Brian Eno - C or D?

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.

Please consult the distinguished website download-soundtracks.com -- there are links to both a short version and a complete version. The sharing service used (iirc) is Uploaded, so be ready to defeat gross, swift popups.

Digging in now, I'll have to investigate and see what's what. Some of this is new Eno, some of this is old Eno, some of this is Harold Budd with Eno, a couple orchestrated ones don't really sound like Eno ... it's pretty, regardless.

there's an Eno book called Oblique Music which per my limited Google Books access of it, talks about the project at some length

Huh, thanks for the heads up on that. Is that a collection of essays (by not-Eno)?

is there a thread where we're discussing Reflection? i'm on my second listen. it's definitely work music, i really like it. if you liked Lux you will probably like it a lot.

did anyone (on earth) throw down for the $40 iOS generative app? i'm interested in it less for the visuals (although i'm curious about that) and more for the prospect of having an infinite brian eno song in my inventory at all times.

i'm not paying $40 for a fucking app. $12, maybe.

Adrian Belew's 'flux' app is only $9.99

I liked his old generative app Bloom.

My favorite generative app is one called Gestrument, I've left it going for hours before

(I mean you can def get pretty composerly with setting its parameters, it's taken me an hour or more to get the parameters just so, but it's more generative than not)

I Love Apps

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.

In that vein, his interview in like 1973 with a young music writer Chrissie Hynde is so out of control, can't remember where it ran

http://www.pretenders.org/eno.htm

Yeah, that's a classic. Tbf, 24 or so year old Eno seems like a different animal than current 68 year old Eno, but maybe not?

I Love Apps and Slanderous Gossip

No deets, no justice.

There's lots of weird stuff in his Swollen Appendices autobiography (if you can call it an autobiog) - lots of time spent photoshopping various women's arses.

""Can I show you my pubic area?" (! ! !) He exposes his stomach down to his, ah - about six inches below his Navel. "Absolutely bare! Now I've got this beautiful bare belly! I've got this new Japanese thing, you see and the Japanese don't have much hair on their bodies 'Japanese culture I tip as the next big thing." "

- Momus

Wow at that interview. It really was a different time.

New album sounds like The Ship with all the interesting parts taken out. A workable ambient album then, which isn't a bad thing.

Found myself spinning the new one often and on repeat so I did indeed go for the app. The price point is crazy at first glance but I was thinking about how they might have reached that figure:

• Apple takes 30% off the top
• Chilvers has probably never made decent money off any of the previous Eno apps
• Since it's a composition through Warp, they might want streaming licence money
• It's a prestige 'art object' with pricing that conveys that
• They will sell probably sell one of these for every 10,000 CDs/MP3 they sell even though technically it's infinitely longer than one of those
• It'll probably only be updated to keep it running on newer OSes, so there won't be any opportunity to derive any more revenue from this once it's bought

Whoops forgot another one:

• Warp probably insisted on a high price point so that CD/MP3 sales weren't cannibalized

Regarding Eno's diagrams on the back of Music for Airports, I wonder if he was familiar with the computer algorithm-generated drawings of artist Manfred Mohr? Particularly these two from 1970:

http://www.emohr.com/paris-1971/catalog/Lpage35.jpg
http://www.emohr.com/paris-1971/catalog/Lpage34.jpg

Huh. I've never heard of that guy, but he and Eno seem like they would be best buddies.

Wow, yeah, thanks for pointing Mohr out. I can't see that Eno ever mentioned him but those diagrams are really similar

Played "Here Come the Warm Jets" at a benefit show I was helping to DJ last night
sad lol

There was a Guardian interview with me earlier this week which had as its headline "We've been in decline for 40 years - Trump is a chance to rethink". I didn’t use those words in that way (as reading the article would make clear), and they've been taken (particularly by some American websites) to suggest that I support Trump. Anybody familiar with my views will know that this is not true.

So: may I make something absolutely clear: I think Donald Trump is a complete disaster. And Brexit is a disaster too. That said, what I think is an even greater disaster is that we in the US and the UK - and increasingly the rest of the world - live inside political systems that can produce absurd results like these.

We now see political careers built upon lies and deceit and encouraged by openly biased media organisations, more concerned about revenue and ratings than giving the public real information. It’s this whole system that has to change: not just who leads the government but something deeper and more fundamental in our political and social processes. Democracy assumes an informed public: it doesn't work if the media are corrupt. Changing the faces at the top doesn’t alter anything if the whole machinery beneath them stays the same - the rich become the super-rich, the middle class stagnates and the poor get poorer.

