Gavin Bryars | The Sinking of the Titanic

Gavin Bryars

The Sinking of the Titanic

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1975

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

"A lot of new wave music was coming out at the time, and I was listening to bands like the Flying Lizards—I liked stuff that was a little unusual. There was also a song called “Mozart” by Michael Nyman. The original song title was different [“In Re Don Giovanni”] but he released “Mozart” as a single and it became a huge hit. The album with [The Flying Lizards’] David Cunningham as the leader was also good, it was called Grey Scale. When I went back to my room tired, I’d always listen to stuff like that—that quiet, heart-calming music. Obscure Records, which Brian Eno founded, had many of my favorite artists, including Gavin Bryars. I loved The Sinking of the Titanic. In fact, my grandfather was on the Titanic. He made it home alive, so the music was very personal to me. The second side [“Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”] was amazing, too. And if anything, I was listening to the second side first. At the time, I was doing very tight techno music, so I wanted some quiet at home. That’s how it started—the music I played in my room was ambient.”

- Haruomi Hosono on the Music That Made Him

Harold Budd | Pavilion of Dreams

Harold Budd

Pavilion of Dreams

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1978

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

In Michael Winterbottom’s film 24 Hour Party People (now over twenty years old, jeez), Factory Records head Anthony Wilson describes the debut Manchester performance by The Sex Pistols as only having forty or so audience members, but influencing the music scene in the city for decades.1 Brian Eno once remarked that only a few hundred people bought the Velvet Underground’s debut LP, “but they all formed bands”. 

The concerts and lectures of John Cage (Obscure #5) seem to have had a similar effect. 

Harold Budd was in the army at the time he first saw a John Cage performative lecture, something he would later cite as one of the two most important moments in his life. 

“I went to a concert by Cage and David Tudor called Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?2” he told journalist Geeta Dayal in 2008. “I thought, Jesus Christ, I wanted to go in that direction. It seemed heavy with the art part, if you know what I mean. It was heavy anti-academic, anti-Germanic, anti-European modernism . . . Cage was not an antidote to that, but just a different monetary value altogether.”

After leaving the army, Budd studied music at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1966. He composed minimalist drone works in this period partly influenced by Cage and Morton Feldman3 as well as abstract expressionist painters, such as Mark Rothko4. He began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts, then operational for less than a decade. 

In 1972, he wrote "Madrigals of the Rose Angel”, which caught the attention of both Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars, who passed copies of a poorly recorded cassette on to Eno. 

According to biographer David Sheppard, Eno was instantly beguiled. 

"Brian called me one evening at my home in California and asked me if this was the sort of music I always do," Budd remembers. The pianist and composer replied yes, and soon found himself flown to London, to record in the Basing Street studio where all previous Obscure Records had been produced. 

"I remember Brian playing for me the Fripp and Eno records, late in the evening, in his living room. For me it was a parallel universe – I had thought till then, in naıvete ́, that I was alone . . . It’s a treasure I’ll never forget."

Alongside Budd and Marion Brown (the alto saxophone player who accompanied him on his trip from California) other players from the Obscure releases also contributed to the recording. These included 

Richard Bernas on celeste, Gavin Bryars on glockenspiel and vocals, Michael Nyman on vocals and marimba, John White on marimba and percussion, and Richard Bernas on piano. Eno contributed his voice to the final of the four tracks, the eight and a half minute “Juno."

Budd describes his peers in the Obscure roster as like part of a “brotherhood of agreeable, like-minded artists”.

The resulting album would become the tenth and final release from Eno’s Obscure Records label (compiled in the recent box set). But The Pavilion of Dreams would have to wait a full eighteen months before being released, following a series of delays owing to Eno’s ever-expanding other commitments. 

 

The record was a critical hit and also managed to find a reasonable sized audience. 

"Harold Budd creates a series of siren songs on The Pavilion of Dreams that shimmer like light reflected on the water's surface,” wrote AllMusic. The Guardian called the reworking of the track first sent to Eno, "Madrigals of the Rose Angel” a 14-minute opus: "Melding harp, piano and celeste with choral vocals, the latter is a feat of melancholia that feels like a template for Radiohead at their best. Guiding it all was Budd’s intuitive grasp of economy and making every gossamer phrase count. As he traversed vast oceans of feeling, each passing depth seemed worthy of special consideration."

Two years later, Eno and Budd released the collaborative record Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and another four years after, The Pearl. Two years after The Pearl, Budd released The Moon and the Melodies. This 1986 collaboration with the Cocteau Twins would further raise his profile and kickstart a collaboration with guitarist Robin Guthrie that would continue for the rest of Budd’s life.5 He would also collaborate with Andy Partridge of XTC, David Sylvian and Jan Wobble. 

Budd attributed his work with these British musicians as a direct result of the Eno’s invitation to record in London. 

"I couldn't get arrested in America," he said. "But as soon as I landed in Britain, I was taken seriously as an artist. What a change from just a few hours earlier!"

In interviews he would often summarize the impact of the record on his career with the line “I owe Eno everything”:

"I owe Eno everything, OK? That's the end of that... I was plucked from the tree, and suddenly I had flowered. I was just waiting. I couldn't do it on my own. I didn't know anything."

"I owe Brian everything. But the primary thing was attitude. Absolute bravery to go in any direction."

“I just want to say one thing again clearly right now: I owe Eno everything. [Recording with him] opened up another world for me that I didn’t know existed, and suddenly I was a part of it.” 

