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