Brian Eno's Another Green World (6 page)

Eno’s lack of formal musical training made him more predisposed to view the studio, too, as a sort of synthesizer, a way to build new sounds. “The documentary aspect is part and parcel of most recording studios,” said Harold Budd. “You perform something and it’s captured, and it’s recorded and pressed and put out in the world. The part with Eno was just the opposite. You use the studio in order to get the sounds that are going to be captured, you know what I mean? It just put a reversal on it.”

Eno may have been a studio maven and a synthesist, but he wasn’t much of a gearhead. “Some producers go in, and they say, ‘Have you got the Lexicon 224 echo?’” Eno said in a 1981 interview with Jim Aikin in
Keyboard Wizards
. “‘Have you got this, have you got that? Oh, you haven’t got that? I can’t work here.’ Suddenly their world crumbles because you don’t happen to have the new Eventide D949 phaser, or whatever it is, and they can’t envisage working without this. But when I go into the studio, I look around and see what is there and I think ‘Okay, well, this is now my instrument. This is what I’m going to work with.’ Another example would be when you’re faced with a guitar that only has five strings. You don’t say, ‘Oh God, I can’t play anything on this.’ You say, ‘I’ll play something that only uses five strings, and I’ll make a strength of that. That will become part of
the skeleton of the composition.’ That’s really what I mean, that any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.

“So, that’s one aspect of the untrained musician thing. The other aspect is this: I believe strongly that recording studios have created a different t y pe of musician and a different way of making music … [when] I make a record, very often I work rather like a painter. I put something on, and that looks nearly right, so I modify it a little bit. Then I put something else on top of that, and that requires that the first thing be changed a little bit, and so on. I’m always adding and subtracting. Now this is obviously a very different way of working from any traditional compositional manner; it’s much more like a painting. So it’s clearly a method that is also available to the non-musician. You don’t have to have traditional technical competence to work that way.”

Basing Street, where
Another Green World
was recorded, was a deconsecrated church that had been converted into an impressive suite of recording studios. It was established by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and mainly recorded Island recording artists. A number of heavyweight acts recorded there—Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Rolling Stones, and so on—along with
Roxy Music, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, and many more.

“It was an old church, of quite sort of big dimensions, that housed two studios and a little copying facility and an apartment,” remembered Sage. “The main studio where we did most of the work was the main congregation part of the church, which had very high ceilings. The main foyer was a very big space. The main control room was like a gallery overlooking that area … we used to go down to the crypt, the lower bowels of the church; that was more a regularsized studio. It was a cozier sort of environment, with facilities to eat; you went down the stairs to Chris Blackwell’s private flat that he would let the artists use when they were in town.”

It seemed fitting that a converted church was where Eno first got to test out his budding theories of the studio as a musical instrument. In a sense, this new way of working in the studio transferred certain godlike powers to the role of producer. “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound —you handle it,” wrote Eno in his essay “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” published in
Down Beat
in 1983.

Churches, like studios, can also be thought of as musical instruments. Old stone cathedrals generate enormous amounts of reverb, lending the feeling
of everlasting sound. In R. Murray Schafer's classic book
The Soundscape
, Schafer wrote: “Anyone who has heard monks chanting plainsong in one of these old buildings will never forget the effect: the voices seem to issue from no point but suffuse the building like perfume.” In the book
Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960
, Peter Doyle explored how the medieval cathedral was a resonating musical instrument that could literally add itself to the voices of its congregation. “This notion would later find an important direct rhyme in twentieth century practice,” wrote Doyle, “when Brian Eno (and others) would come to see the recording studio as a kind of musical instrument … But to return to the medieval church, not only was it a resonating musical instrument; sometimes it also possessed apparently ‘magical’ properties that were a direct result of its reverberant character: ‘a mass by Fairfax—the medieval organist of St. Albans—was composed with
a fourth part supplied by the church
. Even if this is no more than legend, it shows that the building was recognized as an instrument.’”

Another Green World
is the first Eno record which credits “Brian Eno,” not the otherworldly, vaporous “Eno’’ he had been referred to on previous records. It’s also the first Eno album that gives an explicit credit to the Oblique Strategies cards on the back cover sleeve.

Eno and his artist friend Peter Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation— particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and
that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.

The most clear antecedent to the Oblique Strategies cards was John Cage’s adoption of the ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching, to make musical decisions. Some other related concepts to the Oblique Strategies were the Fluxus movement’s fanciful and inventive “Fluxkits” and Fluxus boxes—one particularly inspired example of these boxes, by George Brecht, was called the “water yam” box. The boxes often contained cards with witty sayings or specific instructions.

Another possible predecessor to the Oblique Strategies cards was the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s “Distant Early Warning” cards, issued in 1969. Some of McLuhan’s cards, which were printed on a regular deck of poker cards, had quotes from other thinkers (one card read “Propaganda is any culture in action”—Jacques Ellul); others had classic McLuhan quotes (the ten of diamonds read “The medium is the message”); a king card read “In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinated idiot’’; the nine of spades sported the ominous warning “With data banks we are taped, typed and scrubbed.”

Cage’s I Ching methodology was graceful and complex, and McLuhan’s Distant Early Warning
cards bordered on plain goofy—almost like fortunecookie fortunes from some bizarro media-studies universe. The Oblique Strategies cards, meanwhile, had a specific, utilitarian purpose. The quirky cards were designed to help artists and musicians get out of creative ruts and loosen up in the studio. Each Oblique Strategy had a different aphorism: “Accept advice,” read one. “Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events,” read another. “Humanize something free of error.”

