top Of The Pops but mattered in the sense that they put themselves at some kind of psychic risk there, that they made an investment with their mind.

And as you point out this is the result of certain attitudes towards technology that I advocated very strongly. And I still do advocate, actually. I think that the attitude wasn't wrong, but I can now see how easily it can be abused.

You've done production work for people ranging from DNA to Talking Heads to Jon Hassell. What criteria do you use to choose projects?

That's quite difficult to answer. It isn't which ones are going to make money, as you can tell from the extremes you mentioned. For me, I work all the time and I see a number of positions in my work that I'm advancing. And sometimes you see someone who within their own work, with its set of positions, covers some of yours as well. It's almost like I want to piggyback on their work. I find in the work the development of an idea which I'm already working on.

Now if that's printed that will sound like my work includes all of their work, and that isn't what I mean. What I mean is there is an area of overlap.

Also there's a historical thing at work. Sometimes something is going on which is in a very volatile condition, and you know it's not going to stay there for long. Somebody's got to capture this at this moment, just for history.

The No New York album?

That was a good example of that. I thought, and it turned out I was right, that scene wasn't a tricky project to do, but it was one that you stood to lose money on, which was why nobody else was going to do it.

What about the effect you have on the people you work with. In the case of Talking Heads, Byrne has said you affected his ideas and other people said you affected his personality.

Those are imponderables.

Did you feel a resentment coming from other members of the group, that you were influencing their direction too much?

Yeah. Particularly on the last record, where this was especially true. But I also have a feeling that it's not a good idea to carry those feuds on, so I never comment on it. There was a situation, it's quite true. It's inevitable, I don't see how it could be otherwise.

Tina once said that you and David Byrne ware like two fourteen year old boys copying each other.

Well, I don't want to enter into it. I could reply to all these things and make a big fuss, but my feeling is it profits no one. I don't trust my emotional responses in charged situations like that enough to want to commit them to print. I'm not being political or diplomatic, it's just understanding the difference between the media of gossip or talk and the media of print, which fixes things. If we were just chatting here I'd probably be saying something different.

People are always urging me to take revenge, because of these things that have been said, but I don't think it's worth doing.

Do those comments hurt you?

Well, to say I wasn't hurt would not be true. But that doesn't mean I want to take revenge either, or that I feel like continuing it.

I don't even feel that I have much connection with that world. Anything about it, its whole modus operandi, its values, its struggles. The whole accent on personality doesn't interest me. One of the characteristics of this record and some of the others I've been doing recently is of gradually trying to get myself out of the music. First of all not writing songs anymore, and then making music that is less clearly of some point of view.

My feeling is that I don't want to be there in my work in some obvious way. I don't want people listening to it and hearing some bloody personality struggle going on. That's practically all most pop music is about. That's why it's adolescent music. That's the time people are thinking about that. And the choices they are offered in the music are often quite intelligent choices. But at the moment that problem is not real to me. I don't feel my identity crisis at the moment. I feel pretty calm.

Yet you're stuck with being a pop personality, if only by association.

It's not all bad, it's a mixed blessing. The good part of it is that it accords me a certain amount of attention. And good attention in a way, because imagine where I would be classified with this new record if that were not the case. It would go into electronic avant-garde or some such category. And then it would come with a whole set of preconceptions.

High-culture baggage.

Exactly. Which would be stifling. The nice thing about being in the pop category is that there's a feeling of looseness, a kind of democratic response to things

The disadvantage to being in a category where there is only one given way of listening. Or maybe two; the ballad and the non-ballad. There are very fixed categories of listening attention. It's a funny sort of edge to be on. You want people to be interested, not in an intellectual way, that well-I-ought-to-be-interested-in-this kind of way but in a way where they actually respond with their souls. But you want to say to them at the same time, This isn't like all the other things that you respond to in that way. So it's a tightrope.

A lot of the pieces on the new record teem to be playing with stasis.

I'm glad you said that. As I worked on this record I realised that stasis is a factor of human perception. It doesn't exist. Thera isn't such a thing as stillness. What happens is that we have a range, a spectrum of movement we see. At one end are things that are just perceptibly moving, and at the other end are things moving so fast they approach stillness. Molecular movement is like that.

What happens in a lot of these places is you have two types of stasis rubbing against each other. You have drones, which move so slowly you don't notice the movement. They are actually harmonics of the same note, with the harmonics in constant shift. The other, higher frequency stasis, is like crickets or frogs. The idea was that your initial perception would be of the dark, apparently still underneath and the bright, apparently still air.

You have to realise that listening is not passive activity. You assume you're doing nothing, because the format is normally a given. Because what you are doing to so well practiced you don't notice it.

Doesn't talking about "ambient" music encourage passive listening?

Yeah well there is a kind of confusion in that term, I agree. When I was talking about ambient I meant it in two ways. In the way you're talking about, or having the potential to be that but not only that. And the other thing I meant was ambient in the sense of surrounding you, in the sense of being all around. The idea of you sitting inside of something

When you're not working, what do you do for fun?

In this town, I go to the Museum of Natural History quite a lot. And I go to the movies. I guess I see about two or three films a week. And I go to galleries, but I don't see much stuff there I like at the moment.