Budd suffered a stroke on November 11th, 2020. While undergoing therapy at a short-term rehabilitation facility, he contracted Covid 19. Less than a month later, on December 8th, he died of complications from Covid, at the age of 84. 

"That’s how I met Brian Eno. A student of mine sent Gavin Bryars a piece of mine, “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.” Gavin sent it immediately to Brian Eno and Eno called me up out of the clear blue sky. One of the things he asked was, “Is this the sort of music you always write?” I said, “Well, yes.” He said, “I want to bring you to London to record.” I said, “Well, OK.” That was it.

I had just given a concert with Marion Brown. Marion was on the road with an academic avant-garde composer of really dull music. A very sweet man but really not happening. Marion said to me, “You played with Albert Ayler,” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’ve read about that, are you still there?” I said, “Oh no, no. I left that ages ago.” He said, “Well, what do you do,” and I played him “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.”

At the end, he said, “Would you please write a piece for my horn?” I promised I would and, by God, I did. After he had heard a performance of that piece at Wesleyan University, Eno said, “We have a saxophonist who is really good,” and I said, “Well, I’m sorry. I wrote this for Marion and it really belongs to him.” He said, “Oh yes, OK, I understand. We’ll bring Marion.” That was it. We showed up and recorded for three or four days in Basing Street Studio in London. Full ensemble, six female singers, and cellist, and percussion and harp. It was amazing. I was so jazzed with London that I eventually moved there. Not only could I not make a living in America, I couldn’t get any performances. I couldn’t get any respect. I was happy to get the hell out of there.”

- Harold Budd

1. The legendary concert took place on June 4th, 1976 at the the Lesser Free Trade Hall. David Nolan, the author of I Swear I Was There: Sex Pistols, Manchester And The Gig That Changed The World states "Without that 4 June gig – and the Pistols return visit six weeks later - there would be no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, no ‘indie’ scene, no The Fall, The Smiths, Hacienda [nightclub], Madchester [scene], Happy Mondays or Oasis.”

2. Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing? consists of four lectures from Cage’s book Silence presented by a single performer but heard simultaneously. One of the lectures is read live, to a backing track of the other three. “Sometimes there’s nothing to listen to, and sometimes there’s more than you can possibly take in,” Cage explained. “And my reason for doing all that is to make an imitation of what our daily experience is.”

3. Budd: "Before I graduated from that college I heard Morton Feldman for the first time and saw his scores and that was revelatory to me. The scores didn’t have music paper, same with John Cage. I was just enthralled with those two guys.” 

4. Brian Eno has called Budd "a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician".

5. Budd: “I met Robin Guthrie through Ivo Watts Russell, the founder of 4AD. We went to a Cocteau Twins gig, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice was remarkable, then went backstage to meet them. They initially wanted to only cover one of my pieces, from the Eno collaboration, The Plateaux Of Mirror, but we eventually decided on recording an album of new work together. I developed my friendship with Robin Guthrie there and then. It took about a month of daily work in the studios to do Moon…. There was a very good pub nearby, in White City, I remember, which I took scandalous advantage of, I must say.”

Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton | Irma

Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton

Irma

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1978

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

Irma is the ninth and penultimate recording from Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label, released in 1978. 

Over a decade prior, visual artist Tom Phillips tasked himself with finding a used threepenny novel and altering every page by painting, collage and employing cut-up techniques, to create an entirely new version. In a junk shop on Peckham Rye, South London, he discovered a little-known 1892 Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock, titled A Human Document. The book tells the story of a passionate affair between an unhappily married wealthy woman and an aspiring young poet-turned-foreign-service-minister.

"I took a forgotten novel found by chance,” Philips later wrote, “[and] mined, and undermined its text to make it yield alternative stories, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which lurked within its wall of words. I replaced with visual images the text I’d stripped away.” 

The resulting mixed-media text was named using a portmanteau of the original title: A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. It has been described as the "defining masterpiece of postmodernism”.

The score for Irma, which was completed in 1969 and first published in the French avant garde poetry magazine O.U.,  involved ninety-three random phrases taken from the novel, which were then divided up into sound suggestions, a libretto and staging directions.

Brian Eno met Phillips in 1964, when he was a student at the Ipswich School of Art, where Phillips taught.  The cover of Eno’s 1975 solo album Another Green World featured a detail from one of Phillips paintings, After Raphael. 

Eno proposed that Gavin Bryars flesh out Irma's score for the recording. Bryars took charge of the direction of the piece, with Fred Orton writing the libretto. Given that the work originated as graphic notation, Bryars was forced to make many decisions and improvise extensively. 

According to Bryars, Phillips was pleased with the results, remarking "This is the way I always thought Irma would sound." Bryars recalls thinking "Shit, if you always knew how it was going to sound, why didn't you write it, then?” 

"Tom Phillips blames Eno for not taking a firmer hand over proceedings: ‘Irma was an absolute fucking disaster. It’s the one thing I really hold against Brian – though it was a piece of uncharacteristic naıvety on Brian’s behalf, really. He let Gavin steal the piece. The record came out as a piece by Gavin Bryars, which is outrageous when its total derivation is from me – it’s my piece. Brian said he wanted to do the record, so I said “fine” . . . I didn’t like the performance, it all seemed to be glamorized and softened. I think Brian made a terrible mistake in allowing Gavin to take the piece over as nominally his own. I think Brian was bullied by Gavin a little bit.’”

- David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

John White and Gavin Bryars | Machine Music

John White and Gavin Bryars

Machine Music

London, UK: Obscure, 1978

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

Producer Brian Eno, Machine Music is the eighth release on his Obscure Records label, recently reissued as a complete box set. Side one features compositions by White and side two by Bryars. 

