peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (06/09/83)
The June 1983 issue of "down beat", a jazz-oriented magazine published in Chicago, has a cover story on Brian Eno, one of the prime popularizers of ambient music. For someone who used electronics in popular music early on, he has some interesting comments on synthesizers: "To me, synthesizers are a bit like formica. If you see it from a distance, it looks great -- this big panel of blue or pink or whatever that fits in well with your designer home. But when you get close to the surface of formica and start looking at it, it's not interesting; nothing's going on there. Contrast this with a natural material like wood, which looks good from a distance but also is interesting at any level of microscopic inspection; its atomic structure is even strangely interesting as opposed to formica, which is regular and crystalline. Think of the forest, for instance. You look at it from the air and it's rich, complex, and diverse. You come in closer and look at one tree and it's still rich, complex, and diverse. You look at one leaf, it's rich and complicated. You look at one molecule, it's different from every other molecule. The thing permits you any level of scrutiny. And more and more, I want to make things that have that same quality . . . things that allow you to enter them as far as you could imagine going, yet don't suddenly reveal themselves to be composed of paper-thin synthetic materials". (I'm not sure I believe that all the molecules in a leaf are different, but it's not that important.) Eno thus favours "found" sounds (he pokes around parts of New York City banging on things) to synthesized ones, at least for now, though he is quite happy to manipulate these sounds extensively before they go on disc. Such is only one of the many non-traditional considerations that go into his music, as revealed by the article. Recommended. In the same mathematical/mystic vein, here's an addition to the list of things written on the lead-out grooves of records: Side two of the 1975 Atlantic re-issue of "Tonto's Expanding Head Band", an all-electronic studio creation of producers Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, contains some well-wishes from the producers and the phrase "The only way out of a circle is through the center" on the vinyl, wrapped around the label. p. rowley, U. Toronto.
spaf@gatech.UUCP (06/10/83)
It sounds as if Eno is trying to create the audio equivalent of
fractals. It might be easy to dismiss him as a pretentious fool,
but he is such a talented producer of other work I long ago
decided he actually is a real talent with an unusual vision.
Would anybody be interested in an album of Eno doing John Cage?
--
"The soapbox of Gene Spafford"
Spaf @ GATech (CS Net)
Spaf.GATech @ UDel-Relay (ARPA) School of ICS
...!{sb1, allegra}!gatech!spaf (uucp) Georgia Tech
...!duke!mcnc!msdc!gatech!spaf Atlanta, GA 30332franka@tekcad.UUCP (06/12/83)
#R:utcsrgv:-149000:tekcad:10900004:000:281 tekcad!franka Jun 11 14:49:00 1983 The ideas of making "fractalized" music sounds intriguing, and it sounds so obvious that I can't believe that some electronic musician hasn't done it already. Does anyone know of composers who have used fractals as the basis of music composition or synthesis? Frank Adrian
TOPAZ:fantods@ucbvax.UUCP (06/13/83)
True about the fractals--Eno was just discussing the current state of synthesizers sold in music stores...they are very limited, and as he said (Paraphrased from memory) "I'd rather have a crummy old organ that will give me six good sounds than some modern machine that will give me an infinite variety of mediocre sounds." Stockhausen and many others have used the technique of speeding up rhythms until they become "sounds", that is, taking something at 2 or three beats per second and speeding it up to a couple of hundrd or thousand through successive tape loops and such. Stockhausen's attempts at this created some very interesting sounds that didn't sound "synthesized", but sure as heck didn't sound like anyting I'd ever heard before, either.