Brian Eno - C or D?

If you're not prepared to show us your warts, don't publish a diary.

yeah that's fair, I was just surprised that so much relatively unflattering stuff got left in

26th August:
Pissed into an empty bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss', so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing.

LOL, yes I remember that bit. I always remember his Top Tip on how not to forget to save stuff you're working on on a computer, which was put a book on your head and every time it falls off, save. I've never done it though, but I'm not convinced Eno has either.

has he mentioned the book since or has he kind of disowned it?

I'd be surprised if he disowned it tbh

Heh xp everyone remembers the piss-drinking bit if nothing else, it is one of the top Brian Eno piss anecdotes (there are a few because eno is a piss guy)

I haven't read it in years but I don't remember him coming out of it too bad.

It’s mostly fine, lots of oh I could spend New Years Eve with Bono in Sarajevo but I’m just not feeling it, would love to shag his wife though, maybe next year? kinda stuff. He reveals he’s never been paid any royalties for Are We Not Men? Somewhere on ILM sexyDancer I think called him a “flouncing housewife” with basically no responsibilities and who’s never held to account and that seems accurate to me.

Also worth noting he writes a lot about the War Child charity which turned out to be a total scam a couple years later. He also gets rolled with some kind of elaborate gym membership after a lady trainer praises him. He published a diary too late imo, he’s mostly just a clueless rich asshole at this point, more than 20 years ago now...

Somewhere on ILM sexyDancer I think called him a “flouncing housewife” with basically no responsibilities and who’s never held to account and that seems accurate to me.

this sounds pretty sexist to me; to me he sounds like petulant (and gross) adolescent who hasn't realized that his every thought does not need to be seen/heard

yeah sorry, search isn’t turning up the post I was thinking of so I’m probably misremembering, apologies to sexyDancer, your simile is much more accurate for sure

it's fine i just don't like the feminization of his behavior, which seems textbook brat to me. that is the word to comes to my mind at least.

sexydancer doesn't post anymore does he?

Was War Child “a total scam”? Or was there some corruption in later years? Not sure why this would be a knock regardless as this article suggests the latter and that Pavarotti and Eno both resigned as a result:

https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2017/apr/10/whistleblower-war-child-need-anonymity-corruption

Anyway, I loved Swollen Appendices BTW – for many of the reasons many seem to be criticizing it. The warts, the admitted ass-love, the dilettante-ism, the risotto recipes and doting dad stuff (doesn’t he take baths with his young daughters?). This was a pretty active time for him as well (Passengers, Wobble, Outside, early James sessions for Whiplash).

My favouritest part of the Eno diary when I was a teenager was when he railed against Saul from James and his inability to stick with a single good idea

I don't know why I liked that so much! I think I just wanted to be in James, instead of Saul

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the way Bowie worked on "Outside"

So, the Music For Installations box...

Gorgeous throughout (unsurprisingly), quite varied in tone and intent (surprisingly), included book more or less distills Eno's whole worldview into a lovingly written record of his experiments with light and sound... anybody else enjoying?

Your fellow davey has listened a few times. V much enjoyed

Dumb plexiglass thing down to £182 from Amazon Italy for a short while (still £330 in the UK apparently)

https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B07B627BXH/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=superdeluxe0d-21&linkId=576ac644ae89733e362c180a400f6ab8

meanwhile i am listening to it on Spotify for, like, pennies per hour

damn at first i thought it was a link to some big plexiglass thing that turns your room into the No Pussyfooting cover

I've been a huge Brian Eno fan since I was maybe 16 or so, high school, so closing in on 30 years now. I've listened to all of his stuff, tons of times. I love everything. I'm a completist. I have books, videos, apps, Oblique Strategies cards. And yet - confession - tonight was the first time I put on "Music for Airports" and, as best I can remember, truly enjoyed every last second. Utterly entrancing. Just sitting in the living room with my daughter, reading books, and it just ... clicked. I never disliked the album before, and once even watched Bang on a Can do it, but it always just sort of eluded me. Which is oddly apropos! But tonight - totally magical. Weird.

I played MFA for Chris Dahlen when we were maybe 16 and he just started tooling on it after about 5 minutes. Pretty sure he likes it now too.

It's a very special and unique thing, still.

xpost (What is Chris up to? We went to college together!)

I know! One reason I mentioned it. He’s Pitchfork emeritus at this point, lives in New England. Great dude.

I am a big brian eno fan as well and always found "music for airports" really boring whenever i tried to listen to it which wasn't very often. maybe three times. so i am still waiting for that epiphany. only problem. i have to listen to the bloody thing. and there is so much other good music out there to which i have to listen before. right now i am realky falling in love with the latest markus stockhausen (eternal voyage) which reminds me a lot of oregon in their best days.

It is boring ... but only if you want it to be!

Really? I think I don't want it to be anything. Somehow to me it has not opened yet. Tell me what was the difference when you listened to it in the past and now. Where does the magic suddenly come from? I hear the natural beauty of "On Land" but "Music for Airports" to me just seems like a piece of generative music.

it's not nearly as boring as Thursday Afternoon, Neroli, or Reflection.