"Gavin, Brian, Derek Bailey and I were playing two guitars each, simultaneously. I was probably the only one there who’d actually done such a thing before, but this was extremely demanding in an oddly cack-handed kind of way. Derek and I were already good friends by then, but the fact that Brian was playing those parts speaks volumes about his ability to try just about anything; not to assume that this was for a specialist.”

- Fred Frith, on his contributions to Bryars’ track "The Squirrel and the Rickety-Rackety Bridge"

Music From the Penguin Cafe

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Music From the Penguin Cafe

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1976

12” vinyl record, 29:30

Edition size unknown

The seventh record on the Obscure label is the debut album for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. In a 1975 interview with Time Out Magazine titled “I Want to be a Magnet for Tapes”, Brian Eno teases out the forthcoming album album, calling it "a secret project.” I suspect many people with a Penguin Cafe Orchestra LP consider it a secret treasure, despite the band’s reach extending into popular film soundtracks and television commercials.1 

Like Discreet Music (Obscure #3), the Penguin Cafe was born of illness. The somewhat goofy origin story  involves Simon Jeffes lying on a beach in the south of France, in 1972. He had an hallucination from the food poisoning he got from eating bad fish. A penguin approached him and announced "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random.” As the story goes, Jeffes’ resolved to compose the type of music one might hear at this cafe. 

"I want to make music for people capable of enjoying Wilson Pickett, Beethoven, the Rolling Stones, choral music from West Africa, Bach, Stravinsky, Irish bagpipe music and even Abba on the odd occasion," he said.

Unlike the other albums in the series, Eno did not serve as producer for this LP, instead providing Jeffes with the small sum of 900 British Pounds to handle recording costs. Much of this was done in Jeffes’ back garden, between 1974 and 1976. 

“It was a bit of a fluke,” explains Emily Young, now a renowned sculptor2. “Brian had these other people he was working with in a left-field zone. And then Simon turns up and what he was doing was so unlike anything else, that Brian, bless him, said, ‘We’ll do something, we’ll see what happens.’”

Young sings on the record - something which might be jarring to listeners familiar only with the group’s later, all-instrumental works - and would illustrate all of their future album covers, including any subsequent reissues of this debut. Young and Jeffes have a son together, named Arthur, who later formed a group called the Penguin Cafe, to continue performing his father’s music.  

Music From the Penguin Cafe can sometimes feel like a demo the band’s later masterpiece, the 1981 self-titled disk, but it remains the most accessible of the Obscure series. At almost a half-century old, it hasn’t aged poorly at all. But audiences will likely consider it a minor work in the group’s discography, as did Jeffes presumably, as only two tracks from this disc make it onto their 1996 “primer” Preludes, Airs & Yodels. Broadcasting From Home, Signs Of Life and Penguin Cafe Orchestra are each represented by four cuts on the compilation. 

It strikes me, revisiting these works in the new box set, that so many of the Obscure recordings involve found sounds and chance operations. Music From the Penguin Cafe involves none. However, the track they are most known for features both.3 "Telephone and Rubber Band” originated when Jeffes was making a phone call and discovered the sound of a ring tone and an engaged signal appearing simultaneously. He recorded this strange bit of audio serendipity onto his answering machine and used the loop as the bed track for the song.4 

The band gave its first major concert performance in October of 1976, opening for Kraftwerk at The Roundhouse. Shortly afterwards, Jeffes found himself supervising recordings for Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band, the 101ers, which brought him to the attention of the Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren. McLaren hired him to write the string arrangement for Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way” and later to teach Adam Ant percussion.5 

Jeffes died of an inoperable brain tumour on the 11th of December 1997.

1. Films using PCO songs on their soundtracks include Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tass), Talk Radio (1988, Oliver Stone), Napoleon Dynamite (2004, Jared Hess), and The Founder (2016,  John Lee Hancock). A trailer for John Hughes' She's Having a Baby and an episode of the The Handmaid's Tale also made use of their music. 

2. Young is also the Emily from "See Emily Play”, a 1967 single by Pink Floyd, written by original frontman Syd Barrett. 

3. Their next-best well-known song does not feature found sounds, but rather a found instrument. During the ensemble’s first tour of Japan, Jeffes found an abandoned harmonium in a back alley in Kyoto. He used it to write "Music for A found Harmonium”.  

4.  The 1996 single "In the Meantime” by Spacehog featured a tweaked and detuned sample of "Telephone and Rubber Band". 

5. Before recording his second album as Adam and the Ants, Adam Ant invited McLaren to manage his band. McLaren absconded with the Ants, replacing Adam with thirteen year old Annabella Lwin and changing the band’s name to Bow Wow Wow. 

“Given his individuality, his non-allegiance to any particular musical category, and the unfailing eclecticism of his vision, Simon Jeffes could easily be marginalized as an English eccentric – and thus sort of overlooked.

The truth is he discovered a huge musical territory – stretching along the border regions of the whole United Nations of music – and he wandered through it fascinated and, apparently always smiling. These pieces are reports back from those borderlands.

Like any good explorer, Simon was both alert and humble. He had no trace of musical snobbery, but delighted in the length and breadth of music, happy to experiment with all combinations.”

- Brian Eno

"The first Penguin Cafe Orchestra album was I think number seven on the Obscure label. He produced various people on it as well. Music For Airports was always something that Dad really, really loved. And then also the idea of music being... not a fifth wall exactly... but something to go in a space rather than just a narrative form. That lack of directness in his music was something that informed their music. Someone once described Penguin Cafe as electronica done with real instruments and I think there’s a bit of that in it.”

