gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (09/25/85)
The upcoming issue of OPtion magazine will feature a lengthy version of an interview with Brian Eno that was originally published in SPIN. In order to go along with it, I was asked to pen a quick article about the Obscure Records, which have shown up in news articles from time to time. Just to remind you of what an interesting lot they are, Here's the article that'll run with ENO. Even if you know the albums, note the last paragraph pointer to a really fine book. After that, back to Grieg and the Exploited..... When most of us use Eno's name as an adjective, we probably do so in order to refer to a certain quality of recorded sound. For most of us, "Enoesque" quite likely has to do with the heavily treated instruments and explicitly artifi- cial acoustic spaces that has characterized his work from Here Come the Warm Jets to his more recent collaborative work with Dan Lanois, Roger Eno, and Michael Brooks. Eno has said many times that he views most of his contribution to the art of recording as regarding the use of the record- ing studio as a compositional tool. While it's tempting to think of this only in terms of the sound of Eno's record- ings, there's also another emphasis built in to his work that receives comparatively little attention: his commitment to process and Systems Theory. For all intents and pur- poses, Eno is a hardball systems theorist whose real talent lies in making the music of process an accessible and beau- tiful proposition. In that sense, Brian Eno is a very much a product of the artistic tradition he came out of. He is part of a largely British collection of artists whose interest is in many ways similar to John Cage's composi- tional methods, but who took a very different view of the relationship between raw materials and process. To put it simply, Eno and his fellow artist/composers shared a similar interest in generative systems and "aleatory" (or chance) in music with John Cage, but they chose as their sources material that was either more explicitly "musical" or material that would produce music that would call atten- tion more to the process which produced it than the expecta- tions of the listener. The Obscure Music label was founded by Eno in 1974 as an outlet for experimental artists, and the entire catalog consists of 10 records (see discography below)-all of which Eno produced-which include the work of thirteen different artists. Some of the Obscure catalog (Brian Eno's own Discreet Music, the first Penguin Cafe Orchestra album, and Harold Budd's The Pavilion of Dreams) has remained very popular. A few of the original Obscure artists (John Adams, Michael Nyman, and Harold Budd) have become well-known names in the new music community, and oth- ers (Like David Toop) appear less frequently on various com- pilation recordings. A few of those ten albums (Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, and Michael Nyman's Decay Music-the first "Ambient" recording) have become as legendary as they were unavailable, and still more of them are positively, uh...obscure. Taken together, they comprise a relatively unknown aspect of Eno's career-an effort on his part to make the approaches to making music that influenced him available. In retrospect, they comprise a kind of "snapshot" of the British avant-garde in the mid- dle seventies, and are still a lively source of ideas for the adventurous listener. Obscure Music was a pretty apt title for these records for quite a while, too. It used to be that you had to haunt used record stores for weeks to find a loose copy of some of these. But no longer-Editions EG reissued the entire Obscure Music catalog in Britain in the spring of this year, and they're a lot easier to find. So here's a listing of the Obscure catalog, together with a very brief capsule sum- mary of what you'll find on each album. I include these admittedly sketchy descriptions to serve as a kind of pointer to you if you're interested in checking individual albums out in more detail. Here they are in (more or less) alphabetical order: _G_a_v_i_n _B_r_y_a_r_s, _T_h_e _S_i_n_k_i_n_g _o_f _t_h_e _T_i_t_a_n_i_c: Gavin Bryars is the conceptual daddy of a lot of the Obscure series: His music shows up on three separate recordings, and he arranged both the flip side to Discrete Music and Tom Philips' "opera" IRMA. You've probably heard of this, if only for the famous Jesus' Blood: A simple tape loop of an old hobo singing a simple Gospel song with good pitch and eccentric timing while an orchestral ensemble enters one at a time and gamely tries to follow his idiosyncratic pacing. One of those recordings that packs much more of an emotional wallop than description allows for. The flip side is more typi- cally like Bryars' other work: a dense set of historical events, coincidences, and found recordings that Bryars maps onto a set of spare, almost Satie-like arrangements for strings-the sound of which-like the Titanic itself-gently glides into an echoey, watery murk. _H_a_r_o_l_d _B_u_d_d, _T_h_e _P_a_v_i_l_i_o_n _o_f _D_r_e_a_m_s: Although his "Ambient" collaborations with Brian Eno first brought him wide atten- tion, there's pretty ample evidence here that Budd had his stuff down long before he got interested in what the inside of a piano sounded like with a delay line on it. The ear- lier music on this album is built around lush chordal washes of sound from a piano, a celeste, and a flock of marimbas wrapped around a simple, sustained melody carried by either a wordless vocal or a saxophone. This is one of the Obscure releases that came back into print when his work with Eno became well-known, and has remained popular. _J_o_h_n _C_a_g_e/_J_a_n _s_t_e_e_l_e, _V_o_i_c_e_s _a_n_d _I_n_s_t_r_u_m_e_n_t_s: This record is an interesting set of very early Cage pieces, performed by a very unlikely group of singers-Carla Bley (!?) and Robert Wyatt. The beauty of Robert Wyatt's a capella rendition of Cage's music for the poetry of E. E. Cummings is really a surprise here, and worth the price of the album alone. Jan Steele's music is a kind of marriage of the instruments and improvisational