Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Uncut JULY 2017 - by Tom Pinnock

BRIAN ENO: MUSIC FOR PLEASURE

Deep inside his London studio, Brian Eno is busy bringing "playful" experimental strategies to the studio graft - as his new collaborative albums with conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe attest. But, over pastries, an uncharacteristically digressive Eno finds time to discuss Scott Walker's voice, communal living with Harmonia, mid-'60s 'happenings' and his deep enthusiasm to create anew. "I'm sorry to be so shamelessly enthusiastic about my work," he tells Tom Pinnock

One might expect the serene clutter of Brian Eno's studio to be bathed in pure ambient tones, rather than the harsh industrial noise of a power tool.

"Sorry about the chainsaw," he says. "The tree surgeons are in. They've been doing this one tree for days. I don't know what's so difficult..."

It's not the best day for it. Eno has a lot on. He has been at his west London studio since shortly after 6am. His new collaborator Beatie Wolfe is here too, working on some of their music in his studio room, with its speakers resting on breezeblocks, and an original Velvet Underground & Nico LP, the yellow banana exposed, propped up like a talisman. Meanwhile, long-established colleague Peter Chilvers has turned up to work with Eno on plans for an event in Oxford based around Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry For The Future. To make things more hectic, there's a delivery man at the door - and then there's the small matter of an Uncut interview...

"I've been so angry this morning, because I just want to focus on this fucking Oxford thing," Eno says, jovially. "I kept this day just for that, and" - he gestures at Uncut, and then at his collaborators - "this person turns up, and you people turn up. And that chainsaw's annoying me. It's the fact that it's kind of making a melody, and not a very good one, that's pissing me off..."

Despite his light-hearted protestations, Eno is full of energy, excited as ever about his new music, his light-box art and the cinnamon pastries from a local bakery. "These are in a class of their own," he says, offering them around.

We sit outside in the sun at first, where various passersby, both known and unknown, greet Eno. It's hard to mistake him, looking sharp in his customary utilitarian glasses, blue jeans, Chelsea boots, shirt and a navy blue jacket adorned with a badge of the Palestinian flag. Unable to compete with the tree surgeons, we move back inside and sit at the table in the centre of his studio space, near his shelves of books on art, music, science, philosophy and so much more.

He's speaking to Uncut today primarily about his pair of new albums, the song-based Luminal and the ambient Lateral, the first fruits of his creative relationship with musician, artist and activist Wolfe. "We work in a very similar way," he explains. "We're playful, we just start something and go, 'Oh, that's gone off in this direction. That's interesting. Let's go there.' Every time we go into the studio with the idea that we might finish something we've started, we start new things. We've got so many new pieces going now. Actually I'm jealous of Beatie getting a chance to work now while I'm having to talk..."

"You love talking, Brian!" Wolfe replies. "There's no-one dead, alive or unborn who I'd rather be doing this with, and that's mainly because it just feels like the most amount of fun."

There's also just enough time to delve into Eno's period as a student 'guru', his experiences with other collaborators including David Bowie and Daniel Lanois, what the Germans taught him about making records, and of course his eleven-thousand unreleased compositions.

Politely displacing Wolfe from behind the computer in his studio, Eno boots up his music-player program, custom-designed by Chilvers. It can play any of his unheard pieces at random, or play a number of them on top of each other, also at random. It's the latter feature that spawned the eleven tracks on Aurum, the moody electronic album he quietly released on Apple Music earlier this year.

"It's probably quite likely that the chainsaw will work with most of these," Eno says, cueing up a mix of unheard pieces for Uncut. "So this combination I've never heard before. If I like it, I can do 'save combination'..."

He does so, naming the piece OMF 1 - it's now a contender for his event in Oxford, he later reveals - and generates another combination, a distinctly dystopian clatter with bursts of piercing synth tones. "This is a nice piece. It's a little loud on some parts, but I can do a basic mix here, if I want. Save that. Here's another one. As you can see, it can go on for a long time." He pauses. "Just made three new pieces, haha..."

UNCUT: You're back singing on Luminal, Brian.

BRIAN ENO: It turns out I like singing! Spent years trying to deny it... No, I stopped singing for years because I couldn't find anything I wanted to write songs about.

