>”Nonsense with passion…that’s all I ever wanted from music.” (laughs)
> - Brian Eno

Beth and I saw Brian Eno speak tonight at a MoMA Music and Media event. He was interviewed by Todd Haynes, though it’s probably more accurate to say he was conversed with. An essential skill of interviewers is to sculpt and trim natural conversation with graceful leaps and turns — a skill Mr. Haynes did not demonstrate tonight. Still, I like his films and did find his thoughts interesting, though not what I came for. I’d heard most of the stories before: about being exposed to American black music as a boy in Suffolk, about the Small Here and the Short Now, about composing with tape loops of varied length so the composition wouldn’t resynchronize for six thousand years, but it was interesting to hear them again, accompanied by Eno’s enthusiasm, good humor and skillful detail. There were plenty of things I hadn’t heard about, for instance, he went into great detail on his first video works, such as Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan.

He talked about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts a bit, the album he did with David Byrne, at the center of which are vocal samples from crazy American political radio — samples cut and spliced manually, five years before the first digital samples came out. It wasn’t the first of its kind, as Holger Czukay (pronounced choo’-kay) from CAN (the best band you’ve never heard of) had been sampling radio before then. He described Czukay’s setup, which sounded so fucking cool: four radios tuned to different stations with their inputs fed through Morse keys, then played like a drum machine. So cool.

At the end, I joined the sudden clump of people at the stage handing Eno their demos, letters, and trying to get things signed, which last he politely refused. I invited him to Share, “a meetup of artists, some doing generative music and such,” but he said he was flying out tomorrow. He asked if there was a website — a brand new version of it, in fact: Share 2.0 — and I wrote some Share info on the back of the business card I gave him. I’m glad I had the chance to invite him without being pushy. He gave away some copies of Ambient 1 / Music for Airports (the reissue) because he didn’t want to carry them back on the plane. Again, quite nice of him.

Here are some of the nifty things he mentioned. If you’d like further detail, try searching the EnoWeb.

• More Songs about Buildings and Food, the first Talking Heads album Eno produced, was recorded in the Bahamas.
• Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac is worth picking up.
• Eno had a bottle of sherry with him. He and Haynes were sipping it from paper cups.
• “We’ve been told to stay off politics…” got big laughs. Discussion of the Long Now led to mention of the Iraq war, “which henceforward will be referred to as ‘cupcake’”. Later, “the cupcake war” got another big laugh.
• The (big, heavy, expensive, fully non-automatic) video camera he used for his first video works in 1980 was bought off a roadie from Foreigner (titters from the crowd) who wandered into the studio, hawking it sotto voce. As he had no tripod, Eno set it on its side in front of his window on 8th St, then turned the TV on its side, too, completely changing the expectations it engendered: from rectangular (the proscenium arch, designed for action) to portrait (like a painting, inviting contemplation). It had no automatic calibration and very wide parameters for all the settings, so it was possible to make the color/light sensitivity so great that very small changes in light had very dynamic effects — a new kind of painting.
• setting semi-translucent foamcore ziggurats over televisions, another new kind of painting.
• Hating the “impatience of classical music”… A painter friend made a tape for him combining all the slow movements from Haydn’s late string quartets, which he then copied to reel-to-reel so he could play it at half-speed.
• Mentioning research into eye-tracking of paintings…The difference in eye movements when looking at a landscape painting with a human figure in it and one without is striking. With the latter, the eye wanders in a complex walk over the canvas. With the former, the eye is always zigging back to the figure, referring to it.
• Useful mantra: Go to an extreme, then return to a more useful position.
• “My midlife crisis started when I was 18 and never really went away.”
• recommended Stephen Andrews’ paintings of the Iraq war, which the New Yorker informs me are showing through October 16th at the CUE Art Foundation, 511 W 25th St (212-206-3583). Curated by Atom Egoyan, curiously.
• stamina == enthusiasm. Necessary.
• “State of Independence” by Donna Summer. Terrible backing tracks saved by gorgeous, gospel vocals.
• The only lyrical development of late in popular music has been in hiphop, in which the voice is in a “sort of parallel universe to the music”, not in lock-step, straight cuts.