forms of "rock" music with a very quiet , almost Minimalist ensemble _B_r_i_a_n _E_n_o, _D_i_s_c_r_e_e_t _M_u_s_i_c: It's hard now to remember that this album first appeared while Eno was still as close to a "pop star" as he ever got. It's the definitive record which uses the simplest of source materials (in this case, a cou- ple of simple pentatonic melodic fragments and two tape recorders) to produce a piece of music that grows and breathes with a life of its own. The flip side is Eno at his most formally rigourous: he's disfigured that old wed- ding favorite Pachelbel's Canon in D Major by slowing it to a quarter the original tempo and giving the players a set of instructions on how to alter their parts based on their duration or pitch range. The result is a pleasant mass of Romantic strings which behave very strangely. _C_h_r_i_s_t_o_p_h_e_r _H_o_b_b_s/_J_o_h_n _A_d_a_m_s/_G_a_v_i_n _B_r_y_a_r_s, _E_n_s_e_m_b_l_e _P_i_e_c_e_s: This is easily the most varied of the whole catalog. John Adams (the only American composer in the series, except for Cage) makes an appearance here, and his early work has a lot of the slow throb of his current Minimalist compositions hidden in there What you come away remembering is the juxta- position of the slow unfolding of the music with the found radio broadcast that dominates the middle section of his American Standard. Christopher Hobbs has drastically altered the tempos of some Scottish bagpipe music, and favors ensembles composed of reed organs and/or toy pianos. While Aran sounds like a nightmare in the clock factory, MacCrimmon Will Never Return (for four organs) has a real stately kind of melancholy about it. Gavin Bryars makes his second appearance by taking a snippet of jazz and giving it to each of the players in looped form on their own little private tape recorders. Of course, the tape loops gradually start to go out of sync almost immediately, and the fun begins. It sounds like the most tentative lounge band in the Universe. _M_i_c_h_a_e_l _N_y_m_a_n, _D_e_c_a_y _M_u_s_i_c: This is really the first "Ambient" album. The rules are simple, "1-100" is a sequence of 100 chords played by four pianos. Each piano player plays the next chord in the series when they can no longer hear the sound of the previous one. Although the rules are individual, the pianos are played together, and some harmonic overlaps and interactions occur that are unplanned. In addition, this recording is played at half speed, like the piano in Music for Airports, giving it that peculiar, watery sound. The flip side is a permutative piece for bells, gongs, and cymbals that is noisy as the first side is delicate. _T_h_e _P_e_n_g_u_i_n _C_a_f_e _O_r_c_h_e_s_t_r_a: It doesn't seem as if anyone can write about Simon Jeffes' small group without using the words "eclectic" or "whimsical"-not even the New York Times. Problem is, those are the only words that ever come to mind. A gentle bunch of ukeleles, strings, electric pianos and various objects that produce the lounge music of the PostMo- dern Age. _T_o_m _P_h_i_l_i_p_s, _I_R_M_A (_a_n _o_p_e_r_a): Tom Philips is the painter who did the cover of Another Green World and King Crimson's Starless and Bible Black. He's also played in Cornelius Cardew's "Scratch Orchestra" (composed of musicians and non-musicians of varying skills), and for most of his artis- tic career he's been working with the text of an old Vic- torian novel called "A Human Document" that he paints over, tears up, collages, and partially obscures to produce his own work, called A Humument. The "libretto" for this "opera" comes from that, and Gavin Bryars helped with the arranging. This is for people who thought they didn't like opera. _D_a_v_i_d _T_o_o_p/_M_a_x _E_a_s_t_l_e_y, _N_e_w _a_n_d _R_e_d_i_s_c_o_v_e_r_e_d _M_u_s_i_c_a_l _I_n_s_t_r_u_- _m_e_n_t_s: Of all the Obscures, this is the maybe the one that will try your patience the most. The abovementioned gentle- men appear on wind harps, harps played by running water, and all manner of odd instruments. Do the Bathysphere, with its loopy falsetto vocals (you know you can do the bathysphere/is you would only hear/hear about the bathy- sphere) and eerie flutes will either delight or enrage you. For the rest of the album, you get an explanation of how the instrument works, and then you listen to it. You listen to it a long time, and then there's a break for more falsetto singing. Definitely party material. _J_o_h_n _W_h_i_t_e/_G_a_v_i_n _B_r_y_a_r_s, _M_a_c_h_i_n_e _M_u_s_i_c: he title refers to a common method for each of the pieces: a kind of "machine" or process that is set up and turned loose while the tapes roll. What's interesting about this recording is how different the outcomes can be for such similar processes. John White sets up a piece for beer drinkers (take a swig, blow into the bottle, take another swig, and so on) that produces a choir of mournful owls. A similar technique applied to a simple set of sequential chord progressions gives formally similar but quite dif- ferent sounding effects (rather like Terry Riley). I won't elaborate on the Jew's Harp quartet. Guitar wizards Derek Bailey and Fred Frith help out on Bryars' The Squirrel in the Rickety Rackety Cage-a festival of guitars played flat on a talbe with little attention played to pitch, but a con- stant, slightly swinging tempo. If this doesn't drive you totally bonkers after the first 10 minutes, you win a copy of Lou Reed's Metal Machine MusicSo that's it, all ten of 'em. One more thing: A really excellent history of experimental music, which discusses the work of many of the Obscure artists has just come back into print after a number of years of also being out of print and really hard to find. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (by Michael Nyman, pub- lished by Schirmers, $9.95 in paperback) is the best book on the market about a subject that's rarely written about except in periodicals and reviews. It gives you a real sense of what the general formal issues are in experimental music are without being stuffy, and it's just been updated to include Minimalism and the "New Tonality " Happy hunting/hearing.