Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal Read Free Book Online

‘Come in on Thursday at 12 o’clock. I’ve got four empty tracks—plug into those and I’ll see you at 6 o’clock.’ He said he wasn’t a musician, just a wholesale amateur, but he was very effective on a musical level and that’s all that mattered to me.”
    Eno’s insistence on calling himself a “non-musician’’ was partly a reaction to the prog-rock of the time, and the 1970s emphasis on virtuosity. It was also a logical extension of his interest in experimental music, and his experiences in Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Eno was an emerging type of musician; he was a true synthesizer player. In the 1980s, Eno would become a virtuoso player of an instrument—the Yamaha DX-7.
    In a way, Eno’s lack of formal training was a gift. It meant he approached the synthesizer for what it was: a generator of complex sounds, not as a keyboard. He came at synths from tape machines, and from using tape recorders as generators of strange sounds. This was in stark opposition to the famed progressive keyboard noodlers of the time, like Rick Wakeman of Yes, who treated the synthesizer primarily as a very fancy keyboard.
    Eno’s lack of formal musical training made him more predisposed to view the studio, too, as a sort of synthesizer, a way to build new sounds. “The documentary aspect is part and parcel of most recording studios,” said Harold Budd. “You perform something and it’s captured, and it’s recorded and pressed and put out in the world. The part with Eno was just the opposite. You use the studio in order to get the sounds that are going to be captured, you know what I mean? It just put a reversal on it.”
    Eno may have been a studio maven and a synthesist, but he wasn’t much of a gearhead. “Some producers go in, and they say, ‘Have you got the Lexicon 224 echo?’” Eno said in a 1981 interview with Jim Aikin in
Keyboard Wizards
. “‘Have you got this, have you got that? Oh, you haven’t got that? I can’t work here.’ Suddenly their world crumbles because you don’t happen to have the new Eventide D949 phaser, or whatever it is, and they can’t envisage working without this. But when I go into the studio, I look around and see what is there and I think ‘Okay, well, this is now my instrument. This is what I’m going to work with.’ Another example would be when you’re faced with a guitar that only has five strings. You don’t say, ‘Oh God, I can’t play anything on this.’ You say, ‘I’ll play something that only uses five strings, and I’ll make a strength of that. That will become part ofthe skeleton of the composition.’ That’s really what I mean, that any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.
    “So, that’s one aspect of the untrained musician thing. The other aspect is this: I believe strongly that recording studios have created a different t y pe of musician and a different way of making music … [when] I make a record, very often I work rather like a painter. I put something on, and that looks nearly right, so I modify it a little bit. Then I put something else on top of that, and that requires that the first thing be changed a little bit, and so on. I’m always adding and subtracting. Now this is obviously a very different way of working from any traditional compositional manner; it’s much more like a painting. So it’s clearly a method that is also available to the non-musician. You don’t have to have traditional technical competence to work that way.”
    Basing Street, where
Another Green World
was recorded, was a deconsecrated church that had been converted into an impressive suite of recording studios. It was established by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and mainly recorded Island recording artists. A number of heavyweight acts recorded there—Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Rolling Stones, and so on—along withRoxy Music, King