Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond here. The Broken Record
Speaker 1: team has been revisiting some of our favorite episodes and
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Speaker 1: with Brian Eno. This episode was recorded just before the
Speaker 1: debut of Enos Sonos radio station The Lighthouse, where ENO's
Speaker 1: programmed day's worth of unreleased tracks from various errors in
Speaker 1: his career. In this episode, we get to hear Rick
Speaker 1: and you Know, discuss the works that changed ENO's conception
Speaker 1: of art, the way lyrics generally hold very little water
Speaker 1: for the both of them, and more on the way
Speaker 1: Eno incorporates randomness into his music. To hear more extended
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Speaker 1: Record liner Notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond.
Speaker 1: I'm going to start in a funny place because just
Speaker 1: now before we start, I was thinking about a lot
Speaker 1: of things, and the last thought that came up before
Speaker 1: I made notes this morning was to ask what was
Speaker 1: the last bit of technology to come along that has
Speaker 1: influenced the way you work? There have been a few.
Speaker 1: I've been working quite a lot with my friend Peter Chilvers,
Speaker 1: who's an musician and a CODA and we've been working
Speaker 1: on ways of manipulating MIDI automatically and effectively. What we're
Speaker 1: doing is taking a MIDI signal and subjecting it to
Speaker 1: various probabilistic mutations. So, for instance, you have a stream
Speaker 1: of information going into the MIDI and you say leave
Speaker 1: out thirteen percent of that or twenty two percent or
Speaker 1: whatever you choose. So if you have a drum part,
Speaker 1: it sounds like the drummer's dropping a beat every so often,
Speaker 1: or we can say things like every one in twenty beats,
Speaker 1: double it or move it by a quarter beat. So
Speaker 1: we can take parts that are fairly fixed or which
Speaker 1: are loops in fact, and we can suddenly bring them
Speaker 1: to life in some very very interesting and uncanny ways.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really sound like what humans would do, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like what machines do either, so it's
Speaker 1: an interesting new zone. I think I've always liked those
Speaker 1: zones between the human and the mechanical. This is why
Speaker 1: I love all the voice treatments that are going on
Speaker 1: now so much, because that's always what I wanted to hear.
Speaker 1: One the one thing that used to be sacred you
Speaker 1: could never touch was the voice, and I always thought,
Speaker 1: why not. You know, it's just another piece of electronic material,
Speaker 1: like anything else. We can do what we like with it.
Speaker 1: Do you ever feel like going the other way? Do
Speaker 1: you ever start with something that synthetical programmed and decide
Speaker 1: to recreate it with traditional instruments? Have you ever done that?
Speaker 1: I've done that, and it hasn't always been very successful.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's actually rather rarely being successful for me,
Speaker 1: and I think it's because what I enjoy about the
Speaker 1: use of the electronics and the computers is that they
Speaker 1: do things that humans can't do, and I really like
Speaker 1: that area just between what we can do and what
Speaker 1: machines can do. There's this sort of new area that
Speaker 1: is appearing. I mean, people are noticing it more and more,
Speaker 1: particularly with vocals. Suddenly there are these ways of singing
Speaker 1: that you've never heard before. And what's very interesting, of course,
Speaker 1: is that a new generation of people are learning to
Speaker 1: sing like that. I don't know if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: any of those wonderful things on YouTube where young people
Speaker 1: have clearly heard a Rihannah record or something like that
Speaker 1: and thought, oh, that's great, I'm going to sing like that,
Speaker 1: and they don't actually realize that it's done with an
Speaker 1: auto tune. Yes, that it was not possible to sing
Speaker 1: like that until somebody did it with a machine, and
Speaker 1: then somebody else thought, well, it's possible, so I'll do it.
Speaker 1: In the case of the first example, where you're removing
Speaker 1: bits of media information, would you pick a number like,
Speaker 1: let's try eighteen, let's try twenty two, Let's and listen
Speaker 1: to all the results and then pick the one that's best.
Speaker 1: Is that typically how it works well. I can change
Speaker 1: the parameters as as the thing is running. So if
Speaker 1: if I'm running a drum loop, for example, a MIDI
Speaker 1: drum loop, I can sort of think, Okay, what happens
Speaker 1: if I give it seven percent of mutation of or
Speaker 1: what happens if I leave out fifty? You know what
Speaker 1: happens actually is that you get Elvin Jones. If you
Speaker 1: leave at a very big percentage, it sounds like Alvin Jones.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting. You still have the sort of fragmentary
Speaker 1: skeleton of the original drum part, but it accents in
Speaker 1: the strangest places. So what I can do, So what
Speaker 1: I have been doing quite a lot is tuning the
Speaker 1: system so that it starts to get into that interesting
Speaker 1: area of quasi human and then I run it several
Speaker 1: times and I can record the MIDI that comes out.
Speaker 1: So sometimes there will be a particularly interesting section where
Speaker 1: the drummer does something really quite extraordinary and does something
Speaker 1: that you think, wow, I've never heard of drummer do that,
Speaker 1: and I love it. So then since I've recorded the MIDI,
Speaker 1: I can use that as my basic loop, that section
Speaker 1: that I thought was amazing, that can be the basic loop,
Speaker 1: and then I can again do some variations and mutations
Speaker 1: on that. So sometimes the process is sort of iterated
Speaker 1: two or three times to get somewhere I like. Now.
Speaker 1: I should say that very little of this stuff have
Speaker 1: I actually released. It's still in the stage of where
Speaker 1: I'm just playing with it and fascinated by it. But
Speaker 1: I've also been using it in a way that I
Speaker 1: have released it with them ambient music. So since a
Speaker 1: lot of the work that I've done that I call
Speaker 1: ambient involves long looped melodies, often several of them playing asynchronously,
Speaker 1: the loops collide with each other in different ways all
Speaker 1: the time, so there's always new combinations. I've been using
Speaker 1: the scriptures, this is what we call them, the scriptures
Speaker 1: in those as well, so that for instance, a melody
Speaker 1: might have say fifteen notes in it, or eleven notes
Speaker 1: or something like that, and three or four of them
Speaker 1: can manifest differently, so they are two or three choices
Speaker 1: for what those particular notes can become. There's always a
Speaker 1: sort of it's a very organic sounding variation going on.
Speaker 1: It's it's very interesting and the results don't sound at
Speaker 1: all computerish. That's what's nice that people listen to them
Speaker 1: and think, oh, that's nice. How did you do that?
Speaker 1: When you tell them, they're inevitably disappointed because they thought
Speaker 1: it was a moment of artistic inspiration, And I say
Speaker 1: it was. It just happened somewhere else. Further back along
Speaker 1: the line, would you say that the random aspect of
Speaker 1: the process is always at work free for you? I
Speaker 1: like things when there's a layer of surprise, I suppose,
Speaker 1: and it's not because I have this John Cage and
Speaker 1: faith in randomness. For him it was a sort of
Speaker 1: religious feeling that randomness tied you into the synchronicity of
Speaker 1: the world somehow. By using randomness, you allowed the state
Speaker 1: of things to affect your work. It's a nice idea,
Speaker 1: and I like it and I respect in his work.
Speaker 1: For me, it's a way of searching a musical space
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't do using just my taste. I mean,
Speaker 1: one's taste tends to propel you into the same areas
Speaker 1: over and over again. We all develop a set of
Speaker 1: preferences and habits about where we go. The interesting thing
Speaker 1: about randomness is that sometimes you're taken somewhere that you
Speaker 1: didn't expect to go, and sometimes that turns out to
Speaker 1: be a really interesting new place. So randomness for me
Speaker 1: is really just a tool, just a way of taking
Speaker 1: me somewhere different. So it's not random for the sake
Speaker 1: of random. But through the random process you find something
Speaker 1: new that you're looking for that you didn't know you
Speaker 1: were looking for. Essentially, that's exactly right. Yes, something happens,
Speaker 1: and you kind of recognize that, you think, yes, makes sense,
Speaker 1: even though it's a little bit like neural networks. You know,
Speaker 1: if you if you work with neural networks, they come
Speaker 1: to decisions or propositions that you don't really you didn't
Speaker 1: know before. They're unfamiliar, but you also don't actually know
Speaker 1: how it got there. So the reason I think this
Speaker 1: is interesting is because I think what makes any work
Speaker 1: of art interesting is or gripping or effective, is the
Speaker 1: feeling that somebody was living, somebody was living it, somebody
Speaker 1: was alert and alive and passionate in some way. And
Speaker 1: the way you get into that state is by being
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar territory. I think you're you're most alive when
Speaker 1: you're not quite sure what is going on, when you're
Speaker 1: you're slightly flying by the seat of your pants and
Speaker 1: you have to ootiate it somehow. That's why we love
Speaker 1: improvisation so much, because people are deliberately putting themselves at
Speaker 1: risk in a way, soaring out into the unknown, and
Speaker 1: somehow dealing with it. And that process of hearing someone
Speaker 1: dealing with it is the difference between life and death
Speaker 1: in a piece of work, I think, as opposed to
Speaker 1: a person who's just playing a thing they've done a
Speaker 1: thousand times before and they don't sound like they're particularly
Speaker 1: interested in it. They're just doing it right. They're not
Speaker 1: doing it well in particular. So I suppose all of
Speaker 1: the strategies and techniques that I use, and there are
Speaker 1: quite a lot of them, besides randomness, are really ways
Speaker 1: of trying to find myself in a new place, because
Speaker 1: I get excited when I'm in a new place. I
Speaker 1: like being in unfamiliar surroundings. I always used to say
Speaker 1: that artists are either cowboys or farmers, really, and they're
Speaker 1: both both ways of being an artist to find, you know,
Speaker 1: the farmer wants to find a piece of territory and
Speaker 1: fully explore it and exploit it. You know, you could
Speaker 1: say the last twenty years of Mandrea, and was like that.
