Brian Eno - C or D?

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."

I'm a pretty big fan of that record. Some of her best songs are on that – "Poison," "Puppet Motel," "Freefall," "Night in Baghdad" are all great and Eno's production plays a pretty big role in it. As do Joey Baron's drums.

Yeah I love that record, the Free Fall song, the rain/flood song, the sparse sound, everything except the Lou duet

also has her lou reed duet "in our sleep" which is one of my all time favorite laurie anderson songs

haha OK I guess I need to give that another chance, it's probably been approx. 2 decades since I heard it

("Muddy River" is the rain/flood song I was trying to recall earlier, my favorite)

I either forgot or never realized that this was an Eno production

He was interviewed on Bbc News Channel's Hard Talk last night. I managed to channel surf right at the right time and caught it.
Can't remember why he was topical enough to be on there. But interview was interesting enough.

he has an album coming out. what did he talk about?

Ususal stuff to some degree, Bowie ,Roxy.
TH ei dea of getting away from the auteur which had the interviewer bringing him onto the subject of the people he'sd collaborated with who could possibly be thought of as genius. To which he replied by talking about Scenius which I think was about the artist responding to the environment he's surrounding himself with or at l;east the other ideas flowing through it.

I think I turned on and he was talking about a visual performance he'd set up for a festival in Australia where he'd set up a computer programme to combine images randomly and project them on what appeared to be the Sydney opera house. He talked about having seen and chosen the elements involved but having no control over the combination so not having the level of input expected. & therefore not being 100% responsible for the resulting moments of beauty.

Think I'm not remembering everything. But thought if i said it was on it might allow some people to check it out on iplayer.
Not sure if those interviews get repeated otherwise. Did notice that loads of that Channel gets repeated even months later when I was watching it heavily over the late summer.BUt not sure about Hardtalk.

Have a female friend who worked on that Australia thing. You know all those stories about Eno getting more play than Ferry back in the day, being a general horndog, etc? Hoo, boy. Allegedly this might still be the case.

Given what's on "Bright Red" and "Outside," I'd love to hear an entire Eno-produced album of Joey Baron just playing drums.

Need more deets, PP. After all, he is supposedly happily married.

Ooh yeah spill it

That was gross. I'm sorry. I'm curious now that a hint was dropped but that was a crass way to express it. Please use an oblique strategy to spill the details that are spillable.

do people think he kept all his sex in his hair or something?

My eno jam of late has been this 60+ track thing which purports to be the complete soundtrack to The Lovely Bones. Some of it is old Eno and some of it is Eno influenced but by the film's sound editors, but it's a great listen.

huh where can you get that? sounds intersting.