I listened to The Pearl before bed last night, a favorite.

xpost Hmm, good question. I think it's that starting (obviously) with 1/1 in the past has thrown off my listening. It's significantly longer than the other tracks, which makes it a together nut to crack, but for whatever reason this time, once I made it over the first, familiar plinking piano hump, the second half of the track revealed some new stuff to me, like the more traditional synth washes, which for whatever reason I never really glommed on to before. After that, the other three tracks were (for lack of a better phrase) easy listening, prettier and pretty simple, with their own beautiful synths and choral bits. I was able to get lost in the subtle melodies and textures as opposed to focusing on the austere almost chamber piece like nature of the whole thing (which of course is what Bang on a Can exploited so well).

I think "On Land" is a good thing to bring up, because I find that album, pretty as it is, much darker and more menacing (same with "Apollo," despite its blatant beauty), which in a way makes it more accessible. Or at least more overtly "interesting." His much later generative stuff, or even his asleep-at-the-DX7 stuff like Neroli and Thursday Afternoon, is more boring and invisible, sort of by design, I imagine, but both are firmly from his installation phase, with them devised explicitly as background support for visuals or other related concepts.

Thanks for the explanation. Actually I always thought the point of MfA was not to listen to it like you listen to more "normal" music like AGW for example. Instead it is just supposed to be an aural setting which originally was supposed to be played at the airport when you wait for your airplane to arrive or take off but which you actually do not hear consciously. So in a way your experience does not seem to be intended.

Apollo is easily top ten Eno. It's my go-to writing soundtrack.

xpost I was half joking when I said his ambient albums are boring, but only if you want them to be. I don't think, especially of his formative ambient works, that any of them are meant to be strictly background. His conceptual breakthrough was indeed making listening optional. You can let them float around aimlessly in the background, like apparitions, and ignore them completely, or you can pay attention and embrace the compositional aspects of it, however incidental the composition may be. That's certainly true of the Harold Budd records. Obviously Budd has a more formal classical education, but at the same time those albums can work well as background, too, if you need them to be. Or want them to be.

I think the Harold Budd album "Plateaux of Mirrors" is totally different from MfA and has not a lot to do with ambient. It is not neutral or zen like ambient usually is. Already the warped, trembling piano sound has got this nostalgic quality (like Boards of Canada's analog synthesizer) music. And there is sentiment in form of melody in that music. It immediately touches me or something inside me. Whereas MfA seems like an exercise in music programming without the power of emotion which is intentional of course.

What do you think of Discreet Music?

it never clicked with me. only the pachelbel side did something to me but that has nothing to do with eno. i must admit that i haven't listened to it for more than thirty probably even 35 years. for me that album together with steve reich's drumming was the incarnation of minimal music. i had read about it and was intrigued. but in the end i was disappointed. especially phil glass turned out to be rubbish. always the same pattern, too nice sounding, very trite in the end.

It's been a while, but I recall years ago finding John Cage's book Silence very helpful in understanding this stuff. But in the end a lot of it is so conceptual that I agree the music can gets overrated. There are really no words that capture Another Green World, but at least the gist of the ambient records I think can be conveyed, even if it's just a matter of invoking its mushy New Age descendants.

Like - thinking out loud here - the sleeve notes and diagrams of some of those ambient albums are in a way as important as the music itself.

Ambient music is food

"Discreet Music" is awesome.

side a is my favorite eno and one of my favorite things, ever, really. it calms me and makes me feel warm. it colors my surroundings with love. it's a really important piece of sound for me.

cosign on those last two posts

(not disagreeing that ambient music is food, i just haven't tried it yet)

When I say "Discreet Music" I mean Side 1, so cosign on those last three posts, including my own. FOur posts.

On a different note, and one I’ve debated discussing on ILM, how do people feel about this?

I was a huge Brian Eno fan in my early 20s and a kind friend in museum admin managed to get me tickets to a q&a session with him. After, I asked her if it was amazing to work with him and she told me no, that he’d slapped her on the ass during the walk through.

— Sarah Rebecca Kessler (@moveablejaw) August 5, 2018

Guys suck. A handy thing to remember.

I've got most of Eno's albums and there's none that bores me. At the moment I'm listening to 'Drawn From Life' (with J Peter Schwalm) for the first time in ages, I like it much better than I remebered it was.
Always thought 'Airports' was amazing, but my absolute Eno ambient highlights are 'On Land' and the two with Harold Budd.

His last couple have been surprisingly entrancing!

I would be neither surprised nor especially chagrined that Brian Eno slapped someone on the ass -- he seems like exactly the sort of person who would do that. Cheeky cheeky! Not that it's acceptable, but based on everything I have read about the man leads me to believe he spent decades being weird/inappropriate and overtly pervy. Now he is old and probably still slaps asses from time to time.

i find this kind of speculation - which might have a certain degree of plausibility - about someone you do not know personally very problematic. additionally it does not add or subtract anything from the music.