Speaker 1: When Mondrea finally settled on the style that we all
Speaker 1: know him for, he just carried on doing it. But
Speaker 1: the other kind of artist is the one who just
Speaker 1: wants to find somewhere new. He just wants to find
Speaker 1: the next frontier, the next piece of territory, and that's
Speaker 1: what he gets turned on by. So I think I'm
Speaker 1: more in the second category, though, people listening to my
Speaker 1: work would say, but it all sounds exactly the same, Brian.
Speaker 1: Do you have that same approach in life beyond art?
Speaker 1: Are you an explorer? Have you lived all over the world?
Speaker 1: Do you continue to put yourself off in new situations
Speaker 1: as a human being as opposed to an artist. I
Speaker 1: have such an amazing amount of inertia, you wouldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't leave my studio if I had the choice.
Speaker 1: Probably now it's not that bad. But the only reason
Speaker 1: I ever go anywhere really is because I don't have
Speaker 1: a choice. For instance, I had to go to New
Speaker 1: York in nineteen seventy eight to do something for a week,
Speaker 1: and it was a nice, lovely weather when I arrived.
Speaker 1: It was this time of year somebody said, well, I've
Speaker 1: got a sublet if you want to stay, and I
Speaker 1: ended up spending five years there just because it was
Speaker 1: a nice day when I arrived. Yes, I didn't have
Speaker 1: any intention of living in New York. And then I
Speaker 1: left New York because I had to go to Tokyo
Speaker 1: to do something. And I was away in Tokyo and
Speaker 1: somebody robbed my studio and took everything. Actually everything was gone,
Speaker 1: and somebody rang me up and said, your whole studio
Speaker 1: has disappeared, and I suddenly had this feeling of relief.
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, I don't have to go back to
Speaker 1: New York then, So then I moved to Toronto after
Speaker 1: that for a little while. But I don't really move
Speaker 1: very much unless I have to for some reason, or
Speaker 1: unless I don't plan things very well. I'm pretty happy
Speaker 1: wherever I am. Actually, I think we have that incoming.
Speaker 1: And it's funny. I'm wondering if the urge to adventure
Speaker 1: creatively is the balance for the fact that we lived
Speaker 1: such her metic lives. I think that's a very good theory. Yes,
Speaker 1: I know that whatever I'm doing in my work always
Speaker 1: seems to be balancing what is happening in the rest
Speaker 1: of my life. For instance, when I lived in New York,
Speaker 1: I lived on a very very very noisy corner. It
Speaker 1: was on the corner of Broom and Broadway, so Broadway,
Speaker 1: very busy street, and then Broom was the cross street
Speaker 1: where all the big trucks used to go on their
Speaker 1: way to the tunnel. I lived at the top of
Speaker 1: the building, but it used to kind of rock with
Speaker 1: this sound. And it was whilst I lived there that
Speaker 1: I made the quietest music I've ever made. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure what I was trying to do was to make
Speaker 1: the place in the music that I needed to be
Speaker 1: able to get to sometimes as a relief from living
Speaker 1: in New York. And then I moved back to England
Speaker 1: about two years later, three years later, and I moved
Speaker 1: to the countryside, to the town that I grew up in,
Speaker 1: very quiet, small country town. And then I made the
Speaker 1: loudest music I'd ever made in my life. Again, I
Speaker 1: think I needed a bit of city. I needed, you know,
Speaker 1: some grits, some noise. So yes, I think I think
Speaker 1: that's kind of what artists do. They're all is making worlds,
Speaker 1: and sometimes worlds that they would just like to visit
Speaker 1: and look at sometimes worlds they would like to spend
Speaker 1: time in. Earlier, you said we're born with a particular taste.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like your current taste is the taste
Speaker 1: you were born with and or has it evolved and
Speaker 1: changed over the course of your life. That's a very
Speaker 1: good question. I'd love to make one of those sort
Speaker 1: of graphs over time of the things that have changed
Speaker 1: in my taste. I remember when I first started painting,
Speaker 1: because painting was the first artistic thing I did. I
Speaker 1: never learned to play an instrument, so I was a
Speaker 1: painter as a kid. And I remember I loved combinations
Speaker 1: of red and blue that produced the mo violet range
Speaker 1: of the spectrum, and I did loads of paintings just
Speaker 1: exploring that sort of what I felt was a melancholy,
Speaker 1: deep area color, and certainly the melancholy of it was
Speaker 1: a big part of what attracted me, and I don't
Speaker 1: think that's ever gone. I still have that feeling for
Speaker 1: It's sort of a nostalgia for other futures that could
Speaker 1: have happened but didn't. If you see what I mean.
Speaker 1: How old were you at this time that you were painting. Oh,
Speaker 1: I started when I was about nine or ten. But
Speaker 1: I got into the purple area when I was about
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen. I was very, very impressed by Mandreal
Speaker 1: from early on. I used him as an example earlier,
Speaker 1: but it was probably because of Mandreal that I thought
Speaker 1: I really want to be a painter more than anything else.
Speaker 1: I loved the simplicity of his pictures because I kept thinking,
Speaker 1: how can something that is so simple objectively, you know,
Speaker 1: how can that have such an effect on me? It
Speaker 1: was the closest thing to magic that I had ever scene.
Speaker 1: And at the same time I was I love duop music.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably a probably a bit too young for duap,
Speaker 1: aren't you, But I'm a fan of duop. I am
Speaker 1: too young for it. But there was a growing up
Speaker 1: in New York there was a radio show on the
Speaker 1: oldie station on Sundays that played two or three hours
Speaker 1: of duop every weekend don Que Reid and I listened
Speaker 1: to it religiously, and I absolutely love dua Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this that had the same sort of effect on me,
Speaker 1: because duop is a very simple music in many senses.
Speaker 1: You know, it's mainly about voices, not not about lots
Speaker 1: of instruments and lots of playing and In fact, the
Speaker 1: closer it was to a cappella, the more I liked it.
Speaker 1: And I just loved the fact that four voices could
Speaker 1: produce such a range of colors and feelings that seemed
Speaker 1: to me like on a par with Mondrea and you
Speaker 1: know how. And I was always very drawn to this
Speaker 1: idea of doing as much as possible with as little
Speaker 1: as possible. I was never impressed by the kind of
Speaker 1: music that used, you know, complicated time signatures and amazingly
Speaker 1: brilliant playing and so on. It's sort of impressive, but
Speaker 1: for me, there was not the same magic in that
Speaker 1: you could see the trick being done, you know, with
Speaker 1: Mandre and you just you didn't really know where the
Speaker 1: art was being made. Was it in the picture or
Speaker 1: was it? Was it in you? It was it a
Speaker 1: factor of recognition on your part. So that part of
Speaker 1: my taste hasn't changed. I really am always drawn to
Speaker 1: things that look like anybody could do them, where you
Speaker 1: think I could have made that, but I fucking didn't.
Speaker 1: Why didn't I part I don't know if you have
Speaker 1: this feeling, but part of the feeling of one of
Speaker 1: the feelings I always have that tells me something is
Speaker 1: great is kind of anger. I didn't do it. I
Speaker 1: don't have that, but I understand it. I do. I'm
Speaker 1: so thankful when there's something that I like that I
Speaker 1: didn't make, because it's so exciting. It's like wow. Often
Speaker 1: I make things more out of the need for them
Speaker 1: to exist. Yes, that's exactly right. I want this music
Speaker 1: to exist. Yeah. The only reason I make music. The
Speaker 1: reason I got into this line of work was because
Speaker 1: I was experiencing hip hop music and the records that
Speaker 1: were being made didn't reflect what it actually was. So
Speaker 1: my earliest work was really just documenting something that I
Speaker 1: was already a fan of and did. It just didn't
Speaker 1: exist in the world, so I didn't really have a choice.
Speaker 1: So when I do hear something that I like get
Speaker 1: I get very excited because I'm always looking for something
Speaker 1: that feels like a new way In what you said,
Speaker 1: there is something that I've often thought that the things
Speaker 1: that influenced me most in terms of actually making things
Speaker 1: are the things that I hear that don't quite succeed
Speaker 1: where I listen to them, I think that's a brilliant idea.
Speaker 1: And do you know what if they had done this
Speaker 1: and that and this other thing, and left that bit
Speaker 1: out that would be even better. So quite often when
Speaker 1: I'm thinking like that about something, I realize that I'm
Speaker 1: inventing something new which isn't that thing, but isn't something
Speaker 1: that I really had thought about before either. So it's
Speaker 1: quite often hearing something just missing the mark that makes
Speaker 1: me think that could be better. That's been an important
Speaker 1: thread for me. So the other thing about taste. One
Speaker 1: aspect of my taste that has changed over the year
Speaker 1: is that I've become much more fond of messiness or
Speaker 1: incoherence or untidiness in music. Now. Partly this is because
Speaker 1: it is now eminently possible to make things absolutely flawless
Speaker 1: in every respect, And of course when something becomes very possible,
Speaker 1: it becomes quite boring as well. You just you quickly
Speaker 1: tire of it. And so I noticed at first my
Speaker 1: taste in painting started changing when I saw the work
Speaker 1: of the paint of Philip Guston for the first time.
Speaker 1: Philip Guston's work is almost ugly. It's very very clumsy
Speaker 1: and awkwardly painted, but somehow very gripping, and I remember
Speaker 1: thinking do I hate this or do I love it?
Speaker 1: And I really didn't know for quite a long time.
