Brian Eno - C or D?

yeah, it's really too bad. i guess i'll wait and see if they ever reissue it as a single LP

Or you could just buy the CD, which sounds great (and is like twelve bucks as opposed to 28)

don't have a CD player

you kids today

Playing "Another Day on Earth" for the first time in a while, much better than I remembered it. I wish he sang more often.

I'm having an Eno moment too. Spent the last few days with Discreet Music and now I'm swimming through his whole discography. I know the rock albums really well and a few of the ambient albums, but there is a ton of stuff he's done that I've just never spent any time with.

Me too - I've been way into his two Cluster collaborations, his abandoned album with Harmonia and "Possible Musics" with Jon Hassell. Oh, and the Berlin trio with Bowie. It's all so ratified, it puts me in such a calm state of mind.

c/ratified/rarified/

I would have pressed this on 3 sides of vinyl with Fickle Sun II & III on the 3rd side.
Less than 22 minutes should be totally fine on a single side without compromising audio quality.

In other news - My favorite Eno record since Thursday Afternoon

I'm still in the 'unsure' camp on this. I've had it on three times and it's sort of passed me by. I know Eno's turned this into an aesthetic, but I find something always sticks, eventually, and I'm waiting for it to happen with this one.

I've been listening to loads recently as well. Mainly Thursday Afternoon, the Cluster records and Before and After Science. On Land is probably still my favourite.

On a tangent, I've been listening to a bunch of Wackies stuff and wondering where that production sound 'came from'. It's not a Scratch, Tubby or Coxsone vibe, and I pin Compass Point as a bit later. Part of me wonders if Eno had anything to do with it - particularly the Berlin and Talking Heads records. Dunno.

Huh, dunno anything about Wackies. US reggae imprint? Where to begin?

I'm very far from an expert but the Samplers (3 volumes, I think) are patchy, but when they're gold, they're gold. Bullwackie's All Stars are great, anything with Horace Andy (the re-released Dance Hall Style is killer, as is the Love Hangover single) and my personal favourite is probably the Junior Delahaye Reggae/Reggae Showcase album. He was an engineer for the label and played drums on a whole bunch of releases (they had the inevitable house band). The production is deep and flat, I suppose, eschewing the traditional reggae warmth for something more tectonic and synthetic. It's no accident that the Basic Channel dudes started to re-release a bunch of Wackies stuff. Rhythm and Sound are something of a tribute act, really (albeit an oblique one).

Worth noting that while The Ship is getting a lot of attention for the "vocal forms" angle, Eno has been at this for a bit now. He's been using vocoder at least as far back as Nerve Net – Another Day on Earthfeatured a handful of tracks using one as well. And the two records with Rick Holland's poetry on Warp—Drums Between the Bells and the Panic of Looking EP (both of which are on Tidal but not Spotify)—have a bunch of interesting treatments of his voice and others.

Worth noting that while the Holland records were pretty roundly dismissed when they came out (including by me as I have a limited capacity for poetry readings), I'm actually finding both to be pretty interesting works and engaging listens – in large part because of the vocal treatments, which range from straight readings intoned by prim English ladies to harmonized vocoder tracks that feel of a piece with some of Laurie Anderson's work, to tracks read, sung and duetted with Eno's own voice which I always enjoy hearing. The music is quite varied as well, from LUX-ish ambient, to Curiosities-oriented dork electronica, to some refreshingly lyrical stuff. A couple of my favorites from those records:

https://youtu.be/fE28jM5Ywls

https://youtu.be/yx288P_Yd7Y

On when I get in last night:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b079z9vx/hardtalk-brian-eno-artist-and-musician

G'damn truncated YT links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE28jM5Ywls&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx288P_Yd7Y&feature=youtu.be

Wackies is/was straight up Bronx by way of Kingston, Jamaica. I doubt they were checking on Eno or TH for direct inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mkhhAQ0z5g

I don't understand the fuss about this album at all. His treated vocoder voice is just terrible, it sounds so asexual, so totally devoid of human feeling. I get the impression some kind of God hovering above is singing here, that is so awful. And melody wise this is very weak again. It totally passes me by. The last album I truly enjoyed by him was On Land, it has been a while...

