Tag Archives: eno

The Microsoft Sound

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Non so se lo sapevate, ma il suono iniziale di Windows 95 è stato creato da Brian Eno. Me ne ero accorto anni fa aprendo il box delle proprietà.

Ma adesso ho trovato su wikipedia questa gustosa dichiarazione dello stesso Eno

la Microsoft mi chiese questa cosa dicendomi che volevano una musica capace di ispirare, universale, ottimistica, sexy, futuristica, sentimentale, emozionale, più un’altra serie quasi sterminata di circa centocinquanta aggettivi, e poi in ultimo conclusero che il brano doveva durare tre virgola venticinque secondi. Da allora ho composto 84 di questi piccoli pezzi, sicché quando ritorno a lavorare su brani della durata di tre minuti questi ultimi mi sembra siano come oceani di tempo.

Imaginary Landscapes

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Speaking about Brian Eno (see previous post), on You Tube there is the whole Imaginary Landscapes, a film on Eno by Duncan Ward & Gabriella Cardazzo.

Imaginary Landscapes is a profile of a modern artist at the cutting edge of technological change and popular taste. It brings into an intensely personal focus Brain Eno’s seemingly disparate work in sound, vision and light, and explores his music in visual terms, based on landscapes and images that have shaped his life as an artist.

An audience with Brian Eno

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EnoPaul Morley recently spoke to Brian Eno for a BBC arena documentary in which Eno proved that he is always good for a controversial and catchy phrase about the music industry:

The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.

The whole interview is published on the Guardian’s site.

Generative Music App

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bloom, trope, airBloom, Trope and Air are three applications developed by Brian Eno and the musician / software designer Peter Chilvers that brings to the cells the concept of generative music popularized by Eno.

Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations.

Darker in tone, Trope immerses users in endlessly evolving soundscapes created by tracing abstract shapes onto the screen, varying the tone with each movement.

Air is described as “An endless Music for Airports”. It assembles vocal and piano samples into a beautiful, still and ever changing composition, which is always familiar, but never the same.
Air features four ‘Conduct’ modes, which let the user control the composition by tapping different areas on the display, and three ‘Listen’ modes, which provide a choice of arrangement. For those fortunate enough to have access to multiple iPhones and speakers, an option has been provided to spread the composition over several players.

Buy here

Eno for wine

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cover“Long Now (aka Pelissero Wine)” is a rare, limited edition promotional CD by Brian Eno, produced in 2002 to celebrate an Italian wine and offered to wine sellers. The wine is the Pelissero’s Long Now, so named in honour of the Long Now Foundation.

It features five unreleased tracks, in the same mood as his 2003 album, “January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now“: these compositions experiment possible melodies and atmospheres for bell towers.

Relying on digital bell sounds (from FM synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7), processed through various reverbs and delays, these compositions create strange and hypnotic soundscapes, between ambient and experimentation, with cycles of repetition ruled by mathematical laws.

The Azienda Agricola Pelissero is a family-run vine-growing estate located in the district of Treiso, in the heart of the zone of production of Barbaresco [in Piemonte, Italy].

Here we can hear excerpts from tracks 1 and 3.

Music for Prague

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coverOk, un po’ di tranquillità dopo lo sforzo organizzativo del Premio Nazionale delle Arti.

Eno ha concepito questa musica nel 1998 per una installazione realizzata in collaborazione con Jiri Prihoda a Praga. Il CD risultante è stato poi venduto a un’asta di beneficenza per £ 400 nel Gennaio 2001.

Si tratta di una lunga traccia ambient (un’ora di musica) in cui varie linee melodiche in loop con durate diverse vengono sovrapposte casualmente, nel classico stile della musica generativa di Eno. Il risultato sonoro è simile a Music for Airport, ma privo di loop sensibili e con la differenza che qui gli interventi sono ancora più radi. Ne risulta un insieme che evolve molto lentamente, sempre diverso ma sempre uguale.

Ve ne proponiamo un estratto di circa 15 minuti.

Brian Eno – Excerpt from Music for Prague (1998)

paint

Music for Airports reloaded

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coverBrian Eno’s Music for Airports (1978) played a very important part in the concept and development of ambient music. One could say that ambient music is not a music to be listened to, but a music to be heard, as a subliminal background creating a soundscape for various places or buildings. Supermarkets and elevators are usually places where a poor music is played, one calls it muzak. Brian Eno’s idea was to conceive a sophisticated musical soundscape instead of this anonymous FM music, and he chose airports as the best places where such a music could be heard and understood, creating an unusual and quiet sonic background among all the noises and announcements of a airport terminal.