- Arthur Jeffes, son of Simon Jeffes and Emily Young

"In 1972 I was in the south of France. I had eaten some bad fish and was in consequence rather ill. As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision, there, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied. In one room a person was looking into a mirror and in another a couple were making love but lovelessly, in a third a composer was listening to music through earphones. Around him there were banks of electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place he had been neutralized, made grey and anonymous. The scene was for me one of ordered desolation. It was as if I were looking into a place which had no heart. Next day when I felt better, I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out 'I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random' and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It's acceptable there, and that's how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves.”

- Simon Jeffes

Michael Nyman | Decay Music

Michael Nyman

Decay Music

London, UK: Obscure/Island Records, 1976

12” vinly LP, 49:53 

Edition size unknown

Decay Music is the first LP release by the critic/composer who would go on to write operas1 and score countless films2, including a best selling soundtrack album, for Jane Campion's Oscar winning film The Piano. 

Produced by Brian Eno, as the sixth release on his Obscure label (use the hashtag below to see the first five), Nyman's album features two tracks, one per side. Both are built around the concept of decay. The b-side is a fairly slight work called "Bell Set No.1". The A-side is a beautiful piece titled "1-100". The simple premise is that there are a hundred chords and the performers cannot play the next until he can no longer hear the previous. I was happy to think about the work, without hearing it, for years. 

Gavin Bryars, who (along with Nyman) assisted Eno in the selection of material for the label, was not a fan of Decay Music: 

"The Obscure album he did is incredibly trivial, just him playing through these chords . . . Nyman started writing music because he worked with Steve Reich as a kind of agent and he saw that with Steve’s stuff, you play a little cell then play it over and over again, changing it a bit as you go, and a lot of people come and hear it and say, “Great!”’

Almost thirty years after its first release the recording was issued on compact disk, to coincide with the composer's 60th birthday, in 2004. As a bonus track, the original full-speed recording of "1-100" is included. 

"It was called Decay Music, which was produced by Brian Eno. Brian was brilliant. He persuaded Polydor that he should produce – or curate, as we would call it now – a label of what was still called “experimental music.” I think there are ten releases from 1975 to about 1978.

At that time, I’d written precisely two pieces of music. I played him one piece called “Bell Set No. 1,” which is a kind of fake Steve Reich percussion equivalent for four organs. We recorded that and Brian said, “I’d put this as the B-side of someone else’s album.” I said, “I want the whole album to myself.” He said, “What else do you have?” I said, “I have this piece called ‘1 – 100,’” which was the soundtrack to my very first [Peter] Greenaway film.

It was a solo piano piece where you sustain a hundred chords running from the top of the piano to the bottom of the piano. When the sound has died away, you play the next chord. It’s an old Morton Feldman idea. So, we recorded it. Lasted about 18 minutes and Brian said, “Is that it?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Well, that’s not very interesting,” and I said, “Well, I have this idea,” which I came up with on the spur of the moment. I said, “Let’s play four versions of the piece simultaneously,” so they all existed on their kind of own time and space and there’s a lot of overlapping of chords.

After I was done, something really fascinating happened. Brian sent me a dub or copy of the recording to check over. I put this 7-inch reel on it and started listening to it. I really enjoyed the mix of the piece, and listened for 15, 20, 25 minutes and I thought, “What’s happening? This is an 18-minute piece and I’m still listening to it at 30 minutes.”

I realized that I was listening to it at half-speed, and it sounded fantastic. I immediately rang Brian and said, “Look, I have accidentally created a sound world that we didn’t intend and we have to release this piece. Play it at half-speed!”"

- Michael Nyman

1. Nyman’s operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (1986), Facing Goya (2000), Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), Love Counts (2005) and the never-completed Tristam Shandy, based on his favorite novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. 

2. His film scores include The Ogre (1996), Man on Wire (2008), The Libertine (2005), The Claim (2000), Ravenous (1999), The End of the Affair (1999) and numerous others. He has collaborated extensively with Michael Winterbottom and Peter Greenaway. 

Jan Steele / John Cage | Voices And Instruments

Jan Steele / John Cage

Voices And Instruments

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1976

12” vinyl record

Edition size unknown

John Cage notoriously avoided recorded music (he didn’t own a record player, preferring the sounds of the open window) and there’s no indication that he had any part in this disk. More likely is that Brian Eno felt a series of “contemporary classical" records with a conceptual bent should probably include him in some way. 

Cage’s 1942 work, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (a song for voice and closed piano) was initially commissioned by soprano and socialite Janet Fairbank. Cage appropriated a text from page 556 of James Joyce's 1939 book Finnegans Wake, condensing and rearranging it. It marks the first instance of Cage working with Joyce’s writings, something that would continue for another forty-five years. 

“Even though I owned a copy, no matter where I lived, the Wake simply sat on a table or shelf unread. I was ‘too busy’ writing music to read it,” Cage said, "I loved it without reading it for 37 yrs!”

The vocal line only uses three pitches, and the piano remains closed. The pianist produces sounds by hitting the lid or other areas of the instrument with their fingers or knuckles. This calls back to the Prepared Piano works of the previous decade, and forward to his masterpiece, 4’33”, still a decade away. 

For this recording the song is sang by Robert Wyatt, the former Soft Machine and Matching Mole vocalist. Wyatt and Eno would continue to until the former’s retirement in 2014. 

