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.