A blog about the music of Brian Eno, Harold Budd & others
During the day I often have BBC Radio 3 playing at a very low volume: unlike recordings with vocal content the classical music doesn’t interfere with my train of thought in any way, but does provide a level of stimulus. (Radio 3 does play a lot of opera, which is obviously vocal, but you know what I mean.) A while ago the station played a gentle ambient piece by Brian Eno, which caught my attention. I looked up some more Eno, and asked a friend who likes Eno’s music what he’d recommend as a starting point. He suggested a couple of albums.
I’ve found that I love this stuff. The title track of The Pearl, an album by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, is wonderfully eerie and atmospheric, a deceptively simple composition that gradually increases in complexity and layering. Through headphones a stereo-pan whooshing sound is audible, which I reckon is one of the analogue effects used on the track, adding an effect of its own. The music overall is like fairies, sparks of light that exist in the spaces between moments. Curious visitors with delicate, pointed features, thin bones visible through their translucent skin.
The Winter Garden album – a collaboration between Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie – is probably my favourite. Harmony and the Play of Light is a beautiful track of sweet, gentle sounds with almost menacing undertones and harmonics. Instead of decaying, notes increase in volume, or shift in pitch, or develop vibrato. The relationships between the notes change and grow. The notes seem to create music of their own as other sounds rise or drift in. I see a black lake in a cavern. The light of the music reflects off the water’s oily surface, changing colour and shimmering. The lights rise, blue and white and sparkling gold, then drift back into the blackness. Some of the notes are old and wise. Younger ones want to play.
Heavy Heart Some More is like signals broadcast by a vast alien machine housed in a subterranean chamber. It’s ancient. Huge. A monolith. It’s sent out these signals for thousands of years but received no response. None will come.
There is Nobody on Eno’s Music for Films is almost tribal-sounding. Quartz is beams of light in ice-blue and gold rising from circles of stone in a pebbled garden, merging with thicker red and orange bands. Alternative 3 is a giant wolf stalking, trailing salvia, all hot breath and coarse black fur.
Slow Water on Eno’s album Music for Films has distant alien broadcasts. Then wine glasses singing. (You know how to make a wine glass sing, right? Right.) And maybe a bit of whale song. Then it all comes together in this incredibly relaxed, gentle piece. A woman in a floaty dress levitates above the ground with her arms swaying out beside her. She’s looking to her right, long red hair rising up above her shoulders. Maybe she’s under water. She just drifts, utterly at peace. As the track fades, she does too.
I find this music really stimulating to work to. All music I’ve previously experienced has been somehow two-dimensional, created and performed. But the music of Eno and Budd et al is not of this world; it is of other, far more exotic places. It is the music of gods and aliens, of transcendence. I don’t think this music is even owned by the musicians who created it – each soundscape is an entity in its own right. It’s as if these musicians have formed these sounds and then released them to find their own way, in turn producing sounds of their own. An analogy is obvious. To me this music seems to represent the purest form of creation.
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Martin Sketchley 