Brian Eno - C or D?

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

I really like it because it's a counter to all that comes before it. You've got Eno's voice, lower and older and chopped/broken up, you've got someone else reading a more or less generative poem, and then you've got Eno singing, straight forward, his voice younger, in a 10 or so year old performance from the vaults of a song from one of his favorite, formative albums that set him down the road that got him to where he is now. Ties everything up nicely, and feels really sort of sad to me. I know Eno's healthy and happy etc., but it's sort of a weirdly swan song move. Perhaps he was moved to include it by Bowie's death? Dunno how much I want to read into it.

Think the release was actually pushed back when Bowie died but agree w all that.

http://theship.ai

“Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia: the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we're permanently and increasingly under threat. At the zenith we realise we have to come down again...we know that we have more than we deserve or can defend, so we become nervous. Somebody, something is going to take it all from us: that is the dread of the wealthy. Paranoia leads to defensiveness, and we all end up in the trenches facing each other across the mud.” - Brian Eno (Feb 2016)

Taking this statement as a starting point and utilizing a bespoke artificial intelligence programme developed by the Dentsu Lab Tokyo, this new generative project explores various historical photographic images and real time news feeds to compose a collective photographic memory of humankind.

Developed especially for this piece, the artificial intelligence employs machine learning techniques to interpret its own ”memories” of the past, associating them with ongoing current events and presenting them in a unique generative film.

The Ship - A Generative Film is an exploration of the music and themes from the new Eno album ‘The Ship’ and forms a journey through modern history to explore the relationship between events present and past. The viewer is invited to view this film and begin an internal discussion about how historical meaning is produced. Does the machine intelligence produce a point of view independent of its makers or its viewers? Or are we - human and machine - ultimately co-creating new and unexpected meanings?

Ultimately the response to Brian Eno’s statement exists within the viewer.

I wish there was an instrumental version of The Ship. I can't tolerate the vocals on there.

yeah i liked them at first but they lose their novelty after a few plays.

recently discovered This

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoDVG--F6s

Love it so much

yeah that's a great one

Agreed about the vox - would def purchase an instrumental version.

BE: Recently, I had to give a formal lecture on the evolution of my work, so I tried to push it back beyond Art School to what you might call the first imaginative enterprises I could remember. The first one on the list I call "making special places." That meant designing houses. Thinking of places I would like to live in. These places always have strange corners and labyrinths and secret rooms. They had streams running through them, or trees growing up through the middle of them, or they would be suspended across chasms, things like that. I was designing houses from the age of about seven. The second one was "rethinking systems". These were not the names I gave them at the time, you understand. I had a train set, and instead of making it into a loop and having the thing running around, I used to build these different structures. Like I'd pile a few books up here and there and the idea was to make the rails so the train would take the most gradual possible route to the ground. So it was another way of using a train set. And the third one I call "mud technology." This game involved me digging a hole and collecting a number of sticks that were not long enough to span it, and then weaving a roof which I would cover with mud. And I'd weave a second roof and cover that with mud as well. And then I would ask my Dad to jump up and down on it. And if it could support my father I considered it a success. Now these three games - I've been thinking about this - were my earliest games, and I haven't really played any other games since. That's all I've done since. It's sort of depressing to think that every idea you've ever had, you had by age four and a half. The "mud technology" one is really about enjoying limitations. "Making special places" is installations, environments or making places special, as with Music for Airports and the concept of ambient music. "Rethinking systems" is using video monitors for lights, or using tape recorders to make nonrepeating music, that sort of thing. When this realization dawned, I was sort of jubilant thinking "God, there's a thread connecting everything I've ever done, and on the other hand I thought "Christ! It's time I had a few new ideas!" (laughter).

I think Laurie Anderson's "Bright Red" is one of my favorite Eno productions that no one ever talks about. Comes smack in the middle of his '90s production peak, nestled amongst "Achtung Baby/Zooropa," "Laid/Wah Wah."