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

instructions.
    Another possible predecessor to the Oblique Strategies cards was the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s “Distant Early Warning” cards, issued in 1969. Some of McLuhan’s cards, which were printed on a regular deck of poker cards, had quotes from other thinkers (one card read “Propaganda is any culture in action”—Jacques Ellul); others had classic McLuhan quotes (the ten of diamonds read “The medium is the message”); a king card read “In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinated idiot’’; the nine of spades sported the ominous warning “With data banks we are taped, typed and scrubbed.”
    Cage’s I Ching methodology was graceful and complex, and McLuhan’s Distant Early Warningcards bordered on plain goofy—almost like fortunecookie fortunes from some bizarro media-studies universe. The Oblique Strategies cards, meanwhile, had a specific, utilitarian purpose. The quirky cards were designed to help artists and musicians get out of creative ruts and loosen up in the studio. Each Oblique Strategy had a different aphorism: “Accept advice,” read one. “Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events,” read another. “Humanize something free of error.”
    Percy Jones had strong memories of the Oblique Strategies cards being shuffled and drawn during the recording sessions on various occasions. “The first time he did it, I thought we were going to have a game of poker or something,” Jones said, chuckling. “I had no idea what was going on.”
    While the cards could be useful tools, the instructions on the cards were indeed followed to the letter—sometimes with potentially disastrous results. “If the cards foretold that something had to be erased or turned upside down, they were,” said Barry Sage. If a song was being worked on intensely, and a card that was drawn suddenly proclaimed that the tapes had to be deleted, they were.
    Eno’s playfulness in the studio was key. “My quick guide to Captain Eno: play, instinct/intuition, good taste,” wrote Robert Fripp in an e-mail. “Enodemonstrated his intelligence by concentrating his interests away from live work; and his work persists, and continues to have influence. The key to Brian, from my view, is his sense of play. I only know one other person (a musician) who engages with play to the same extent as Brian. Although Eno is considered an intellectual, and clearly he has more than sufficient wit, it’s Brian’s instinctive and intuitive choices that impress me. Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower.”
    Eno is popularly characterized as a brainy studio boffin, an egghead theorist and solemn architect of “sonic landscapes”; meanwhile, his friends and collaborators describe him as lighthearted and fun to be around, with a relaxed, anything-goes attitude— both in the studio and in life. How to reconcile these two poles? Leo Abrahams, who worked with Eno on a number of recent recording projects, said that he’d observed Eno working on two different levels. “When I see him work on things that are on the more ambient levels of what he does—like the album
Neroli
or certain things that were on his last record, or the J. Peter Schwalm stuff—that’s when you’d almost see that reputation of the boffin, if you like, being justified, because there are certain things he knows how to do with instruments and effects that nobody else knows how to do,” Abrahams said. “It’s amazingwatching him fashion that; I think that’s a lot closer to his visual work, which again is extremely painstaking. But then again, when I see him working on songs— more song-based records—he’s really hands-on, and not at all precious about sounds. He likes things to be distorted and he likes things to sound really rough, and he does lots of things that an engineer will say ‘That’s wrong, you can’t do that!’ He likes to sing with the speakers blaring out, so you hear the music in the background