Speaker 1: I was drawn to keep looking at those things. So
Speaker 1: that's something that's changed that that was not a taste
Speaker 1: that I had as a younger person. Do you find
Speaker 1: that if you look back, the most interesting things have
Speaker 1: hit you that way, Like when you first hear something
Speaker 1: or see something, you don't know whether you like it
Speaker 1: or not, or maybe it makes you laugh or it
Speaker 1: seems ridiculous or yes, but then you come around to
Speaker 1: loving it or maybe loving it the most. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: I really admired the who I'd loved that my generation
Speaker 1: and things like that, And then they released a song
Speaker 1: called Happy Jack. I thought they shouldn't release lightweight material
Speaker 1: like this. They are a serious, revolutionary, radical band. What
Speaker 1: are they doing releasing this kind of material? And I
Speaker 1: even wrote to Pete Townsend saying saying, you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: releasing stuff like this, you were much too important, or
Speaker 1: something to that effect. And it was about three or
Speaker 1: four months later that I suddenly got it that this
Speaker 1: was a kind of pop art in the sense that
Speaker 1: you know, there was pop art in painting, but there
Speaker 1: wasn't really pop art in pop music. There hadn't been
Speaker 1: that ironic approach to music that the who were using
Speaker 1: them and it didn't really happen again. Well, I think
Speaker 1: Frank Zappa picked it up as well. He was one
Speaker 1: of the great music or ironists in that he sort
Speaker 1: of stood outside of what he was doing and he
Speaker 1: watched it from the outside and fashioned it from the outside.
Speaker 1: Whereas the traditional image of the artist is someone lost
Speaker 1: in their own passions, completely inside the work and kind
Speaker 1: of crying out to the world. Whereas what happened from
Speaker 1: about the mid sixties in pop music, first of all
Speaker 1: in England, I think, was this notion that actually, you
Speaker 1: know what, we've got the history of pop music behind us.
Speaker 1: We can pick and choose and put things together in
Speaker 1: new ways. So it was a much more sort of
Speaker 1: detached process than people had considered pop music to be
Speaker 1: until that time. So that's one example of something where
Speaker 1: I had a real change of mind, and I've had
Speaker 1: more of those in painting than in music. In music,
Speaker 1: I kind of very often have a pretty good feeling
Speaker 1: of what is about to happen. I don't mean that
Speaker 1: I could make it, but I'm not incredibly surprised by it.
Speaker 1: For instance, I remember saying to David Byrne we were
Speaker 1: in a car in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty and said,
Speaker 1: I think there is going to be a kind of
Speaker 1: music where people kind of shout poetry over beats. And
Speaker 1: indeed there was. It wasn't entirely an unscripted idea. I'd
Speaker 1: heard something on NPR. It was a poet, a black
Speaker 1: poet from somewhere in America, reading this poem called Cadillac.
Speaker 1: I spent years trying to find this thing. I never
Speaker 1: found it. I wrote to MPR and I phoned them
Speaker 1: up and everything. It was called pink Cadillac. And he
Speaker 1: just did this amazing, very rhythmic poem about how he
Speaker 1: wanted a pink Cadillac and how cool it was and
Speaker 1: how it turned rounded the corner and things like that.
Speaker 1: And I thought, this is a new kind of music.
Speaker 1: I mean, had I knew about the last poets. They
Speaker 1: were sort of in the back of my mind as well.
Speaker 1: But I just suddenly had this vision of a popular music,
Speaker 1: not a music that would only be on NPR, but
Speaker 1: a popular music that people would want to hear, that
Speaker 1: had heavy beats and speech, not songs. Was the pink
Speaker 1: Cadillac piece that you heard? Did it have a beat
Speaker 1: or was it a cappella. I think it was a
Speaker 1: cappella or just had a very I can't remember it
Speaker 1: very well now. In fact, I only heard it that once.
Speaker 1: It just stuck in my mind, and I can still
Speaker 1: remember the cadence of some of it. And there may
Speaker 1: have just been a you know that pink CALLAC thought
Speaker 1: that kind of feeling to it, you know, and I thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is definitely new. Can you remember any other forms
Speaker 1: of music that either do or don't yet exist that
Speaker 1: you you've imagined. Yes, there's one that has just come
Speaker 1: into existence, I think, and it's something that I have
Speaker 1: been sort of playing around with. Do you know this
Speaker 1: listening practice? I don't really know what to call it exactly.
Speaker 1: I could call it music, but I'm not sure it
Speaker 1: is the right word for it. It's called ASMR. This
Speaker 1: is where people are listening very close up noisest like this,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of smacking lips and that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and basically people tell quite long stories, but they're hardly stories.
Speaker 1: It's about that sound. And they often use stereo microphones
Speaker 1: so they can move their voices from one from one
Speaker 1: of your ears to the other and back and forth.
Speaker 1: It's very, very interesting because these are quite long pieces
Speaker 1: and just go on YouTube and have a look. They've
Speaker 1: got millions and millions of listeners, so there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people doing this. So I heard these first of all,
Speaker 1: I think three or four years ago. I heard the
Speaker 1: first one and thought, this is really interesting. This is
Speaker 1: like having somebody wandering around inside your head whispering to you.
Speaker 1: And I thought, this is kind of a night. It's
Speaker 1: like ambient music. Actually, there's a sort of diminution of
Speaker 1: content in favor of sound. So it's a kind of
Speaker 1: live of the moment sound experience that doesn't really have
Speaker 1: a past or a future. You know. It's not what
Speaker 1: philosophers called teleological. It doesn't doesn't go somewhere, it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a goal. It's a steady state experience. And this,
Speaker 1: of course is what I always wanted ambient music to be.
Speaker 1: Like a like a picture on the wall, you don't
Speaker 1: expect it to change all the time. What changes is you,
Speaker 1: the listener. The art stays relatively still. So I heard
Speaker 1: this as Mr. Stuff and thought, this is a kind
Speaker 1: of ambient music, and I thought, what about making music
Speaker 1: that is vocal music but like that? I had never
Speaker 1: really thought about ambient music being vocal before then. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was for me specifically not vocal. It was a
Speaker 1: sort of deliberately personality free music. And putting a voice
Speaker 1: in there to me was to say to draw all
Speaker 1: the attention to the voice and say, oh, here's somebody
Speaker 1: with something to tell you. And I really didn't want that.
Speaker 1: But then when I heard this ASMR, I thought, this
Speaker 1: person clearly has nothing to tell me at all. They're
Speaker 1: talking about how they comb their hair and doing it
Speaker 1: for twenty five minutes. Clearly the message is not about
Speaker 1: combing hair. The message is about being inside a voice
Speaker 1: for a decent length of time. So I started to
Speaker 1: think what would you do to existing music to make
Speaker 1: it occupy that same space, And then I started experimenting
Speaker 1: with my favorite tool of all in the studio, which
Speaker 1: is the low pass filter. Just taking off all the
Speaker 1: high frequency of things has an amazing psychological effect to me.
Speaker 1: It creates scale, distance, warmth, and a weird sort of intimacy,
Speaker 1: which is quite strange. I think, because you know you're
Speaker 1: missing a lot of detail, your brain very actively engages
Speaker 1: with those kinds of sounds. That's my theory about why
Speaker 1: it's interesting anyway, So I started thinking, perhaps there could
Speaker 1: be a kind of music like that where we take
Speaker 1: existing songs, you know, Hannah record or and we just
Speaker 1: put it through a low pass filter, but really a
Speaker 1: really radical low pass filter. So nothing above say two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty hurts is audible. If you listen to
Speaker 1: a Beyonce record through a wall, it's not exhausting. It's warm.
Speaker 1: So about a week ago somebody said to me, oh,
Speaker 1: have you heard this new ASMR music thing, and described
Speaker 1: exactly that same experiment. So it's like you're listening to
Speaker 1: records that are being played in another room, so you
Speaker 1: just have that sort of comforting. You can't really figure
Speaker 1: out what it is, but it's sociable somehow, it's friendly.
Speaker 1: It's like having other people around. It's like a day
Speaker 1: dreamer must yes, yes, yes, that's a good way of
Speaker 1: saying it. Yeah, sounds fantastic. On the other side of that,
Speaker 1: are lyrics ever important to you? They're very rarely the
Speaker 1: thing I'm most listening to in music. I think the
Speaker 1: base requirement for me in lyrics is that they don't
Speaker 1: make the music stupid, which turns out to be quite
Speaker 1: a high bar. In many now people say, do up
Speaker 1: lyrics are stupid, but I don't think they are at all.
Speaker 1: They serve the music absolutely. Do up lyrics are the
Speaker 1: way of making a voice become musical. What is always
Speaker 1: awkward to me is when somebody feels they have something
Speaker 1: to say and it's important and you get these clumsy
Speaker 1: pieces of scanning and the rhymes don't sound stupid, and
Speaker 1: so I can't bear that. I'd rather just leave out
Speaker 1: the voice completely than have that. But I mean, there
Speaker 1: are lyricists who I absolutely adore, Like I always say
Speaker 1: Joni Mitchell, who's for me, one of the greatest songwriters
Speaker 1: of all time, and her lyrics are so clever and
Speaker 1: intricate and always worth returning to that I'm always hearing
Speaker 1: new things in her singing and new interpretations of what
Speaker 1: she's saying. And there are a few people like that,
Speaker 1: very very few whose work I actually do really want
Speaker 1: to know the lyrics of. For instance, I very rarely
Speaker 1: read people's lyrics. You know, they're often printed on the
Speaker 1: sleeves of things I just don't want to know. I'm
Speaker 1: happier not knowing, generally, unless it's Joni Mitchell or one
Speaker 1: of a couple of dozen great writers. Do you like poetry, Yes,
Speaker 1: yes I do. And one of the interesting things I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've found this. Have you ever tried
Speaker 1: turning poems into songs. It's really hard. I worked. I
Speaker 1: work with a poet who also is a rapper, and
Speaker 1: we did a lot of work to make the poetry
Speaker 1: with music not sound like rapping, and it was difficult.
Speaker 1: It took years to break out of the way the
Speaker 1: rhythm of the vocals attaches to the music. And it's
Speaker 1: another thing that I found very interesting is lyrics without rhythm.