I don't think it's as simple as vocoder. It's a combo of sort of self generating treatments, robo text and cut ups. Plus his now lower register. Changes it from singing to something stranger, IMO, the same way his old technique of say putting a bass drum through a wah wah was fresh.

I've slowly been working my way chronologically through Eno's discography over the last few weeks and have been amazed at how consistently brilliant it has been. Just got to 1992's Nerve Net and now you can disregard my first sentence. Woof!

don't understand people's problem with that album. I thought it was thrilling at the time and I still like most of it. I guess I prefer the My Squelchy Life version more now but only because it's less familiar.

and don't forget the Shutov Assembly came out at almost the same time, and that's a beautiful album.

whoah @ Wackies doc! thx Captain!

I like nerve net a lot

whoah @ Wackies doc! thx Captain!

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, May 18, 2016 8:56 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah!

Squelchy >>> Nerve Net. That RSD thing last year was a revelation

I still think Another Day On Earth is a masterpiece. Why does no one else realize this??

15:30 into Fickle Sun (I) you can hear a text-to-speech program recite an email disclaimer...what the hell?

Now I'm really poring over this...

I can imagine how Nerve Net might have sounded exciting at the time but listening with 2016 ears, I don't think it has aged well at all. Reminds me a lot of Mani Plank Neumeier's Zero Set, which I like far more. And "Ali Click" is just embarrassing. I haven't heard the Squelchy Life version.

his floppy disc-issued generative music album from 1996 is pretty unheralded. written for window 95, it would render a different version (within the set parameters) of each song every time you played it. music is lovely, heavy SAW-era aphex vibes....and has a very particular outside of time feel to it. there's a CD bootleg of some of it but someone put a bunch of freshly rendered versions on YT last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptB6bxCGTv4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEQ8aeyNpSQ

p.s. best wackies session is keith hudson "playing it cool"

xxxpost You're welcome!!

In return for borrowing the drums for "Ali Click," Eno did this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfa7Y0oEkl0

Good Nerve Net era interview here:

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/audio93a.html

THE SHIP IS SOOOOOO GOOOOOD!!

I like Brian Eno's 'The Ship' a lot except when he reads that poem I always expect him to say 'then welcome, ooh voof welcome, in Blue Jam'

That's not Eno, iirc.

peter serafinowicz?

Yeah, reading generated lyrics.

it's peter serafinowicz?? no way. thought i recognised the voice.

should've done it as Brian Butterfield imo

I still think Another Day On Earth is a masterpiece. Why does no one else realize this??

Took me a while to get on board at the time but yeah I think it's one of his very best. Still not sold on The Ship

I highly recommend playing two of the Generative Music 1 videos linked upthread simultaneously

I love the first part of the ship but the poem is silly and the song is so obviously a velvets song (I've not heard the original) that it kind of rubs me the wrong way.

I don't consider myself a VU expert or anything but what other song of theirs sounds like "I'm Set Free"? Or more to the point, Eno's cover of it?

How have you not heard the original?!

I actually didn't know it well. But when I heard it, I didn't think Eno's version sounded particularly faithful.

I'm just not a big VU fan although listening to the Eno cover, you can hear that the original has all the hallmarks of a Velvets ballad in the Candy Says/Sunday Morning vein. I like those songs fine, but something about including it as a cover feels out of place on this album as it's so very clearly a VU song.

Also he recorded it like 11 years ago. Maybe he just had a space on the album he needed to fill? I like it btw, but then I love the song.

yeah it's nice on its own, and i like the idea that he rounds off this epic ambient record with a sweet song, it just doesn't feel quite part of the work, just kind of tacked on at the end rather than something which was covered or composed especially for the project.

hm, it feels like a natural conclusion to this record to me