How did you and Beatie meet?

I met her at Somerset House. She'd done an installation: twelve old American phones in a room, and each one played a different text, all in her voice. Then she became one of the artists working with [Eno-founded charity] EarthPercent, and they had this idea to pair some of us up to do a track together. It was just so easy to work together, and so much fun.

How did the music you were making become two distinct albums, Luminal and Lateral?

We ended up diverging off into other directions all the time. We thought all the things that were coming out were nice and that they should be treated as separate groups [of music]. I realised we could have made four or five different categories, really. [Lateral's] "Big Empty Country" didn't want to be a short piece. I just wanted it to go on and on, so we made it as long as you can get it on CD. That was the only limitation we had. It could have been a twelve-hour version of it. Maybe we'll do that one day.

Is Lateral largely generative?

Yes, except Beatie is then playing guitar over it. I got a letter yesterday from a teacher at the Berger School in east London. She said she uses my music a lot with her youngest children, five, six, seven, eight-year-olds. She told me they say things like, "Oh, Miss, can we have the calm music?" It was such a nice letter, and I'm going to send Lateral to her so she gets it before the rest of the world does.

My dad used to play My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts in the car when I was young.

What an interesting record to play to kids. What did you think of it? Can you remember?

I vividly remember hearing it, but I didn't really love it at the time.

I can imagine, it's quite challenging. I wouldn't think My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts would make much sense to kids. I'd imagine they'd think, 'Why don't they sing properly?'

Beatie's guitar seems central to both Luminal and Lateral - are you playing too?

There's a lot of software involved, which was mostly my department, but not many instruments: one guitar, one baritone guitar, one bass, a lap steel guitar. Oh, an Omnichord. There is some of me on guitar. I do enjoy it, but I know my limitations - I know what I can do that will work and I don't really try anything else.

Virtuosity has never been the point, though, has it?

No, and this wasn't goal-oriented. If you have a goal, you design everything around that, but we did it the opposite way around. We said, "We'll keep playing with what we've got until we've got enough, or until we get fed up." We haven't got fed up, we're still working.

So you have enough material for more albums?

We did a piece the day before yesterday. Beatie was playing guitar and I was putting it through various odd treatments. I went back and found one particular chord and slowed it down to a quarter speed and it's like being inside a huge gong. That became a new piece, we finished it that day. The only question now is how long to make it.

It's interesting that there's a baritone guitar on Luminal, because there are definite Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti vibes at times.

When we started off, we were often talking about it as cowboy music, because we like those empty Arizona-type landscapes. A feeling I kept getting was of dusk on a plateau, maybe tumbleweed rolling off in the distance. The landscapes were definitely not English, they're much more American. Which is strange, because neither of us are particularly big fans of America.

That sort of ambient Americana can't help but recall Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks.

You're right. It's not the same landscape, but it's the same feeling about landscape; this sense of openness and possibility and relatively few humans. One of the qualities of country-ish music is this sense of 'we're pioneers, we're out on our own, we're at the edge of things'. Working with Beatie isn't very different [to working with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno], to be honest, although with Apollo there was a film to make music for. The way I nearly always work is I just make a lot of music and then think, 'Alright, that piece kind of gets it and that one is good. These other ones I'll use for something else.' On Apollo, there was this big Yamaha CS80, one of the earliest hybrids between an electric organ and a synthesiser, that became my instrument of those sessions. It wasn't a question of thinking, 'Oh, space... we'll need a big orchestra for that, and we'll need at least forty string players...' I just like to work with what's on offer. Also, I hate wasting money!

Luminal is very much a song album, and you're revisiting the doo-wop or gospel feel you last channelled on All I Remember, from the Eno documentary soundtrack.

It's funny that the genes of early rock'n'roll have survived this long, and that they sound familiar and somehow still interesting. The basic three or four chords of pop music - C, F, G and A minor, shall we say - it's interesting to me that that sort of minimal matrix is enough to support a lot of very complicated feelings. You don't need the complexity of Boulez or Stockhausen - there's no reason why you shouldn't, but you don't have to have it. And as for lyrics, when I listened to songs I used to wish that they wouldn't have to have words, because often the music is so beautiful and abstract and then the words pin it down to something about somebody's bloody relationships. But I think the person who showed the way out of that was Scott Walker. That batch of stuff [on The Walker Brothers' 1978 LP Nite Flights] called The Electrician and Nite Flights and so on, I thought, 'OK, so you can write about something else, it doesn't have to be about adolescent relationships.'