Speaker 1: If you heard a rap piece like Pink Cadillac without
Speaker 1: a beat, the lyrics have a much more profound effect
Speaker 1: when there's no beat playing. Yes, always, always, it's there's
Speaker 1: something that happens when the beat is playing that takes
Speaker 1: up too much of our attention to where the lyrics
Speaker 1: become secondary. Always for me, when there's a beat, the
Speaker 1: lyrics are always secondary. Yes, yes, I agree with you.
Speaker 1: And I think the other thing is that poetry by definition,
Speaker 1: puts a lot of freight in those words, and in
Speaker 1: the sense the words are nearly always too heavy to
Speaker 1: make songs out of. They sound awkward, they sound contrived,
Speaker 1: they don't sound like what somebody would naturally sing, and
Speaker 1: there are very few exceptions to that. One of the
Speaker 1: only things I can think of is that Fug's song.
Speaker 1: It's the poem is called bury me in an Apple Orchard,
Speaker 1: that I may taste your lips again. It's a lovely poem,
Speaker 1: and they do it in waltz time. Interestingly, whenever I've
Speaker 1: tried to do anything with poetry, I've found that waltz
Speaker 1: time is a much much better time to use. And
Speaker 1: I've got this theory that we actually talk in three four,
Speaker 1: not in four four. We talk in groups of three syllables.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I've never not really had very much
Speaker 1: success in turning poetry into songs or any at all. Actually,
Speaker 1: why not, be frank, I think it's a very hard
Speaker 1: thing to do because in a sense, you want the
Speaker 1: words to be as though they are kind of exclamations
Speaker 1: that come out of somebody spontaneously. You want that feeling
Speaker 1: in them somehow, and poetry doesn't often have that feeling.
Speaker 1: It's one of the things that makes opera, I think, listenable,
Speaker 1: is the fact that in I think we translated the
Speaker 1: opera into English, it wouldn't work. And there's something about
Speaker 1: the fact that at least I don't know what they're saying.
Speaker 1: That allows that allows that to work absolutely true. I
Speaker 1: mean it turns it into duop. You know. In duop
Speaker 1: people are saying shut up and shoot and things like that,
Speaker 1: which don't really mean anything. But that's what the Italian
Speaker 1: sounds left to us. It's old on who knows what
Speaker 1: that means? Yeah, do you think the line is between
Speaker 1: sounds and music? It's where that line is. Is actually
Speaker 1: one of the things I've thought about most in thinking
Speaker 1: about music. I had an accident years and years ago
Speaker 1: where I was confined to bed for a while and
Speaker 1: one afternoon, a rainy afternoon, a friend of mine came
Speaker 1: over and I said, as she left, I said, can
Speaker 1: you just put a record on for me? This is
Speaker 1: I had a record player, but it wasn't close to
Speaker 1: the bed, so she put this record on. It was
Speaker 1: a record of Welsh harp music, and she just put
Speaker 1: the needle on. She left, and it was actually very quiet,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't get up to change the volume, and
Speaker 1: the rain was beating down outside, and I suddenly had
Speaker 1: this realization that I loved the fact that the music
Speaker 1: seemed to be arising out of the rain. It wasn't
Speaker 1: on top of the rain. Sometimes it was submerged by
Speaker 1: the rain. But these notes, the loudest notes, were appearing
Speaker 1: out of the rain, and I thought, how lovely to
Speaker 1: co opt the surroundings to become part of the music.
Speaker 1: So this was in nineteen seventy four, I think or five.
Speaker 1: So I started thinking, what about if you made a
Speaker 1: kind of music that didn't have a hard edge to it,
Speaker 1: that didn't have a hard boundary, that wasn't done so
Speaker 1: that you knew that that was a musical sound and
Speaker 1: that everything else was just random everyday noise. I thought,
Speaker 1: what about softening the edges of the music so that
Speaker 1: you include some things that could be noise outside of
Speaker 1: the music. That could be the street, or the rain,
Speaker 1: or the wind or something like that. So I started
Speaker 1: building in this sort of where ambient music started coming
Speaker 1: from was this idea of making music that had a
Speaker 1: soft edge that blended into the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: So this idea of saying, let's make the edge soft
Speaker 1: so that the music can invite in more of the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. It draws it in and that
Speaker 1: becomes part of the composition as well. And I think
Speaker 1: this was at the time I was starting to think
Speaker 1: about messiness as well, that I didn't want the work
Speaker 1: to be sort of in a little capsule, tidily closed
Speaker 1: off from the rest of the world. I wanted it
Speaker 1: to feel like it was somehow connected to it, that
Speaker 1: it bled into the rest of the world. What did
Speaker 1: you look like at the time at that point in time,
Speaker 1: how were you dressing? What was your I think I
Speaker 1: still had long hair, I was still wearing makeup. I
Speaker 1: think then yeah, mid seventies, I was, yes, and I
Speaker 1: wore a lot of unusual clothes. And I'm just wondering, like,
Speaker 1: how the just the justa positions, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: the person who's dressed like that making the music that
Speaker 1: you don't look at or don't pay attention to. It's
Speaker 1: just really interesting. Really, you're absolutely right. It's it's sort
Speaker 1: of inconsistent. And it became clearer to me that they
Speaker 1: were inconsistent that my physical appearance was saying look at me,
Speaker 1: but my musical output was saying, it's nothing. It's just
Speaker 1: a tint. It's just an atmosphere, you know, no big deal,
Speaker 1: carry on with your life. And maybe that was again
Speaker 1: looking for the balance. Yes, yes, you know that art
Speaker 1: was looking for the balance, and yep I never thought
Speaker 1: of that. That's very very likely true. From about the
Speaker 1: late seventies on, I started to not want to be
Speaker 1: a pop star, and really that was that was because
Speaker 1: I thought it was miss leading people. You know, if
Speaker 1: if the whole thing is about me, that's actually not
Speaker 1: a very interesting subject to be honest. I'm not a
Speaker 1: boring person or anything like that, but I didn't think
Speaker 1: that my personality was the thing that I had to
Speaker 1: offer the world. Yeah, you saw larger issues, yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: like what is the edge? What is the edge of art?
Speaker 1: That that was the issue that really interested me. I think,
Speaker 1: what do we call art? And why where do we
Speaker 1: draw the boundary? And what do we what do we
Speaker 1: mean by art? Anyway? You know, for me, the most
Speaker 1: interesting question for a long long time has been why
Speaker 1: do we want to make art at all? And why
Speaker 1: do we want to listen to it? I mean, it's
Speaker 1: an incredibly deep question. Why do we like music? Why?
Speaker 1: You know, if you think about it, what is music?
Speaker 1: It's a kind of arrangement of noises, but you know,
Speaker 1: we have incredibly strong feelings about them. If you said
Speaker 1: to a martian who just landed on earth. You played
Speaker 1: them four string quartets. You know, there's Shostakovich, there's a
Speaker 1: Brahms whatever else, and then there's one done by a computer,
Speaker 1: and there's one played by a group of talentless fourteen
Speaker 1: year olds who've just got those instruments. And you said,
Speaker 1: what's the difference between those? They probably say, well, there's
Speaker 1: no difference. They all sound exactly the same. But we
Speaker 1: are hearing very very very fine distinctions between these things.
Speaker 1: We obviously care about and value these experiences in quite
Speaker 1: intense ways. And since I was about seventeen, I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about this question, what are we doing it for?
Speaker 1: What are we hearing? Why does it matter? We clearly
Speaker 1: can live without music. It's not like food. We can't
Speaker 1: live without food, and we can't live without clothes, and
Speaker 1: we can't live without communicating with other human beings. And
Speaker 1: there are all sorts of things we have to do.
Speaker 1: Music isn't one of them, Painting isn't one of them, Sculpture,
Speaker 1: None of those things that we call arts are things
Speaker 1: that we have to do. So why are we doing them?
Speaker 1: And why is it so universal? We don't know of
Speaker 1: a culture that doesn't have music, Well, then then I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that we don't have to do it. If
Speaker 1: that's the case. Yes, yes, I mean it's not functional
Speaker 1: in terms of survival. It doesn't seem we have never
Speaker 1: tried the experiment. Yeah, to take it away, but it
Speaker 1: seems to have some ability to allow us to feel
Speaker 1: or understand ourselves. The music isn't what's important. It's the
Speaker 1: reaction that's important. Yes, exactly, it's what is happening to us.
Speaker 1: I think it's easier to see why we like novels
Speaker 1: and art forms that involve language in that way, because
Speaker 1: it must be an important thing for humans to be
Speaker 1: able to imagine other worlds. That's how we work. You know,
Speaker 1: we're good at visualizing worlds that don't exist. We can
Speaker 1: imagine a bridge across that river. We can imagine a
Speaker 1: city where this and that happens. We can imagine all
Speaker 1: sorts of things because we have a lot of experience
Speaker 1: in imagining. So you can see with novels where somebody
Speaker 1: sets out, here's a world where these people do this
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and this person does that to that,
Speaker 1: and all of this stuff happens, and what do you
Speaker 1: think about it? We're constantly revising our thoughts about what
Speaker 1: we think about things on the basis of fiction. Essentially,
Speaker 1: fiction is an experiment in what could happen, what if
Speaker 1: we did this? But whereas it's easy to see that
Speaker 1: with things that have words, like novels, it's much harder
Speaker 1: to see it with things that have no narrative content,
Speaker 1: like music, or earrings or or cake decorations. All of
Speaker 1: those things seem to be very arbitrary by comparison to
Speaker 1: the stuff that happens in novels. But my argument is
Speaker 1: that actually they're not arbitrary at all. Style what's called
Speaker 1: style is content, and we're very alert to stylistic changes.