Joey Ramone performed The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs for Cage Uncaged, a 1993 tribute, which also included contributions by David Byrne, John Cale, Fred Frith, Debbie Harry, Lee Ranaldo, Lou Reed, John Zorn, and others. His version can be heard here. 

Cage wrote Forever and Sunsmell for dancer Jean Erdman. The work is for a singer and two percussionists. The singer is instructed to sing in a non-operatic manner, to avoid using vibrato, and is given wide latitude regarding the pitch of the melody. The percussionists play two Chinese tom-toms and one large suspended Chinese cymbal. 

The text is from e.e. cummings' 1940 collection 50 Poems, using lines from the poem designated as “twenty-six". The borrowed lines of poetry are supplemented by an interlude of humming.

On Voices And Instruments the work is sang by Jazz legend Carla Bley. 

That’s the first half of the Obscure Records (and Obscure Records box set). The second will resume shortly. 

David Toop / Max Eastley | New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments

David Toop / Max Eastley

New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1975

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

Released on December 5th, 1975 (alongside Obscure Records #1, 2 and 3), New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments features four tracks from Max Eastley on side A and three from David Toop on side B. 

“Brian suggested an array of five stereo microphones on stands to record the sound of the [kinetic sculpture] Metallophone, producing multi-channels on the studio mixer. I realized that the instrument had been transformed into another medium where choices could be made regarding dynamics and equalization. We made two recordings: one by Brian and one by me. Brian said he liked the first part of my recording and the second part of his and so this is what finally appeared on the record.”

- Max Eastley, 2023

"At that time, '73 and' 74, I became aware that there were a number of us making instruments. Max Eastley was a good friend and he was making instruments, Paul Burwell and I were making instruments, Evan Parker was making instruments, and we knew Hugh Davies, who was a real pioneer of these amplified instruments. Paul and I had also got interested in making books. We’d been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum. And Bob would do a book in an evening: Christmas Day, he’d do a book. He was just like, “Do you want to do a book?” “Yeah, OK,” “Let’s get going” – he was that kind of character. It was very inspiring to us – we were much younger, of course. But it made us realise you can do this. Never mind that nobody’s interested in it in the mainstream media.

I had the idea to do an anthology about instrument-making. At that time, Paul was at Ealing College of Art, studying art: basically, he was doing that to use the facilities. In other words, if we wanted to do a book, then we could do it there.

What happened after that? I think I sent one to Brian Eno. I don’t know how I got to know his address, but I sent one to him. He called me up and he said, “I really like the book, and I’m starting a new label, would you liked to do something?” It was a tricky situation for me, because I’ve always had this thing in my life of a tension between collaboration, which was extremely important to me, and then being alone. Make of that what you will! I think Paul and I had come to the end of a phase of working together. We were very close, we were sort of like brothers in a way, but I was beginning to feel I wanted to do something beyond that. So, I think what I did really was quite dishonourable, in the sense that I said to Brian, “Well, I want to do it solo.” It’s one of those things in my life I’m not particularly proud of. But I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book, and Max was the obvious candidate. In fact, I asked Paul, and Hugh Davies, who was also in the book, to play, and Paul graciously agreed to that. It makes me feel even guiltier.

I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?”

- David Toop, 2016

Brian Eno | Discreet Music

Brian Eno 

Discreet Music

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1975

12” vinyl LP, 54:07

Edition size unknown

On January 18th, 1975, Brian Eno was walking in the rain as it turned to sleet, and slipped and fell into the road. He was hit by a taxi cab, knocking him backwards to hit his head on the bumper of a parked car. He was hospitalized, but discharged himself after a week to convalesce at home. 

"I was not seriously hurt,” he writes in the liner notes to Discreet Music, "but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon1 visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn't the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility."

The tale has taken on legendary status as the origin story of ambient music, but Nylon disputes the account (see below) and Eno’s retellings are inconsistent. In an 2011 interview he states "Judy put a record on and then left. The record was much too quiet but I couldn't reach to turn it up and it was raining outside ... I suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn't impose itself on your space ... but created a sort of landscape you could belong to".

Music For Airports, released three years later and subtitled Ambient #1, is typically credited as the first and best ambient album (Pitchfork ran a ten-star review only a couple of weeks ago). It’s indeed excellent, but Discreet Music came first and is ultimately the more satisfying album. 

I first bought the record when I was in high school, a vinyl copy from a used record store, and played it nightly as I fell asleep, for weeks. 

This was around the time that the Grammys introduced a new award for Best New Age Music. Eno certainly shoulders some of the blame for the popularity of that genre, but 99% of it struck me then (and now) as vacuous and insipid. 

Discreet Music, on the other hand is rich, beautiful and placid. The melody line is infectious and slippery, like the best pop music hooks. And conceptually solid. 

The first sentence in the liner notes might as well be a conceptual art manifesto, akin to Lawrence Weiner’s In Relation To Probable Use (below)2 :

"Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of the planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.”

The liner notes (reprinted, twice, in the new box set reissue) continue: 

"Two ways of satisfying this interest are exemplified on this album. "Discreet Music" is a technological approach to the problem. If there is any score for the piece, it must be the operational diagram of the particular apparatus I used for its production. The key configuration here is the long delay echo system with which I have experimented since I became aware of the musical possibilities of tape recorders in 1964. Having set up this apparatus, my degree of participation in what it subsequently did was limited to (a) providing an input (in this case, two simple and mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a digital recall system) and (b) occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer's output by means of a graphic equalizer.