Did you know Scott?

Yeah, but I didn't know him when Nite Flights came out. But I remember taking those four songs to Bowie, and he was absolutely knocked out by them, and we just were listening to it and thinking, 'Wow, this is really different. This is something completely new.' And if you listen to Bowie's voice after '78, when Nite Flights came out, he completely changed the way he sang. He suddenly became a grown-up singer. For a start, he stopped singing always in the higher register, and he dropped into that baritone register that Scott sang in. That was Bowie's best voice, I think.

Neither Bowie or Scott Walker were afraid to sound unhinged with it too, though.

'I'm a grown up and I'm still fucking crazy'. It's more of a message when it sounds like a mature person - you expect kids to be nutty, but when you hear somebody singing like a man, but singing as a sort of demented person... What was the song we did? "I'm Deranged".

Over the last couple of years there's been the Eno documentary and your live Ships performances where you were playing some older material - that's a lot of looking back, maybe slightly uncharacteristically for you. Is this collaboration with Beatie the start of a new phase?

I think so. Well, in the sense that, first of all, I'm singing more. I'm even singing on the album with Beatie, but I'm singing backing vocals generally. With the orchestra [for Ships] it was interesting to take stuff that was made completely electronically in that room over there and see what happens when people are playing it instead. It was a chance to see if that could really work with an orchestra that had been set up specifically to do things like that. Usually, the problem with orchestras is that it's very difficult to change direction. I can try things in my studio, the maddest things you can imagine, and if they don't work it doesn't matter, it hasn't really cost anything. But if you do that with a 60-piece orchestra, that's expensive and it makes people naturally more cautious.

By This River was a highlight of those live shows. You wrote that by the Weser at Harmonia's house in Forst, didn't you?

It's a big strong river, that. The strong rivers don't do a whole lot of dancing around, they just push forward to the sea. We were all living in that lovely old farmhouse. I can't remember what equipment we used - it felt pretty sophisticated at the time, but I'm sure it would look hopelessly primitive now, because that was almost fifty years ago. God, why are we still talking about it? Nobody ever expected that it would remain interesting for that long. But I really enjoyed that time there, they were such a nice bunch of people.

You worked there with Harmonia, and then Cluster - what did you learn from them?

They had an attitude towards music that I didn't find so much in England. They were really just in it for the experiment. 'What happens if we do this?' And then, 'Oh, it happens to be seventeen minutes long. OK, that's the piece then.' It was all about fitting formats here and I really hated it. The first long record I made was Discreet Music, and that was as long as I could make it on a vinyl album. I think it was thirty minutes and thirty-one seconds, that one side - I would have made it sixty minutes if I could have done. But the idea was 'I want this piece of music to be endless and this is as close as I can get at the moment'. Luckily, I didn't have anybody saying, "Oh, it's too long." That's not what should be in your mind when you start out. You make something and then you change the world for it. All the German people I worked with were very artistic. They thought, 'This is art and this is the size it should be.'

In his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock recalls you, then a Winchester School of Art student, putting on 'happenings' for the pupils at Winchester College: "He has thin shoulder-length hair and a pair of blue circular sunglasses... [he] has the authority of a teacher, yet he's subversive like a rebel..." Do you recognise the Eno there?

No, I don't, though I think most of what Robyn says is true. I like the book a lot, but it's funny, my memory of that time, of who I was then, is quite different from his. I didn't think I was seen as some kind of a guru by those boys at Winchester College. [But] just two or three years makes such a difference at that age. I probably looked like I knew much more than I did about what I was doing. I was just trying things out. They were a nice bunch of boys. I remember Robyn. I also remember Galen Strawson, who's now a philosopher.

How did you end up putting on these 'happenings' for public school boys?

It was just a stroke of luck, really. I happened to be at an art school that had a big public school nearby and enough young people there who were interested in trying out some thought experiments. More than my art student colleagues, actually - they weren't as open-minded as some of the kids at Winchester College.