Speaker 1: We know that we feel the difference. No is not
Speaker 1: the right word. We feel the difference between something that's
Speaker 1: painted very carefully with quiet, slow strokes and something that's
Speaker 1: painted very quickly with broad, violent strokes. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what it is that's being painted. Even at that level,
Speaker 1: we start to get feelings for that work. Music affects
Speaker 1: us the same the same way, or maybe more so
Speaker 1: than words, in that it's an abstraction and in the
Speaker 1: abstract that we can I'll say recognize because no, as
Speaker 1: we say it's not no, it's more like recognize a
Speaker 1: greater truth or or have more of a awareness or something,
Speaker 1: or sense something that that's too big for words, yes,
Speaker 1: or too too hard to find words for. Often, I
Speaker 1: think when when you feel something in music, what you
Speaker 1: feel is I think, is you feel, Oh, that's a
Speaker 1: kind of world that could exist where those kinds of
Speaker 1: feelings happened and are possible. You might not even be
Speaker 1: able to say, you know. If I think back, for example,
Speaker 1: to my experiments with red and blue, mixing red and
Speaker 1: blue when I started painting, I just got such a
Speaker 1: strong feeling from those things, and it was a feeling
Speaker 1: about a kind of world I thought existed, but it
Speaker 1: was sort of intangible and I couldn't give a name
Speaker 1: to it. I didn't know the word melancholy. Then I
Speaker 1: didn't have a way of describing it. But I had
Speaker 1: a way of touching the feeling of it through these
Speaker 1: experiments I was doing with colors. And I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that art does for you, that
Speaker 1: you sort of orientate yourself. You find something that moves you,
Speaker 1: and something in you says, what world is that telling
Speaker 1: you about? What are you being drawn towards what is
Speaker 1: happening inside you? What are the feelings that you have
Speaker 1: and where do they come from? And how could you
Speaker 1: if you're attracted to them, how could you find more
Speaker 1: of them in your life? Where would you find more
Speaker 1: of them? And if you're repelled by them, how do
Speaker 1: you avoid them in life? Because of course it's not
Speaker 1: all about good feelings, you know, if you're reading a
Speaker 1: book like nineteen eighty four, the point is discovering a
Speaker 1: world that you don't want to inhabit. So it's it's
Speaker 1: not only about attractive attraction, it's it's about the sources
Speaker 1: of repulsion as well. I imagine it when we tap
Speaker 1: into that in art, it makes us also feel less alone,
Speaker 1: not even that someone made it. But there's something out
Speaker 1: there that resonates with me, even if it's the paint. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm not this this thing that doesn't understand itself. Here's
Speaker 1: something that is being reflected back that resonates with me.
Speaker 1: I feel a connection. So it's maybe it's like love,
Speaker 1: might be like love. Now, I think this is such
Speaker 1: an important point that the thing that binds communities together
Speaker 1: is shared culture, and it's for exactly that reason. I
Speaker 1: think it's the knowledge that there are a group of
Speaker 1: other people who have these same feelings. You might not
Speaker 1: even be able to articulate them. But you know, I
Speaker 1: can remember this so strongly from when I was young,
Speaker 1: that you defined yourself almost by the set of feelings
Speaker 1: that you responded to. So, for instance, I remember it
Speaker 1: there was a time when you were either a Beatles
Speaker 1: fan or a Rolling Stones fan, and they were fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: They talked about a different kind of person. You know,
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that in the end they all ended up millionaires,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't matter, it's not important. What was important
Speaker 1: was that they presented these two different pictures of the
Speaker 1: kinds of feelings that were appropriate to have about the world,
Speaker 1: and crossing over from one to the other was a
Speaker 1: big decision. I can remember people having real sort of
Speaker 1: identity crises about they were fine starting to find the
Speaker 1: Stones more exciting than the Beatles, and in fact they
Speaker 1: were starting to find the Beatles a bit sort of wimpy,
Speaker 1: or vice versa. Actually as well, it happened both ways.
Speaker 1: So I think you're right that you you tap into
Speaker 1: a sort of community of feelings and the sense that
Speaker 1: there are other people who value the same feelings that
Speaker 1: I value. That's sort of what it's about. Really, It's
Speaker 1: about saying these feelings have value for me, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of others that don't. Yeah, there's also a
Speaker 1: great feeling in finding a new piece of art and
Speaker 1: sharing it with someone and enjoying it together is different
Speaker 1: than enjoying it yourself. There's a real sense of community
Speaker 1: in enjoying something that you know, we enjoy this, but
Speaker 1: maybe maybe many people don't, and that's fine. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: a great feeling of connection, and maybe that's maybe that's
Speaker 1: the greatest feeling of connection, is the feeling of these
Speaker 1: shared responses to stimuli. Yes, And incidentally, I think that's
Speaker 1: the that's the power of religion as well. The power
Speaker 1: of religion is not the connection with God, but the
Speaker 1: connection with the rest of the congregation. I think, the
Speaker 1: connection with all of the people who also believe in
Speaker 1: that particular story. I'm not really religious myself, but I
Speaker 1: really respond to that idea. You know, I got into
Speaker 1: gospel music very young. In fact, when I came to America,
Speaker 1: I was by then a big gospel fan. And what
Speaker 1: surprised me was that all my hip friends thought it
Speaker 1: was quite embarrassing if they found a little bit a
Speaker 1: quaint or something that I liked. Gospel music to me,
Speaker 1: it was just like Doop had been. It was this amazing,
Speaker 1: exotic foreign music and it really came straight through to me.
Speaker 1: But the you know, religious music, there are certain stages
Speaker 1: in one's life when music becomes a religious experience, when
Speaker 1: suddenly it represents all sorts of things, all sorts of
Speaker 1: whole host of baggage comes with the musical experience. And
Speaker 1: you know, as you know in pop music, it always
Speaker 1: involves not only music, in fact, not mainly music. Often
Speaker 1: it involves haircuts and ways of dressing, social manners, ways
Speaker 1: of talking to each other. All of those things come
Speaker 1: bound up in the same package that they're all part
Speaker 1: of the same sort of universe of feelings that you've
Speaker 1: decided to enter into. That's why we call it culture
Speaker 1: because it's a big mess of all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: It involves everything, cooking, what you should eat. And there's
Speaker 1: a brilliant book. Actually, I think you'd really like it.
Speaker 1: It's about the end of the Soviet Union. I'm always
Speaker 1: telling people to read this book because I think it's
Speaker 1: so not well known enough, and it's called Everything Was
Speaker 1: Forever Until it Was no More, and then the subtitle
Speaker 1: is the Last Soviet Generation. It's one of the best
Speaker 1: books about youth culture I've ever read, about how beliefs
Speaker 1: and feelings and orientations spread through people and suddenly everybody's
Speaker 1: doing it. And the title Everything was Forever Until it
Speaker 1: Was no More refers to the fact that the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union disappeared overnight. It had seemed eternal, you know, nobody
Speaker 1: could imagine it not being there, and in one night
Speaker 1: it was gone. Next day there was no Soviet Union anymore,
Speaker 1: and people carried on with their lives. It turned out
Speaker 1: that they've been living without the Soviet Union for a
Speaker 1: long time. In their heads. This is what will happen.
Speaker 1: I hope to capitalism eventually that it will have looked
Speaker 1: like it was forever, but suddenly it will disappear. I
Speaker 1: wonder what it was like on the day of the change.
Speaker 1: I guess that's what the book's about. It's really worth
Speaker 1: reading because it talks about the youth culture leading up
Speaker 1: in the twenty years before the end of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: and because because it involved Russians. Russians are incredibly articulate
Speaker 1: and very much to do with manifestos and writing down
Speaker 1: positions and articulating positions. So there's a lot of documentation
Speaker 1: of what people were doing and what they thought they
Speaker 1: were doing, which is what makes this book so great.
Speaker 1: You think, wow, young people are so brilliant, They're so
Speaker 1: fruitful coming up with ideas. It's quite humbling to read,
Speaker 1: actually beautiful. I've heard the story before of how the
Speaker 1: moment of recognition or the need for what became ambient
Speaker 1: music based on the Cologne airport. Sitting in the Cologne airport.
Speaker 1: How might it have been different if it would have
Speaker 1: happened in a natural space as opposed to a man
Speaker 1: made space. Well, the question really is would it have
Speaker 1: even occurred to me if if I was in a
Speaker 1: natural space, I'm not sure that it would have done.
Speaker 1: It was because I was in an incredibly carefully manufactured space,
Speaker 1: beautiful airport, where the architects had really looked at every detail,
Speaker 1: and the light was beautiful and the lines of the
Speaker 1: place were beautiful, and somebody in the cafe had put
Speaker 1: on a cassette of German disco music which was ringing
Speaker 1: through the airport. I mean, I wasn't postmodern enough at
Speaker 1: the time. To accept that. I just thought, that's not right.
Speaker 1: That part hasn't been thought about. Everything else has been
Speaker 1: thought about, but nobody's thought about that now. It was
Speaker 1: a beautiful day and the airport was nearly empty, and
Speaker 1: I was sitting there, bathed in light, and it was
Speaker 1: one of those cases like we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: where you think, I wish there was another kind of
Speaker 1: music for this situation. And I started thinking, so what
Speaker 1: would that be like. You know, it's an airport, so
Speaker 1: you can't be too loud. Obviously, people have to hear announcements.
Speaker 1: It has to be interruptible for the same reason. It
Speaker 1: shouldn't dominate the vocal register, because people need to communicate.
Speaker 1: So I just was sort of thinking this out, and
Speaker 1: quite soon I thought, right, I think I know what
Speaker 1: I could make that music. I know how I could
Speaker 1: do that. And that's how that first ambient record came about.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't unprecedented. I had been working on
Speaker 1: music a little bit like that before, but I suddenly
Speaker 1: realized what its role in life could be. If you like,
Speaker 1: what the place of this music could be. I knew
Speaker 1: it wasn't dance music. I knew it wasn't radio music.