Music for Airports is a masterpiece, with its subtle piano tracks, its complex electronic treatments, its choral parts, and its slow and organic development.

In 1998, Point Music, a label directed by Philip Glass, released this amazing interpretation of Music for Airports by Bang on a Can: Robert Black (bass), Lisa Moore (piano, keyboards), Evan Ziporyn (clarinet, bass clarinet), Maya Beiser (cello), Steven Schick (percussion), a choir of female voices and additional musicians playing pipa, flute, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, cello, mandolin and mandocello.

This chamber music ensemble plays Eno’s compositions with fidelity and creativity at the same times. The acoustic instruments create a rich harmonic soundscape and add a very original touch to the original recording.

This peaceful, quiet and slow music is very evocative and poetic: the cover version is as beautiful as the original…

Excerpt from Brian Eno – Music for Airports 1.1 – played by Bang on a Can

Via Just Another Garden

Musica Discreta

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discreet music

From Discreet Music, the first non-pop Eno album (1975), I always liked the first variation of Pachelbel Canon in D Major on which the instrumental parts go little by little out of syncro.
It’s a strange composing, working only with the time. But sometimes I think this piece’s appeal depends more on the canon’s beauty than on the Eno’s work.

Oblique Strategies

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Le Strategie Oblique sono state sviluppate nel ’74 da Brian Eno e Peter Schmidt.
Si tratta di un mazzo di carte su ognuna della quali è stampata una sentenza oracolare. Il loro scopo è quello di aiutare l’artista a prendere una decisione nel corso del delicato tragitto che conduce all’opera compiuta con una modalità di pensiero vicina a quella orientale (indubbiamente devono molto all’I Ching almeno come ispirazione). Così a volte ci si trova di fronte a istruzioni quasi operative (“Usa meno note”; “Lavora con un ritmo differente”), altre volte a consigli applicabili in molti modi (“Torna sui tuoi passi”; “Solo una parte, non il tutto”), qualche volta si sconfina nell’oracolo (“Non si tratta di costruire un muro, ma di fare un mattone”).
Sono state anche stampate in quattro edizioni, tutte leggermente differenti (le sentenze vanno e vengono): le prime tre (1975, 1978, 1979) regolarmente distribuite sul mercato (anche in ed. italiana da GammaLibri, 1983), la quarta, completamente diversa, per uso privato (1996).
Eno e Schmidt affermano:

Queste carte si sono sviluppate a partire dall’osservazione dei principi che regolano le nostre creazioni.
Talvolta [i suddetti principi] sono stati riconosciuti retrospettivamente (facendo così coincidere intelletto e intuizione), a volte sono stati identificati osservando ciò che è successo, altre volte si è trattato di formule.
Possono essere utilizzate come un tutto (una serie di possibilità costantemente riportate alla memoria) opure isolatamente, estraendo una carta dal mazzo mescolato quando si presenta un dilemma a un certo punto del lavoro. In questo caso, ci si rimette alla carta anche se l’applicazione non è chiara.
Le carte non danno responsi definitivi, nel senso che nuove idee si presenteranno spontaneamente mentre altre diventeranno via via evidenti.
[Eno, Schmidt, 1975, trad. mia]

La cosa interessante di questi oggetti è che, come l’I Ching e in fondo tutti i testi oracolari, possono portare a vedere le cose in un modo diverso dall’usuale. Invece di incaponirsi cercando una soluzione con i soliti mezzi, suggeriscono una via trasversale per uscire dall’impasse.
Esiste un sito dedicato alle strategie oblique che sono anche consultabili in linea.

The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. There are four versions. The first three editions (1975, ’78, ’79) were regularly on sale, the fourth (1996) is completely different, multilingual and printed for private use only.
They measured about 2-3/4″ x 3-3/4″. They came in a small black box which said “OBLIQUE STRATEGIES” on one of the top’s long sides and “BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT” on the other side. The cards were solid black on one side, and had the aphorisms printed in a 10-point sans serif face on the other.
The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter whose works grace the cover of “Evening Star” and whose watercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno’s “Before and After Science” and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure – either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking – to jog the mind.
Eno ad Schmidt said:

These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.
They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

This is the Oblique Strategies site. You can also consult the deck online.