What else are you working on, besides these albums with Beatie?

I always find it hard to remember - it's almost like I have to take that file [out of my head] and put the next one in to even remember it. I'm doing a lot of these light pieces. I've got five on the go and this is the newest one. Look at this! I'm sorry to be so shamelessly enthusiastic about my own work, but I just think this is so lovely. It's so simple, except nobody else thought of it. That is the secret of a lot of things; it's just having confidence in a way, of thinking, 'I think this is going to work.' You could make a version of these to watch on a screen, but it wouldn't have this softness. The most interesting perfumes now are being made with very clever mixtures of organic and synthetic and the best music to me is the same way: you can go from totally organic music to extreme electronica like Kraftwerk and so on. But the most interesting place is somewhere inbetween, where you can use both of them as vocabulary.

Looking to the future, but not throwing out the past completely.

Exactly, exactly. I think the history of modernism is always relearning that lesson, that the past is useful. It's repertoire, if you like, it's vocabulary. But the future is exciting. It's novelty. It's alive.

You seem rather sprightly for someone about to turn seventy-seven. Is that the work keeping you young?

I'm not feeling particularly sprightly today, I have to say. I've had a hard week. But yeah, I love making things so much. I think if you love doing something, it keeps you alive really. It keeps you awake. You don't want to sit in a chair and watch television, you want to make something.

Luminal and Lateral are released on June 6 by Verve

• • •

"WE'VE PLAYED THE SAME GUITAR AT THE SAME TIME!"

Beatie Wolfe on her "restorative" work with Eno

"We never intended to make a number of records, we were just experimenting. But very quickly we realised we'd made thirty pieces. Now it's closer to a hundred. There was a whole array that were more conventional songs, of which Suddenly is an example - that was one of the first things we made. But then there were really weird, noisy, industrial, dark, atmospheric pieces and everything in between.

"Brian was like, 'This is so great, we should put it out.' Luminal became the home for the first collection of songs. But there was this landscape piece called Big Empty Country that originally was eight minutes long. We'd both been listening to it separately, pretty much on the same day while going for a walk, him around here, and me in LA, and we both kept looping it. I got an email from Brian saying, 'I really think it should be longer. I think around eight cycles would be perfect.' And I said, 'It's so weird, I felt exactly the same thing.'

"We've also got these pieces that are in between songs and landscapes. We're both really interested in making songs where there is a voice, but it doesn't feel like it's a personality. Could it somehow be a universal voice?

"I lost my dad about a year ago and I really couldn't do much. But making music with Brian seemed to be the one thing I wanted to do, and it's been an incredibly healing and restorative experience. Brian can work quickly but also very slowly; he can take an inordinate amount of time to go through something other people would just fast-track, or he'll be like, 'Oh, let's move on to something else.' It's been so much fun; we've been each other's mic stands, we've played the same guitar at the same time - I was holding the chords as he was beating it with drumsticks!"

THE ROAD TO LUMINAL & LATERAL

How Eno got to the ambient Western drift of his new albums

FRIPP & ENO: EVENING STAR [Island, 1975] - A more hushed follow-up to the previous year's (No Pussyfooting), the pair's second collaboration found Eno once again processing the guitarist's Frippertronics and dusting them with synth and keys. Side Two, one long piece titled An Index Of Metals, is a doomy, crawling drone, and quite transportative. 9/10

BRIAN ENO, DANIEL LANOIS AND ROGER ENO: APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES & SOUNDTRACKS [EG, 1983] - Ostensibly soundtracking For All Mankind, a documentary utilising lunar and space footage from the Apollo missions, this collaborative record finds Eno at his most captivating. While there are lonely, bleak moments - the opening Under Stars, especially - most of these tracks are blissfully beautiful, with An Ending (Ascent) perhaps Eno's most popular track. 10/10

BRIAN ENO: ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH [Hannibal, 2005] - His first album of songs since Before And After Science twenty-eight years earlier, Eno's twenty-second solo record was built around And Then So Clear, a wistful electro-ballad that presages much of his vocal work since, including some of Luminal. It was also a high point of his Ships performances. 8/10