Speaker 1: It was functional, but I hadn't yet discovered the function.
Speaker 1: It was then that I thought, I know what this
Speaker 1: music could be for. Might there be other forms of
Speaker 1: ambient music for different use cases? Yes? I did a
Speaker 1: record called Narrowly. The subtitle was Music for Thinking that
Speaker 1: really came out of a response. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: hearing from a lot of particularly artists and graphic designers
Speaker 1: that they liked having my music playing when they were working.
Speaker 1: They didn't want conventional records which kept stopping and starting
Speaker 1: and the mood changing, and they were there was lyrics
Speaker 1: and they were kind of annoying. They didn't want classical
Speaker 1: music because it sort of felt too old. They liked
Speaker 1: this music that had this sort of directionless atmospheric quality.
Speaker 1: So I thought, oh, good, so it's workings. It's working functionally,
Speaker 1: And so I thought, so what about when you want
Speaker 1: to sit and concentrate on something, You want to have
Speaker 1: something that kind of calms the world down a little
Speaker 1: bit around you, that softens, as Eric Sati said, softens
Speaker 1: the clink of fork against dinner plate or something like that.
Speaker 1: I forget the quote exactly, but you want something that
Speaker 1: is sort of a slight barrier to the noises of
Speaker 1: the world, and it becomes a barrier by sucking them
Speaker 1: into itself. And so that I came up with this
Speaker 1: piece Coordinarily, which is an hour long piece, which at
Speaker 1: that time was the longest I could make it. And
Speaker 1: I started thinking then about the idea of music that
Speaker 1: doesn't have a beginning or end, that just is theoretically infinite. Well,
Speaker 1: that didn't become possible until the nineties when I started
Speaker 1: working with computers, and it was possible to make the
Speaker 1: kinds of programs I make nowhere where the music effectively
Speaker 1: never repeats. And my ambition always then was to try
Speaker 1: to make an experience a little bit like sitting by
Speaker 1: a river. So you're sitting by the river. It's always
Speaker 1: the same river, but as you know, it's never the
Speaker 1: same river twice, so every time you look up at
Speaker 1: the river, it's doing something a little bit different. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not like watching a film where suddenly the river
Speaker 1: turns blood red or gets much bigger or something like that.
Speaker 1: I didn't want drama. I just wanted something like nature,
Speaker 1: subtle subtle variations, subtle variations, yes, and variations that stay
Speaker 1: within a kind of range of possibilities and explore that
Speaker 1: range rather randomly. I just wanted the thing to be
Speaker 1: what Harold Bud used to call eternally pretty. That was
Speaker 1: his wif of second it. Dear Harold. He died about
Speaker 1: two months ago from COVID very sad, so I dedicate
Speaker 1: this thought to Harold. So yes. So, when when Harold
Speaker 1: and I met, we were both pretty much on this
Speaker 1: groove of thinking, what about making music that isn't designed
Speaker 1: to upset anybody? Now, of course that sounds pretty uncontroversial now,
Speaker 1: but in the mid to late seventies that was considered
Speaker 1: to be the biggest sell out of all time. You know,
Speaker 1: music was supposed to shake the world and create revolutions
Speaker 1: and upset your parents and all sorts of things like that.
Speaker 1: And we thought, what about making music that is just
Speaker 1: really comfortable? Comfortable was probably the most controversial word you
Speaker 1: could use. Then, what about music that makes you feel
Speaker 1: warm and friendly and open and able to surrender? When
Speaker 1: I realized that surrender was really the thing that I
Speaker 1: was interested in for that kind of music. Obviously I
Speaker 1: don't only make that kind of music, but for that
Speaker 1: I wanted to make something that would make you think
Speaker 1: I can let something happen to me. I don't have
Speaker 1: to defend against everything. I can get out of that
Speaker 1: posture of self defense and let something happen. And I
Speaker 1: started then thinking a lot about the idea of surrender.
Speaker 1: And I realized that since we come from a technological culture,
Speaker 1: and since we're incredibly good at technology, we tend to
Speaker 1: think that control is the solution to every problem. And sure,
Speaker 1: if you can do it, it is a good solution.
Speaker 1: If you can control when crops come up and how
Speaker 1: they grow, and how to get rid of weeds and
Speaker 1: what have you, why not. But there are lots of
Speaker 1: situations we can't control because we don't know the rules
Speaker 1: for them, we don't have the technology to deal with them.
Speaker 1: So if you can't control, what is the best thing
Speaker 1: to do? The best thing to do is to surrender
Speaker 1: gracefully and to somehow allow that situation to carry you
Speaker 1: along and not be damaged by it. So surrendering I
Speaker 1: think of as an active verb, not a passive verb.
Speaker 1: I think of it as a way of dealing with things.
Speaker 1: You know, in our repertoire of responses to things, we
Speaker 1: have at one end, extreme end control at the other surrender.
Speaker 1: We can very rarely, except in scientific experiments, be completely
Speaker 1: at the control end. There are always random factors and
Speaker 1: unpredictable things, and equally it's quite difficult to be completely
Speaker 1: at the surrender end. We're gradually generally in our lives,
Speaker 1: we're moving along the access to find the right blend
Speaker 1: for the occasion. But what we find ecstatic is nearly
Speaker 1: always an experience of surrender. If you think of the
Speaker 1: things that where we achieve transcendence if you like or ecstasy,
Speaker 1: it's sex, drugs, art, and religion. Those are all the
Speaker 1: places where we say, I'm going to let go and
Speaker 1: just let this thing happen to me. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to control it. I'm going to be taken somewhere. Now,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that although we are constantly trying
Speaker 1: to control, our biggest thrills come from letting go of control.
Speaker 1: And so what becomes obvious that is that it's the
Speaker 1: combination of those two that we should really be specializing in.
Speaker 1: We should and we should not forget the surrender part.
Speaker 1: We should not think that surrendering is passivity or cowardice
Speaker 1: or incompetence. We should say it's one of the ways
Speaker 1: we deal with the world. And it's one of the
Speaker 1: things I think we learned from from the experience of
Speaker 1: art and the experience of love and sex and religion
Speaker 1: and drugs. As I said, they're always where we pitch
Speaker 1: ourselves into a situation that we know we will be
Speaker 1: out of control. And that's one of the other reasons
Speaker 1: I think that we are so attracted by art because
Speaker 1: we know that can happen. And of course art is
Speaker 1: harmless essentially, so we can have the experience of being
Speaker 1: out of control and not be flat and by it,
Speaker 1: not be killed by it. We can switch the film off,
Speaker 1: or we can leave the gallery or whatever. So I
Speaker 1: think art is the place where we go to have
Speaker 1: this feeling again, to remember that feeling of going with
Speaker 1: the flow, of letting something happen to us, so that
Speaker 1: in real life, in the rest of life, I should say,
Speaker 1: we are still able to do that. We can remember
Speaker 1: that feeling and we can know when to use it.
Speaker 1: How strongly would you say, our kids? You for me,
Speaker 1: there are certain I can see a film that has
Speaker 1: an energy in it that could affect me for months,
Speaker 1: and I'm very open to the energies contained in things,
Speaker 1: so I'm protective of what I watch For that reasons,
Speaker 1: I don't want to have a bad time. A lot
Speaker 1: of the time, I don't choose that, And I just
Speaker 1: want to ask how sensitive you are in that respect. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think I'm very sensitive in that respect, and to
Speaker 1: the extent that certain experiences I don't want to have
Speaker 1: them very often because I don't want them to lose
Speaker 1: their power. So just about the single album that probably
Speaker 1: influenced me more than almost any other was the Third
Speaker 1: Valve Underground album. That was a really really important record
Speaker 1: in my life because so many things I had been
Speaker 1: wondering if they were possible suddenly appeared on that album,
Speaker 1: and also a lot of things I hadn't even conceived of.
Speaker 1: For that reason, I've never owned the album. I haven't
Speaker 1: even listened to it that many times because I really
Speaker 1: wanted it to retain that power. I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to become commonplace. Yes. Another piece like that is the
Speaker 1: Steve Wright piece It's Going to Rain, that tape piece
Speaker 1: from I think nineteen sixty four that absolutely devastated me.
Speaker 1: The first time I heard it. I understood so many
Speaker 1: things about music that I had not even dreamed of
Speaker 1: before that piece, and I still regard it as a
Speaker 1: key moment in my life, and I think I've probably
Speaker 1: listened to it four times. It turned a switch and
Speaker 1: the switch stayed turned. Yes, I didn't have to keep
Speaker 1: turning it again, you know, it stayed turned. Can you
Speaker 1: think of other works of art that impacted you in
Speaker 1: a profound way, maybe changed you over the course of
Speaker 1: your life, from from your earliest days to the first
Speaker 1: one that I really can remember very strongly. Sounds trivial
Speaker 1: to say it, but it was a Walt Disney film.
Speaker 1: We didn't have a television when I was young. Nobody
Speaker 1: did when I was young. My uncle had an eight
Speaker 1: millimeter projector and he he got a Walt Disney film
Speaker 1: and he set the projector up next to the kitchen wall.
Speaker 1: It was only about that far away from the wall,
Speaker 1: so the image was tiny like that, but it was
Speaker 1: intensely bright. We didn't have very bright light, bulb stain
Speaker 1: or anything. And on this wall I can remember even
Speaker 1: to this day that sensation of pure color because it
Speaker 1: was Donald Duck or something like that, so it was
Speaker 1: just flat panels of pure color. You never saw anything
Speaker 1: like that in life, and I can remember just being
Speaker 1: completely dazzled by this experience. Of that color and those
Speaker 1: saturated pigments. And I talked to my parents about this
Speaker 1: about thirty years ago and they said, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: were talking about that for weeks. I really was. I
Speaker 1: just thought, that is the most amazing thing I everseen.
