What happens if the money runs out and the recording studios close down? How can you make electronic music with a technology that's been switched off?I wouldn't care if the recording studios were closed. I'd do something else.
What?
I don't have to be a musician. I could do whatever the situation demanded. For instance, in that cupboard behind where Nancy's sitting I have a box of 160 aromatic oils.
Oils?
They're essences. I mix them up...I wouldn't be at all unhappy if that was all I was left to work with for awhile.
You make music with smells?
Well, I've always been interested in smells. I have a very good sense of smell.
What are these tubes?
They're what I use to mix the oils.
Do you mix them with the same effect as mixing sounds, or like a painter mixes hues?
There's no vocabulary for it. There have been many attempts to map the smell spectrum, but there's just no...(Sniffing sound) 'English Lily'. Try it?
Mmm.
I'll give you a couple of strange smells, you want to smell something?
What's this one?
Egypt, I think.
Well, Cairo. I was overwhelmed by the smell there..'Shit and piss and rosewater'.
Sure. Actually this is a mixed essence, it's got a number of flowers in it. It's nice though, isn't it? Now this one...See, my secret ambition is to make a perfume for black women--
(Sniff) That's a great smell. Jeez, that's...
You have to see that one in context.
What context--Africa? It smells like...hmm. Well, it's definitely a bass note, you know.
There are some sorts of correlations...but I don't force a relationship--I just see what happens.
That's an art of course.
I have always tend to regard (sniff--sniffing at his perfume for Mm d'Afrique) my behavior, and in fact all of every else's behavior, as artistic behavior. It's a game.
Are the possibilities limitless in this game?
The greater you understand the structure of something, the more amazed you'll be at the tiniest movement within it. In that sense the possibilities are limitless.
(Sniff) And what's the point of the game?
Well, the species as a whole entertains fringe genes, and recessive genes--so should we maintain our varieties in life, for all sorts of possible situations, scenes. It's a discipline of its own, doing that. For example...Jon Hassell is a trumpet player, and he studied Indian singing with Pandit Pran Nath for six years in order not to sing better but to play the trumpet better. Of course he's evolved a unique style. And it's a playing discipline I know nothing about...I don't even play any instruments...
But your voice is an instrument.
I'm not sure I can play that now. I'm not at home in my voice anywhere near the way an African singer is, for example. In Africa the whole use of the voice is very easy and exploratory in a playful kind of way. It's not just rampant spontaneity. Some people think that African music is these guys banging drums and yelling. It's not like that at all. It's a very tight system hat they're working within, and the degree of actually innovation they permit themselves is very, very small.
Are you systems as tight?
Oh, we don't have in the Western world any systems that are as interesting. I don't think the operatic system is interesting. Pop musics haven't really developed a system at all. In fact, what is interesting in rock & roll is that nobody has a clue...(sound of glass clinking) Here now, this is my pride and joy, this little number.
Oh, this is...amazing. Blue!
If you were mixing that one with oakmoss, for instance, you'd need something like 100 parts of oakmoss to one part of that. I use it just to give an edge.
Man!
It's powerful. But actually...it's this one (burrowing for an even tinier bottle in the bottom of the case), this is my favorite one. I never open this (He open it).
This is...hollow. Is it a fruit, in fact?
Spikenard is what it is. It's a bush. It grows in a peculiar places and it's almost unobtainable now. You can't get it.
(More nose work) But there's cucumber...?
Yes.
I think it smells unobtainable.
There's a story I must tell you. About 15 or 20 years ago, there's a flower which is a substitute for the very expensive oil that comes from a gland of the musk deer, suddenly this flower spontaneously all over the world stopped smelling. It just stopped smelling.
Did it stop smelling, or did mankind's ability to smell it stop?
Ah, that's the question. But we just can't determine the answer to it, you see.
Brian, do you share this thing with anybody else, or is it entirely solo...
I do make smells for people now and again. Like sometimes I'm with a woman and I can suddenly think of a smell that I hope might be right for her. I made a very successful one recently, I was very pleased with it.
Can you divine a fragrance for my friend Nancy? Or do you have to know people really well for that?
I have to actually sleep with them. Well...maybe this is a smell Nancy might like. In fact there's two that you might like. (Glass tubes tinkle. He produces two amber colored phials).
(Nancy sniffs) The olfactory is so direct.
That's right, that's absolutely right. (He applies in small circles an oily touch of essence to the front of her left hand.) You know that certain smells connect directly with the brain, in that the molecules of the smell itself actually enter the brain. (Now a dab from the second phial on her right wrist.) Our other senses have a synaptic connections, interpretive mechanisms, but smell is different, it's a different thing altogether. Oops, sorry about that...
The essences glisten on her skin. Nancy flicks her hand to waft the odors, conjuring up more of this madness, igniting the darkness with totally unknown scents...
That's right, you should smell them together.
You smell like forest Nancy.
I find these things reshuffle themselves continuously. (His nose leads his face in a smooth, dreamy glide.) Ah, that's sexy, that smell!
Now Eno has suspended his nose above an half empty bottle, this is clearly his final resting place. All is well and the tape in my machine is about one half minuet from running out.
Oakmoss. This is the one. This is my Mangbetu smell. I had a photograph once of a Mangbetu woman, the Mangbetu deform their heads so they get very cortical crowns, and in the picture she had this big, big hairstyle around it, and lips that were pouted, and her breasts were like...toing! toing!...just beautiful, what a great photo. I has a smell for her immediately (sniffing the bottle), I sense a smell for her. And this is it...