My hope - the only hope really - is that Trump in office will reveal himself for what he really is, and that the public will roundly and unequivocally reject him and everything he stands for - his terrible policies, his jingoism, his arrogance, his childishness, his lies, his prejudices and his small-mindedness. In rejecting Trump we’ll also start to take down the whole malignant media-political structure that so lovingly nurtured him.

As I've written before, I believe that Trump can turn out to be not the beginning of a long decline, but the end of one - the turning point. For 40 years we've been sliding into a deepening pit of inequality, fear-driven nationalism and conservatism, and mostly not noticing. Trump’s presidency could inadvertently change that - not because he's going to do anything right but because his election is energising people to come to grips with the fact that their political system is fundamentally broken and it's time to do something about it. The demonstrations that happened last weekend are a reflection of this new mood.

It would have been better if we hadn't got to this point, but that's where we are. My feeling is that a Clinton presidency (or even a 'remain' vote in Britain), though more comfortable in the short term, wouldn't have dealt with the fundamental problems that beset both our political systems. Trump has proven beyond doubt that the system is broken, so let's fix it.

– Brian

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

I've been listening to Reflection nearly every night for the past month; might have to splurge on the app eventually.

Heard this on the Sonic Realities podcast the other week. If you had told me who it was by, I would never have expected it to sound like this. Just totally joyful.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-INeMspNSQ0

You'd never heard that before? I envy your first exposure.

reflection app repriced to $30.99. I am tempted, even though I found the album version didn't quite connect with me & I'm not sure why; but the concept of an app version of an album is way overdue for him so I feel like I shouldn't neglect it

I didn't find much in 'Bloom' to hold me; while I liked the implementation of variable-length loops capturing the melodies you'd play with the touchscreen, the sounds weren't quite there. although if you hooked it up to a good sound system, there was some nice low end going on that you couldn't hear through an iphone speaker. The music for 'Scape' ended up being my favorite Eno album since 'Shutov Assembly', I've made myself more than a few playlists of scenes in that app, and I love the degree of low end when you play it back through a good sound system. I am fighting the temptation to get a good digital-out capture of 'Scape' so I can play back WAVs more easily on other devices / systems -- certainly there are a variety of captures already on youtube -- but there is something challenging about it being subtly different every time that makes me think that I shouldn't even let myself do that.

haven't listened to the other apps; Chilvers has been busy making a few others as well, all much more reasonably priced

I wish there were some better interviews with him on the subject of his apps, but as long as I'm hanging out and guessing on a message board because I am a huge fan of the subject

Things like 'Bloom' seemed to be all real time synthesis engines; very simple sounds, but with a lot of variability, with notes being triggered instantly in response to touching the touchscreen. But it also leads to a bit of a restricted range of fairly simple sounds. 'Scape' has a lot of guitars & bass lines & things that sound like his older DX7 patches -- so those are obviously not a real time synth engine, but pre-recorded ingredients, loops or files of varying lengths that you turn on and off by dragging those silly icons onto the screen. The background shimmering modal drone I suspect is a synth engine and not pre-recorded, but overall in 'Scape' there's less control over how you trigger these sounds. but the wider variety of them makes for a much more engaging listen and it just sounds a lot more instantly like one of his albums

Listening to the mp3 captures of his 'Generative Music' release -- very un-Eno-like sounds -- sounds like elementary MIDI -- so I'm guessing that was truly a 100% real-time synth engine with no built in DSP, he committed himself to the idea of the project and did without all of his hallmark studio treatments -- he has come a long way since that release

don't know if it'd be possible but i'd LOVE an app version of discreet music, even if the generative nature of it would be less pronounced than scape, bloom, or trope. even minimal variation (and without the fades) would be preferable to just putting the 1975 recording on repeat. i'd rather spend 30 bucks on that than this newer thing.

Often play this 57 minute Eno loop, which is really nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alo3KFRfLvE

Xpost haha yes I thought it was something of an obscurity until I saw the YouTube had nearly half a million views!

This is an obscurity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJas7Q_yXXY

dharmabumguy11 year ago
I like this version better. his voice has that beachy vibe.

baaaaaaarrrrrffffff
that song is so good

my go-to ambient eno is the video version of thursday afternoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riz6AKeBpa0

hah that was in "The Beach" (the DiCaprio movie) and I was like....something isn't right here...