Speaker 1: I want to see more of that. I wasn't at
Speaker 1: all interested in the story. I can't even remember what
Speaker 1: it was, but I just loved this sensation of intense color.
Speaker 1: So that was an important one. Do you remember the
Speaker 1: first musical one? There was one that I think was
Speaker 1: very important for me, but it's not obvious how that
Speaker 1: translated into anything that I did in after that. So
Speaker 1: I was eleven and another uncle was moving and left us.
Speaker 1: He wants somewhere to park his record collection, so my
Speaker 1: dad said he would take it. So suddenly we had
Speaker 1: this huge record collection and it was all big band
Speaker 1: jazz and Ray Conniff singers. So every morning as I
Speaker 1: got up to go to school, I put one of
Speaker 1: these records on and the Ray Coniff, Wow, I just thought,
Speaker 1: what a beautiful sound. Again, the music wasn't really that
Speaker 1: interesting to me, but it was this this incredible texture
Speaker 1: that I don't know how they got it. They had
Speaker 1: singers and strings and all the things. You know. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know that any of those Ray
Speaker 1: Coniff records. I've had similar experiences with Henry Mensini recordings
Speaker 1: where it's just transcendent, not because of the material, but
Speaker 1: just the the sound of it. It feels like it's
Speaker 1: coming from another another planet. Yeah, well, those those recordings
Speaker 1: I realized later on as I started to recording myself,
Speaker 1: I would often think about those recordings, and I realized
Speaker 1: that they really came from the certain technical peak that
Speaker 1: happened in recording about that time, where people really knew
Speaker 1: their equipment really, really well. I subsequently worked with an
Speaker 1: engineer in London who was John Would. His name was.
Speaker 1: He was an old school engineer who he specialized in
Speaker 1: recording folk music, particularly the British folk rock like Fairport
Speaker 1: Conventionance on. And I watched him at work and he
Speaker 1: had a very simple studio. He had, you know, a
Speaker 1: few mics, a couple of compressors. Nothing, I mean, laughable
Speaker 1: compared to what we all work with now. But he
Speaker 1: had such a sensitivity to those things. He would walk
Speaker 1: out and move a mic an inch and he wasn't
Speaker 1: doing it to show off. He was quite a lazy man.
Speaker 1: If he could stay sitting in his chair, he would,
Speaker 1: but he would get up to change the position of
Speaker 1: a mic. And I thought, this man absolutely understands the
Speaker 1: material he's working with. He really knows where you put
Speaker 1: a microphone in relation to a banjo as opposed to
Speaker 1: in relation to a guitar or whatever. And that made
Speaker 1: me think again about that era of recording, when you
Speaker 1: had people who knew their studio really well. They'd worked
Speaker 1: in that same room for twenty years. They knew that
Speaker 1: you put someone in that corner for that sound and
Speaker 1: over there for this sound. It was a condition of
Speaker 1: technological expertise that hasn't yet been rivaled in the digital era,
Speaker 1: because there's just too much to know now, you know,
Speaker 1: nobody can ever have that kind of rapp or with
Speaker 1: with all of this equipment that we have. You know,
Speaker 1: every day more equipment is invented than those engineers experienced
Speaker 1: in their whole lifetime. So they were just better at that,
Speaker 1: we have to accept. I remember going to the National
Speaker 1: Sound Archive in London, which is a fabulous place by
Speaker 1: the way, and they had a display of I think
Speaker 1: it was eight different recordings of Tchaikovsky Symphony recorded in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Speaker 1: So it was there not to show you how the
Speaker 1: different orchestras dealt with it, but to show you how
Speaker 1: the recordings were different. And without doubt, the best sounding
Speaker 1: recording was from the nineteen sixties, and it was for
Speaker 1: exactly that reason. You just felt that these people really
Speaker 1: understood what they were doing. The later recordings were more
Speaker 1: accurate in a certain sense in that you could hear
Speaker 1: all the parts very well because they had spot miked everything,
Speaker 1: but none of them had the feeling of that nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties recording. So it's interesting to me that technically we
Speaker 1: get worse at the same time as we get better. Yes,
Speaker 1: we lose certain skills as well as gaining new ones
Speaker 1: in your evolution up to ambient music. It's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me that you could ever do anything different than that,
Speaker 1: Do you know what I'm saying. It's like it almost
Speaker 1: feels like that's the end of the line in terms
Speaker 1: of the minimalist approach you got there. So it's interesting
Speaker 1: that you do other things like you didn't do the
Speaker 1: Mandrean staying in the same language only. Yes, perhaps if
Speaker 1: I had carried on living in New York, I would
Speaker 1: have done because I would have always wanted more of
Speaker 1: that kind of music. But I've just had the very
Speaker 1: interesting experience of do you know about this Sonas project
Speaker 1: that I'm doing. I don't really tell me. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: Sonas asked me to curate a channel for them. Basically
Speaker 1: it's like my own radio station, and I like the
Speaker 1: idea of that, but I thought, what I'd really like
Speaker 1: to do is to curate a station that plays only
Speaker 1: my music, because I've got so much unreleased stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: I work in the studio every day pretty much, and
Speaker 1: some of it is just experiments where I try something
Speaker 1: out just to see what it would do if you
Speaker 1: tried to make a piece of music like that. And
Speaker 1: I have thousands of thousands of recordings like that. I
Speaker 1: just mix everything, you know, when I finished the day,
Speaker 1: I mix whatever I've done that day. Sometimes it can
Speaker 1: be five or six different pieces. Even so, I have
Speaker 1: this vast library of stuff. Some of it is really
Speaker 1: quite interesting, and I thought, how nice would it be
Speaker 1: to have a radio channel where you just switch it
Speaker 1: on and outcome pieces of music that you've never heard before,
Speaker 1: will probably never hear again, and they're all quite different
Speaker 1: from one another. There's quite a range of stuff. Some
Speaker 1: of it is very ambient, some of it is very
Speaker 1: hard beat stuff. Some of it's really electronic. Some of
Speaker 1: it is touchingly human, which is how you describe something
Speaker 1: that is rather amateur. So for the first time in
Speaker 1: my life, I thought, well, I'll just start listening through
Speaker 1: to those things, And so they play on random shuffle
Speaker 1: out of my computer, and I have to say, I
Speaker 1: so like the collisions, the strange combinations of things. You know,
Speaker 1: something from nineteen ninety one next to something I did
Speaker 1: last year next to something from twenty to five, and
Speaker 1: no rationale to the choices that they're randomly selected. And
Speaker 1: although some of the music is pretty challenging, a lot
Speaker 1: of it is quite easy to listen to. And as
Speaker 1: I would say to people, you'll probably only hear it once,
Speaker 1: so if you don't like it, just wait, something else
Speaker 1: will come along soon. What's the variation of length between
Speaker 1: the pieces. The shortest piece on there, I think is
Speaker 1: about a minute and a half. The longest is I
Speaker 1: think about eighteen minutes, So it's quite a range. I mean,
Speaker 1: I do have much longer pieces as well, but I
Speaker 1: thought it would be a little bit demanding if you
Speaker 1: switched on and you weren't that fond of the piece,
Speaker 1: and yet it's going to last for another four and
Speaker 1: a quarter hours. The longest piece in my archive is
Speaker 1: eight hours long. And will the way, will the way
Speaker 1: it gets programmed be random, It'll just be on a
Speaker 1: random loop. Well, it'll it'll be live random, so it'll
Speaker 1: be selecting as it goes, you know, yes, just like
Speaker 1: you know in iTunes you have shuffle mode. Can we
Speaker 1: talk more about we started talking about the pieces of
Speaker 1: music or art that along the way we've only got
Speaker 1: we're still in childhood that struck you as changed either
Speaker 1: changed your work or just changed you. You know that
Speaker 1: those new chapters starting based on something you've experienced. Well,
Speaker 1: still pretty much in my childhood was John Cage and
Speaker 1: all of the cluster of things that were happening and
Speaker 1: composing in the mid sixties, which was when I became
Speaker 1: aware of Cage. And this was really the important idea
Speaker 1: here for me was that art could be a kind
Speaker 1: of discipline, a spiritual discipline of some kind. So in
Speaker 1: that sort of assessment of art, the process is much
Speaker 1: more important. The process of doing the thing is more
Speaker 1: important than the result. So my way of explaining that
Speaker 1: was I used to say process, not product. But I
Speaker 1: also used to say, think about beginnings rather than endings.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a sort of not goal oriented
Speaker 1: way of making art, where where it's not like I've
Speaker 1: got a vision of this picture I want to pay
Speaker 1: and I'm going to realize that vision. It's more like,
Speaker 1: there's a procedure that I want to do and it
Speaker 1: will produce something, and I'm not sure what it is.
Speaker 1: You know, it's I don't yet know what it's going
Speaker 1: to be. So that became very important to me. The
Speaker 1: idea of the composer as somebody who started something rather
Speaker 1: than finished it. So this was very much a thought
Speaker 1: in the sixties with people like Cage and Steve Ryke
Speaker 1: and Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, all
Speaker 1: of those kinds of composers were really initiating procedures of
Speaker 1: some kind, and those procedures would by the way, produce music,
Speaker 1: but the compositional attention was on the procedures, and this
Speaker 1: very much appealed to me, and it certainly became what
Speaker 1: I subsequently called generative music. Is really that where where
Speaker 1: what you're really doing is designing a sort of system
Speaker 1: that makes music, and you tweak the system until it
Speaker 1: makes the music that you wanted. And so that that
Speaker 1: was that was important. Then of course all this time
Speaker 1: I was listening to pop music as well, but there
Speaker 1: are so many examples there of things that really changed
Speaker 1: my listening life. I mean, from early on, I would
Speaker 1: say one of the most important records for me was
Speaker 1: this song called The Mountains High by Dick and Dede.