It is a point of discipline to accept this passive role, and for once, to ignore the tendency to play the artist by dabbling and interfering. In this case, I was aided by the idea that what I was making was simply a background for my friend Robert Fripp to play over in a series of concerts we had planned. This notion of its future utility, coupled with my own pleasure in "gradual processes" prevented me from attempting to create surprises and less than predictable changes in the piece. I was trying to make a piece that could be listened to and yet could be ignored... perhaps in the spirit of Satie who wanted to make music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner.”

Along with Satie’s idea of "furniture music”3 and John Cage’s use of chance when composing, Discreet Music borrows from the tape experiments of Steve Reich. Here the left channel sequence is approximately 63.5 seconds, and the right is 68.7 seconds. This difference in length means the loops are  asynchronous, taking roughly 15 minutes return to their original alignment.

In a 1979 interview with Lester Bangs, Eno called Obscure #3 the most successful of his recordings, explaining that it "was done very, very easily, very quickly, very cheaply, with no pain or anguish over anything, and I still like it."

"What I liked about it,” he added later, "was the idea that, by fading it in at the start and out at the end, you get the impression that you’ve caught part of an endless process."

It’s unfortunate that the two tracks on Gavin Bryar’s Obscure #1 LP have both been given extended versions that almost triple their original running time, but Discreet Music - which was always advertised as being a selection of a larger work - has never been revisited. It would have made a nice bonus disc for the box set. 

1. Judy Nylon is a multidisciplinary American artist who has collaborated with Patti Palladin (as Snatch), Eno, John Cale, Jah Wobble, Adrian Sherwood, Bot'Ox and others. She is the subject of Eno's song "Back in Judy's Jungle” and “Judy Nylon” by Arp.

2. Better still, Robert Filliou’s Principals of Equivalence checklist: Well Made, Badly Made, Not Made.

3. Erik Satie coined the term “Furniture Music” in 1917, to describe music intended to be played in the background. The French term "musique d’ameublement” is sometimes more literally translated as "furnishing music”.

"The anecdote about the inciting incident [the harp record] that started Eno's Discreet Music has been told with several slight variations on the sleeve, in interviews and a number of books over almost 30 years and even translated out of English. According to what I remember, it was inaccurately told, even on the first record sleeve. There were two people in the room, him and me. I could recreate it as if it were written by Robbe-Grillet, but not one interviewer or author has ever asked me my version to this day. It would take a truly modern artist to say, "This is what I remember but you might also ask Judy". 

So it was pouring rain in Leicester Square, I bought the harp music from a guy in a booth behind the tube station with my last few quid because we communicated in ideas, not flowers and chocolate, and I didn't want to show up empty-handed. Neither of us was into harp music. But, I grew up in America with ambient music. If I was upset as a kid I was allowed to fall asleep listening to a Martin Denny album…I think it was called "Quiet Village". The jungle sounds, played very softly made the room's darkness caressing instead of empty as a void. Pain was more tolerable. Brian had just come out of hospital, his lung was collapsed and he lay immobile on pillows on the floor with a bank of windows looking out at soft rain in the park on Grantully Road, on his right and his sound system on his left. I put the harp music on and balanced it as best as I could from where I stood; he caught on immediately to what I was doing and helped me balance the softness of the rain patter with the faint string sound for where he lay in the room. There was no "ambience by mistake". Neither of us invented ambient music; that he could convince EG Music to finance his putting out a line of very soft sound recordings is something quite different. We both listened to the early seventies German wave and were influenced by them too.” 

- Judy Nylon

Christopher Hobbs / John Adams / Gavin Bryars | Ensemble Pieces

Christopher Hobbs / John Adams / Gavin Bryars

Ensemble Pieces

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1975

12” vinyl LP, 49:36

Edition size unknown

Ensemble Pieces is the second LP from Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label, issued simultaneously with the first, third and fourth from the series. This release strategy may be responsible for the title getting somewhat overshadowed by the others. It remains one of the least discussed disks in the series, including in the box set’s liner notes. 

Like most of the Obscure Records recordings, Ensemble Pieces employs chance compositionally, and involves found sounds. 

Gavin Bryars returns (and will again in the third instalment, as the conductor and co-arranger for the b-side of Eno’s Discreet Music) with "1, 2, 1-2-3-4”. The track involves ten performers each wearing headphones which plays only their part. They are instructed to accompany each other, as much as is possible, without hearing them.1 The resulting composition is a kind of dream-like, discombobulated jazz performance. 

Christopher Hobbs was a student of Cornelious Cardew, and the youngest member of his infamous Scratch Orchestra. Time Out Magazine (in one of the few contemporaneous reviews of Obscure Records, in 1975) wrote: "Hobbs’ dryly humorous and playful pieces manipulate modest patterns with teasing unpredictability.” Hobbs was twenty-five at the time of the album's release. 

John Adams was twenty-eight, and his track American Standard is own of his earliest compositions. He would later go on to success with the release of his first opera, Nixon in China, in 1987. 

American Standard consists of three movements of Americana: John Philip Sousa (a march), Christian Zeal and Activity (a hymn) and Sentimentals (a jazz ballad).2 

The second is the standout, and apparently the only part of the work performed subsequently, and for which there are published performance materials available. Like both pieces on Obscure #1, it involves a hymn, and - like Jesus’ Blood - a sampled religious voice. The hymn is an arrangement of "Onward, Christian Soldiers”, which I only know from the Flanders’ kids singing it on The Simpsons. 

