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