Speaker 1: It's a brilliant example of pinning a record around one
Speaker 1: very simple, great idea, which is this drum figure that
Speaker 1: so the music go dun dun dun dundum dun dun
Speaker 1: dun dum dum du du. This really loud drum figure
Speaker 1: comes in every bar, and then Dick and Deed this
Speaker 1: very strange harmony they seeing together. So again this was
Speaker 1: this was the early experimental days of rock music, when
Speaker 1: it was obvious to anyone who could think that this
Speaker 1: was not really about music. It was about space. It
Speaker 1: was about creating new spaces. And this record, The Mountain's High,
Speaker 1: had this weird, ringing, strange quality to it. It was
Speaker 1: another world, you know, suddenly there was this other world,
Speaker 1: very exotic to me growing up in rural Suffolk. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what that world was, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was the same effect as reading sci fi. You know, Wow,
Speaker 1: what a world that could exist? Could it exist? Do
Speaker 1: you remember how you heard it? Yes? Well, you see,
Speaker 1: I grew up in a part of England, the most
Speaker 1: easterly part of England, which was where all the Cold
Speaker 1: War air bases were. So after the Second World War,
Speaker 1: the deal we had with America was okay, thanks for
Speaker 1: all the weapons. Now you can have half of the
Speaker 1: east of England to put your bloody gray air bases on,
Speaker 1: which is what they did. There were many of them
Speaker 1: within a few miles from where I grew up. So
Speaker 1: the little town I grew up in had coffee bars,
Speaker 1: lots of them because there were so many Gis and
Speaker 1: English soldiers and airmen as well. And every single coffee
Speaker 1: bar had a jukebox, and nearly all of the music
Speaker 1: they were playing was American music because that was their audience.
Speaker 1: So very early on I was hearing stuff that you
Speaker 1: just wouldn't ever hear on the radio in England. Nobody
Speaker 1: was playing that kind of thing. So I was hearing
Speaker 1: do opened early R and B and so on. Then
Speaker 1: my sister, who was four years older than me, fell
Speaker 1: in love with a GI and so she used to
Speaker 1: go to one of the bases. We had a big
Speaker 1: base called Bentwaters, which had six or eight thousand American
Speaker 1: gis on it, and they had a great, big PX
Speaker 1: store where she used to buy singles, and so I
Speaker 1: had quite a good collection of quite sort of radical
Speaker 1: early rock and roll fantastic. So that sort of cumulatively
Speaker 1: had a big effect on me. It made me like
Speaker 1: a way of delivering music which was much more impassioned
Speaker 1: than what was happening in English music at that time.
Speaker 1: And it took me years to realize that what that
Speaker 1: way of music, that way of delivering was was called
Speaker 1: black music. I didn't know that these were black people.
Speaker 1: I just heard this type of music and I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. And it reminds me actually of a story.
Speaker 1: This is a true story. During the war, when lots
Speaker 1: of gis were coming over to England, somebody interviewed an
Speaker 1: old farmer from Devon and said, so, how do you
Speaker 1: feel about the Americans coming over here? And the farmer said, well,
Speaker 1: they're all right, aren't they, except for the white ones.
Speaker 1: He obviously thought that Americans were basically black people, but
Speaker 1: there were a few of these sort of boisterous white
Speaker 1: people that he wished hadn't turned up with them. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: So I was listening to this music and not aware
Speaker 1: for a very long time because there were no music
Speaker 1: magazines then, no, there was no nothing like on television,
Speaker 1: and it was a long time before I realized that
Speaker 1: this was actually a music that came from a particular
Speaker 1: racial demographic. What was what was the part music in
Speaker 1: England at that time, just to for so we could
Speaker 1: picture what everyone else was hearing while you were hearing this,
Speaker 1: Well it was it was very often really truly pathetic
Speaker 1: versions of those American songs. So you know, there would
Speaker 1: be a hit like like watered Down. Well, anything that
Speaker 1: became a big hit in America would get covered in
Speaker 1: England by an English artist. So and the covers were
Speaker 1: just appallingly sad. They were done by sort of groups
Speaker 1: of sessions musicians reading sheet music. It lacked everything that
Speaker 1: I wanted from music. All it had was a nice tune,
Speaker 1: you know, there was nothing in the performance that was
Speaker 1: convincing at all. So there was there was a man
Speaker 1: called Craig Douglas who covered every every American number one.
Speaker 1: It seemed to me there would be the Craig Douglas
Speaker 1: version of it came out, and you know, when you
Speaker 1: put the two together. On the one hand, this this
Speaker 1: sort of raw, quite angry sound that American music had then,
Speaker 1: even even the even the love songs had a sort
Speaker 1: of urgency and a grip to them. And then you'd
Speaker 1: hear the English version. It had all been nicely sort
Speaker 1: of tidied up and all the rough hedges taken off,
Speaker 1: and it's very very pleasant. You know. I just thought,
Speaker 1: oh god, it was one of the most important lessons
Speaker 1: to me that the content of a piece of art
Speaker 1: is the delivery. You know. The content isn't what the
Speaker 1: words say, it isn't what the melody says. It's the
Speaker 1: bloody delivery. That's the thing you respond to. And of
Speaker 1: course this was what made the Beatles so amazing, because
Speaker 1: they knew that delivery. They'd been listening to Chuck Berry
Speaker 1: and you know, John Lee Hooker and everybody else, Howland Wolf,
Speaker 1: so they they came with that style. And that was
Speaker 1: I mean, because They wrote great songs too, but it
Speaker 1: was that style that made it great. Do you remember
Speaker 1: the first time you heard the Beatles? Yes, I remember
Speaker 1: it very well. And how was What was the occasion
Speaker 1: and what was your reaction. I was in the Flamingo
Speaker 1: Cafe in Woodbridge Thoroughfare and on the jukebox came the
Speaker 1: single Love Me Do, and I honestly had never heard
Speaker 1: anything like that. I thought it was so beautifully awkward
Speaker 1: in a way, I think is what it was. It
Speaker 1: just didn't sound smooth, and that was good. I didn't
Speaker 1: like smooth, and it's very minimalistic. You know. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing about the Beatles is that they hardly ever did
Speaker 1: a three part harmony, you know, the thing that everybody
Speaker 1: does all the bloody time now because it's easy and
Speaker 1: it's irresistible. So everything has three, four, five part harmonies.
Speaker 1: But you know a lot of the great bands of
Speaker 1: that period that the Evely's is another example, did two
Speaker 1: part harmonies. And I think that's that restraint. That missing
Speaker 1: out of something is very engaging for a listener because
Speaker 1: it invites you to fill the whole, to imagine what
Speaker 1: would fill the gap. It's another lesson of minalism. That
Speaker 1: if you leave stuff out, you invite listeners in. Yes,
Speaker 1: you give them something to do, a place to go.
Speaker 1: They often also often sang unison as opposed to going
Speaker 1: to automatically going to a harmony, yes, which which you
Speaker 1: hear in a lot of sort of Central European music,
Speaker 1: where like Georgian and Balkan music in general, where people
Speaker 1: move between being harmonists and unison and they go back
Speaker 1: and forth without this sort of classical assumption that you've
Speaker 1: always got to be doing something different. Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: one last question to ask, just because I'm really curious,
Speaker 1: what's your relationship to spirituality? Well, as you can tell
Speaker 1: from from the way I talk too much, I think
Speaker 1: about this kind of thing quite a lot. What I
Speaker 1: always want to do is to cut away as much
Speaker 1: of the shit as possible and see what's left. So
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a believer. I want to
Speaker 1: be somebody who, as far as possible, understands and knows things.
Speaker 1: Believing things leaves me a little bit unsatisfied. If I
Speaker 1: find myself believing something, I want to test the belief.
Speaker 1: I want to say, how do I find out how
Speaker 1: valid this is? How true? This is? Now? In real
Speaker 1: belief in proper faith, You're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1: Faith is supposed to be, by definition, the acceptance of
Speaker 1: something that you cannot find evidence for. If you can
Speaker 1: find evidence for, it's not faith anymore. It's called knowledge then.
Speaker 1: So this is a long way round of saying that
Speaker 1: I'm not anti spiritual, I'm not anti religion. Actually, in fact,
Speaker 1: I can see how religion really cements some communities together
Speaker 1: and really helps people in their lives. But I'm not
Speaker 1: by nature a believer, so it's difficult for me to
Speaker 1: use that kind of cement. My cement has to come
Speaker 1: from trying to understand things and to see how they work,
Speaker 1: and to share those ideas with other people. So I
Speaker 1: think one of the other things that surrendering prepares you
Speaker 1: for is the experience of uncertainty, the experience of not
Speaker 1: knowing the answer but still having to do something. You know,
Speaker 1: the fact that you don't know the answer can't cripple you,
Speaker 1: And of course a lot of people are crippled by
Speaker 1: not knowing the answer, and so they just choose an
Speaker 1: inappropriate answer just for the want of an answer. So
Speaker 1: you just have to accept that you don't know the
Speaker 1: answers and you will make mistakes, and you will need
Speaker 1: to change your values and your tools, and some of
Speaker 1: them might last you a lifetime. But you're lucky if
Speaker 1: that happens. I haven't got any that lasted me a lifetime.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this amazing pleasure speaking
Speaker 1: with you. Yes, you too, I must say I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed that. Thanks to Brian Eno for sharing his artistic
Speaker 1: philosophy with us. To hear a favorite Brian Eno tracks,
Speaker 1: head to Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 1: broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes.
Speaker 1: You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken
Speaker 1: Record is produced with helpful ly Arose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Mila Bell. Broken Record is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please
Speaker 1: remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast
Speaker 1: that our theme musics by Henny Beats. I'm justin Whitchman.