Percy Jones had strong memories of the Oblique Strategies cards being shuffled and drawn during the recording sessions on various occasions. “The first time he did it, I thought we were going to have a game of poker or something,” Jones said, chuckling. “I had no idea what was going on.”

While the cards could be useful tools, the instructions on the cards were indeed followed to the letter—sometimes with potentially disastrous results. “If the cards foretold that something had to be erased or turned upside down, they were,” said Barry Sage. If a song was being worked on intensely, and a card that was drawn suddenly proclaimed that the tapes had to be deleted, they were.

Eno’s playfulness in the studio was key. “My quick guide to Captain Eno: play, instinct/intuition, good taste,” wrote Robert Fripp in an e-mail. “Eno
demonstrated his intelligence by concentrating his interests away from live work; and his work persists, and continues to have influence. The key to Brian, from my view, is his sense of play. I only know one other person (a musician) who engages with play to the same extent as Brian. Although Eno is considered an intellectual, and clearly he has more than sufficient wit, it’s Brian’s instinctive and intuitive choices that impress me. Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower.”

Eno is popularly characterized as a brainy studio boffin, an egghead theorist and solemn architect of “sonic landscapes”; meanwhile, his friends and collaborators describe him as lighthearted and fun to be around, with a relaxed, anything-goes attitude— both in the studio and in life. How to reconcile these two poles? Leo Abrahams, who worked with Eno on a number of recent recording projects, said that he’d observed Eno working on two different levels. “When I see him work on things that are on the more ambient levels of what he does—like the album
Neroli
or certain things that were on his last record, or the J. Peter Schwalm stuff—that’s when you’d almost see that reputation of the boffin, if you like, being justified, because there are certain things he knows how to do with instruments and effects that nobody else knows how to do,” Abrahams said. “It’s amazing
watching him fashion that; I think that’s a lot closer to his visual work, which again is extremely painstaking. But then again, when I see him working on songs— more song-based records—he’s really hands-on, and not at all precious about sounds. He likes things to be distorted and he likes things to sound really rough, and he does lots of things that an engineer will say ‘That’s wrong, you can’t do that!’ He likes to sing with the speakers blaring out, so you hear the music in the background of all the vocal tracks and stuff, just because he doesn’t like using headphones. It’s a deceptively slapdash approach, if you know what I mean. It’s quite rock and roll, and it’s not what you’d expect from the person who made things like
Music for Airports
or
77 Million Paintings
. A similar thing was said by Rhett Davies; he described to me a few of the situations of what it was like in the studio, and it just sounds like a huge amount of fun, basically, and very experimental and not so boffin-esque and not so painstaking.”

Eno mixed it up in the studio at around the time of
Another Green World
in other ways. “Sometimes you’d be into something really intense, you’d be working on a piece of music and discussing it, and then he’d say: ‘Anybody want some cake?’” said Percy Jones. “Eno would pull out a cake and he’d cut up slices of cake, and everyone would eat some cake, and then we’d forget all about the creative process!”

At other times, Eno could be found recording in odd places, such as the stairwells of Basing Street Studios. Sometimes he would be preparing pianos à la John Cage, stuffing the hammers and strings with all sorts of metal odds and ends; at other times he and Rhett Davies would be constructing giant makeshift tape loops in the control room. “I had to duck under this tape,” remembered Jones. “They had a tape loop going around the whole room—it was probably 20 feet on a side—you’re talking about an 80-footlong tape loop. There’s no way you can have a loop that long on a machine, so they just made their own supports, just pencils stuck in the corner, and … I can’t even remember what it was playing; I was struck by the size of the tape loop. He was doing a lot of stuff with sound, well before synths really caught on, certainly before the digital revolution.”

Eno used other offbeat tactics in the studio. “I tried all kinds of experiments, like seeing how few instructions you could give to the people in order to get something interesting to happen,” Eno said in an interview with the
NME
in 1976. “For example, I had a stopwatch and I said, ‘Right, we’ll now play a piece that lasts exactly 90 seconds and each of you has got to leave more spaces than you make noises,’ something like that, and seeing what happened from it.”

Eno was also fond of drawing out various mathematical charts for some of the performers to use—charts that didn’t ascribe to any conventional musical notation. “I can certainly remember Phil Collins, especially, being told to drum in a mathematical way that Brian laid out,” Sage recalled. One particular mathematical strategy apparently made Collins so aggravated that he began flinging things across the room. “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers,” remembered Jones. “‘Percy you play C-sharp,’ or whatever, to specific numbers. Then he started a metronome or some kind of click—follow this piece of paper and play these specific notes against this correct number. It started out sort of okay, and then people started to lose their way and it sounded more bizarre, and at one point Phil was throwing empty beer cans across the room to hit a bicycle. I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else.”

Eno’s whimsical studio experiments continued apace on future albums. The masterful ambient record
On Land
, released in 1982, took over three years to finish, and Eno’s flights of conceptual fancy would sometimes drive his collaborators crazy. In an
article on Brian Eno in
People
in 1983, Arthur Lubow noted:

Musicians can find him maddening to work with. “He spent three days twirling hoses,” recalls one disenchanted instrumentalist. “One day everyone was playing with gravel in little boxes, and he would say, ‘That’s a lovely sound.’ Another time he brought back a set of slides from the Museum of Natural History which he projected on a sheet as we were playing, so we’d really feel like part of the environment. Everyone would stand around in the dark watching a slide of a monkey.”