The sample is most notable for me: a "late-night AM radio talk show in which an abusive host argued about God with a patient man who eventually identified himself as a preacher”. 

When I think of long form audio works that involve vocal samples, it strikes me that a disproportionate number of them use preachers. This likely began with Steve Reich’s minimalist composition It’s Gonna Rain, from 1965. The sole source material for the now-legendary phased tape piece was a recording Reich made of a young Pentecostal preacher giving a sermon in San Francisco's Union Square, in January of ’65. Brother Walter tells the story of Noah being mocked for the folly of building the ark and seconds into the seventeen minute piece the title phrase is subjected to manual looping and stereo panning experiments. 

Brian Eno’s own My Life in Bush of Ghosts, a 1981 collaboration with David Bryne, is often cited as the first use of sampling but was of course predated by early hip-hop, dub reggae producers such as King Tubby and Lee "Scratch” Perry, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Holger Czukay’s tape-splice recordings and Stevie Wonder's soundtrack to the strange 1979 film The Secret Life of Plants.3 

Eno felt the innovation of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was having the samples samples serve as the "the lead vocal”4. Given the use of a New Orleans broadcast of Reverend Paul Morton (on "Help Me Somebody”) and an unidentified exorcist ("The Jezebel Spirit”), it’s possible the Adams’ piece provided an early germ of the idea.5

Godspeed You Black Emperor’s 1998 song "East Hastings6", also features a passionate preacher preaching. The track begins with the vocal sample: "God love this country, the United States, the world and all the billionaires! If money could buy happiness, my love, then we'll have it. But praise God, it's only salvation, it's only Jesus Christ”, followed by bagpipes, droning and eventually the full band.  The voice sets the apocalyptical tone of the eighteen minute epic.7 

“Punk Rock”, released a year later by Mogwai, also features distorted found spoken word clip, as the lead in for an album of rock band instrumental crescendos. But instead of a preacher, the vocal sample is of Iggy Pop. The audio comes from an interview in Toronto, with Peter Gzowski at the CBC, broadcast on 11 March 1977. A bewildered Pop was on the show to perform, but at the last minute was prevented from doing so because of union disputes. He does his best to be congenial, but is set off with a question about punk rock, then a brand new musical genre. 

He launches into an impassioned tirade: 

"I'll tell you about punk rock: 'punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators, about music that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.’ I don't know Johnny Rotten but I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did.”

Re-listening to it now comes the realization that Pop was proselytizing, with all the passion and fervour of a preacher, about his own religion. 

1. Glenn Branca, I believe, later employed the headphone technique with choral works, coaxing harmonies from the singers that their ears would naturally force their voices to avoid. 

2. "American Standard" was used on the soundtrack of the 2010 Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island.

3. The science behind many of the claims in the film have been debunked, and the title is currently unavailable on disc or streaming services. Without Wonders involvement, it would have likely fallen into complete obscurity. Strangely, it is sometimes held up by conspiracists as evidence that Wonder is not actually blind. I curated a great project by Aislinn Thomas, who screened the film without its image (Louise Lawler style) for an Ontario Culture Days presentation. The soundtrack was then augmented and annotated by Aislinn and her interview subjects. 

4. The sample as lead vocal was later popularized by Moby, for better or for worse. 

5. During a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, Eno cited Reich’s It's Gonna Rain as his first experience with minimalism and an influence on his later ambient works. 

6. The song is named after East Hastings Street in Vancouver's blighted Downtown Eastside. It is often considered the “skid row” of Vancouver.

7. "East Hastings" appeared in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and seems to have influenced the rest of the score. For rights reasons, it did not feature on the films soundtrack album. 

Gavin Bryars | The Sinking of the Titanic

Gavin Bryars

The Sinking of the Titanic

San Francisco, USA: Superior Viaduct, 2022

Audio CD

Edition size unknown

Once impossible to find, now seemingly everywhere, in a variety of different versions, Bryar’s The Sinking of the Titanic is available on CD from Superior Viaduct. 

The label, founded in 2011, has produced a series of reissues of excellent and rare works by Glenn Branca, William Burroughs, Tony Conrad, Jean DeBuffet, David Cunningham, Henry Flynt, Terry Fox, Joe Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, Chris Marker, Phil Niblock, Steve Reich, The Residents, Yoshi Wada, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and many other artists whose work will have appeared here. 

They are also issuing vinyl by musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Pascal Comelade, The Fall, Brigitte Fontaine, Laraaji, Charles Mingus, Sun Ran, Suicide, Tuxedomoon and the Upsetters. 

Visit their site, here. 

Gavin Bryars | Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet [book]

Gavin Bryars

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet [book]

Rimini, Italy: Luigi Castiglioni Editore, 2021

[80] pp., 50 × 35 cm., slipcase

Edition of 140 signed copies

Renowned bookbinder Luigi Castiglioni began a publishing company a couple of years ago and his first (and thus far only) three projects were with Gavin Bryars. All involve the two tracks on Bryars' Obscure Records disc, The Sinking of the Titanic. 

This super-deluxe edition folio features the score letterpress printed on Fabriano Tiepolo 290 gsm, and includes a vinyl record with the song-fragment played as a loop for fifty times, presumably a cappella. It was produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the composition. 

In a somewhat convoluted structure, some copies also contain a hand drawn artwork and others include a “musical autograph” (?) and one of the letterpress printing plates. 

Gavin Bryars | Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Gavin Bryars

Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet 

Point Music, 1993

Audio CD, 74 minutes

Edition size unknown

A religious hymn that could make an atheist cry (I speak from experience), Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet was originally released as the B-side to The Sinking of the Titanic (Obscure #1), and now rivals it as the work Bryars is best known for. 

It’s astonishing that an LP (a debut record, no less) would later have both of its tracks reissued in expanded editions almost twenty years later, each to considerable acclaim. When this CD was released, it topped the Classical charts, selling thousands of copies in the first month of release. According to London’s Daily Star, the HMV megastore on Oxford Street were selling fifty copies a week and rival Tower Records twice that. The disc was subsequently shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize.

It was a time when interest in contemporary ‘classical’ music was high, with recent successes by Henry Gorecki and Avro Part driving interest in the genre. 

“I think it all started with opera,” Bryars told the Globe & Mail1 in February of 1994. "Pavarotti recorded Nessun dorma for the World Cup and every time you’d turn on the television you’d hear it. Then Classic FM, a commercial station, took a more populist approach and had a chart show, which had the effect of not only reflecting the way that records were selling, but stimulating it as well”. 

The involvement of Tom Waits - arguably at the peak of his popularity, after the Grammy winning Bone Machine2 LP - undoubtedly contributed to this later success, even while it diminished the power of the recording. 

Waits had cited the 1975 version as his favourite record of all time, and not just in terms of importance, influence or other academic concerns. He wore out his copy by playing it too often. He contacted Bryars seeking a replacement, and the composer invited him to participate a in a forthcoming re-recording. 

Dating back to 1971, the piece was based around a snippet of found sound, a five line hymn, possibly improvised, by a homeless man:

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Never Failed Me Yet

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

There’s one thing I know

For He Loved Me So

The singers voice, while weakened by circumstance, is surprisingly solid in terms of pitch (if not tempo, which is irregular in a quite compelling way). His conviction is unshaken and sincere. 

“I certainly don’t think of of Jesus’ Blood as a Christian piece,” Bryars told the Toronto Star. “For me, the important thing is the humanity and dignity of the man at the end of his life”. 

In this extended version, the voice of Tom Waits takes over, which would be interesting enough in a live setting (triumphant, even, possibly), but as the definitive version of this composition (which this came to be, and the limited edition nature of the box set won’t alter that), it’s an unfortunate addition. 

Luckily his voice doesn’t appear until almost the hour mark, after four sections (String Quartet, Low Strings, No Strings and Full Strings). Waits then warbles along for another twenty minutes or so. 

The 1993 reissue was initiated by Philip Glass, who started Point Music a year prior, almost certainly influenced by the Obscure Records label. In its ten years of operation it released five recordings by Bryars, along with discs by Jon Gibson, Arthur Russell, Todd Levin, Aphex Twin, Angelo Badalamenti, Bang on a Can (performing Eno’s Music For Airports), the Master Musicians of Jajouka and works by Glass himself. 

Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet is still available on CD for $13.29 at Amazon, here. 

"In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song – sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads – and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.

When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song – 13 bars in length – formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.

I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the homeless man's nobility and simple faith. Although he died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism.”

- Gavin Bryars

1. Bryars was in Winnipeg, presenting the North American premiere of Jesus’ Blood. 

2. Tom Waits’ 1992 classic Bone Machine was finally itself given a vinyl reissue, a few months ago. 

Gavin Bryars | The Sinking of the Titanic [live]

Gavin Bryars 

The Sinking of the Titanic [live]

Brussels, Belgium: Les Disques du Crepuscule, 1991

1:00:13 Audio CD

Edition size unknown

The original 1975 Obscure Records issue of this piece (remastered and collected in the new box set) is 24:28 long, in part because of the limitations of the format - fidelity loss occurs with a vinyl record beyond 25 minutes a side, because of the necessity of cutting the grooves so close together. 

With the advent of the Compact Disk format, Byars was able to release a recording of just over an hour, without having to break it up over two sides of an LP. This is a live performance in a disused water tower in the Chateau D'Eau, Bourges, from April of 1990. 

The musicians performed from the basement of the three storey tower, where the public heard the pieces through a specially designed sound system on the second floor, after the sound had passed through the cavernous top floor.

The recording was released by Les Disques du Crépuscul, an independent record label founded in 1980 by Michel Duval and Annik Honoré, the journalist best known for her relationship with Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. The label distributed Factory Records artists in Belgium and also worked with Cabaret Voltaire, Mikado, Anna Domino, and Michael Nyman (Obscure #6). 

The new Obscure Records box set is easily the most I’ve spent on a single music purchase (even divided by ten for each LP). Previously that distinction was held by this disc. I had been searching for the record for years and finally came across it the reissue by chance. I think I paid $50 for it, which was more than twice the going rate for catalogue compact disks, and three times the price of a new release. Taking inflation into account the amount is probably closer to a hundred dollars. But I didn’t hesitate. A couple of years later, it was reissued in a broader release.

“A number of new elements were used in this performance. The strings comprise two violas and double bass, rather than the string sextet of three violins, two cellos and bass, and additional music was written for them. Percussion was used extensively for specific effects - the hymn tune on marimba, the woodblocks giving the sequence of morse, the use of the bell and bass drum relating to specific aural images. The wind instruments gave a sequence of hymn possibilities as well as delay effects. Quite dramatically, a bass clarinet ‘lament’ was added in homage to the young Scottish piper who died in the disaster. Specific sound effects were added relating to the descriptions given by survivors of particularly striking sounds. There are reminiscences about the disaster from two survivors, Miss Eva Hart and Miss Edith Rusell.”

- Gavin Bryars, liner notes to this edition