Marshall McLuhan | Distant Early Warning

Marshall McLuhan

Distant Early Warning

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1969

54 pp., 6.35 by 8.89 cm., boxed

Edition size unknown

In 1968, after having moved back to Toronto from New York, Marshall McLuhan began publishing a monthly newsletter, advertised with no shortage of hyperbole: 

“THIS IS AN INVITATION TO JOIN A SELECT GROUP OF BUSINESS, ACADEMIC AND GOVERNMENT LEADERS WHO ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE WHAT MUST BE THE MOST STARTLING NEWSPAPER EVER WRITTEN.” 

The project - produced with his son Eric and New Yorker Eugene Schwartz - was essentially a well-designed repurposing of pithy aphoristic statements by McLuhan, designed for corporate clients desperate not to miss out on the next big thing. 

“Which technological breakthroughs are completely hidden from your view?” asked a New York Times advertisement promoting the series. 

The newsletter took it’s name from the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada (as well as Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland) which were set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War, and warn of any sea-and-land invasions.

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 

The series lasted less than two years, and the most notable of the issues was Volume 2, Number 1, which was accompanied by this deck of playing cards, designed by McLuhan and Harley Parker.

A pre-cursor to the Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies, the deck was designed to be used as a problem-solving device, a bottle-neck breaker. Printed as a functional deck of poker cards, the cards feature quotes from McLuhan himself, alongside W.C. Fields, Jacques Ellul, Sam Butler, John Cage and others. The texts include “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs”, “Silence is all the sounds of the Environment at once” and, naturally, “The Medium is the Message”.

The cards were packaged in green, red, black, blue, or brown slipcases, and contained an instruction sheet with more purple prose (“an intellectual’s card deck!”) along with the rules of the game: 

"In addition to the conventional card games, the Dew Line deck performs as THE MANAGEMENT GAME. Proceed as follows:

(a) Take any card. Relate the aphorism to your current hang-up.

(b) Call to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards. Select a card and apply its message.

(c) Take three cards. Experiment with different arrangements of these until they yield new insights and patterns in your problem.

(d) Deal yourself three cards. Pick a pair to maximize the comic side of your problem.

TO OBTAIN YOUR SCORE

(1) If you get your breakthrough in thirty seconds or less, you are a top Dew Liner!

(2) Those who get their million dollar solution in less than two minutes have not yet been promoted to the level of their incompetence.

(3) If it takes you three minutes or more, try another problem."

"Indeed, what one notices is McLuhan’s appeal to artists and corporations alike. Both craved the next new thing.”

- Alex Kitnick, Distant early warning: Marshall McLuhan and the transformation of the avant-garde

Keith Haring and Andy Warhol play with nine year old Sean Lennon’s Computer

 

“Tuesday, October 9, 1984

I made up some things for Sean Lennon’s birthday and the painting was still wet—a little heart candy-box that said “I love you”—and I also brought a “paint brush” that instead of bristles had strips of red colored paper in a stack. And a bracelet I’d made out of pennies. PH picked me up and we went to the Dakota (cab $6.50). There were fans outside in honor of the day still on the “vigil.” Because the ninth is Sean and John’s birthday. Inside Yoko’s door everybody had taken their shoes off so there was a line of shoes. I wouldn’t take mine off, though, and I didn’t want PH to, either, so that I wouldn’t be alone. PH said that when she went to the Royal Palace once in Hawaii that the tour guides gave you booties to put over your shoes and that would be a better way to keep the house clean, I think. So then when we heard a glass drop and break, that was our excuse—that we didn’t want to be in our socks when there might be glass. 

Yoko ran to call Sean and he came in and said, “Did you bring my dollar?” Yoko said that he’d been remembering and wanting the other half of the dollar I tore in half the last time. So I gave him a whole bunch of torn bills that I’d brought for him and he went off to try to find the match to the half he had. Keith was there and he brought Kenny Scharf as his date. Walter Cronkite was there, and John Cage and Louise Nevelson and Lisa Robinson. On purpose for fun I had spelled Sean’s name “Shawn” on a couple of his gifts, and so when Sean autographed napkins for me he signed it that way, too. He was wearing Michael Jackson-type gloves, but on both hands, that his friend little Max Leroy, Warner Leroy’s son, had given him. Michael Jackson is his favorite singer. He said he likes Prince, too, and he must like Boy George, too, because later on his computer he did a drawing of Boy George. Sean and Keith hit it off. Keith is very good playing with kids—he was playing really “well with another baby that was there, too, coming after her with a stuffed animal. Sean sat between me and Roberta Flack. The cake was a big blond grand piano. Sean was the one who had the idea that it should be a piano. He has a piano in his bedroom. And he cut the cake. Harry Nilsson led everyone singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and later Sean made a really nice speech and said that if his father were there we’d be singing ‘Tor They’re Jolly Good Fellows”

We went into Sean’s bedroom—and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it. 

Sean’s bedroom had two mattresses on the floor and lots of Beatles pictures and the big Rupert Smith picture of Yoko on the wall. There was wrapping paper and presents all over the floor, and lots of robot toys on the shelves. After we left I was so blue because before I was Sean’s best grownup friend and now I think Keith is. They really hit it off. He invited Keith to his party for kids the next day and I don’t think I was invited and I’m hurt.”

- Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries

John Cage | A Year From Monday

John Cage

A Year From Monday

Middletown, USA: Wesleyan University Press, 1967

23 x 20.3 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled New Lectures and Writings, A Year from Monday is John Cage’s second book, following the 1961 release Silence (also published by the Wesleyan University Press). The volume is a collection of essays, lectures and journal entries from 1961 to 1967. It includes an early version of "Diary: How to Improve the World (you will only make matters worse)”, which was later republished by The Something Else Press and, posthumously, expanded into a full book by Siglio Press. 

The book also features texts about several of Cage’s contemporaries, including "26 Statements Re Duchamp" (1963),  "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas" (1964), "Miró in Third Person: 8 Statements" (1967), and "Nam June Paik: A Diary" (1965). 

"Daniel Charles: Well, where did the title of your second book, A Year from Monday, come from?

John Cage: From a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico 'a year from next Monday’. We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It’s a form of silence ...

Daniel Charles: Is your second book very different from the first one?

John Cage: It deals in particular with change. Consequently, it touches on plans. Or at least, it englobes something in the future - keeping the future in sight. Frankly, when I thought of the title, I wasn’t being pessimistic, contrary to what you might be led to think from what I’m saying. The very fact that our plan failed, the fact that we were unable to meet does not mean that anything failed. The plan wasn’t a failure.”

- For The Birds

John Cage | Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel

John Cage

Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel (Plexigram I)

Cincinnati, USA: Eye Editions, 1969

Serigraph / Screenprint, on 8 Plexiglas panels with walnut base

14.5 х 24 х 14.5 in. cm.

Edition of 125, signed and stamped

John Cage was "composer in residence" at the University of Cincinnati in 1968, when his close friend and sometime collaborator Marcel Duchamp died. A local art patron named Alice Weston approached him about producing a commissioned lithograph, as a memoriam to Duchamp. The project morphed into a series of eight silkscreened “plexigrams” panels, mounted on a wooden base, accompanied by a lithograph.

The texts were created using Cage's usual approach of "chance operations", though stories on the method differ. Some accounts have Cage consulting the I Ching (which he used regularly as a compositional tool) and others indicate that it was the 1955 edition of The American Dictionary and tossed coins that were used to yield the words, placement and typefaces. Cage collaborated with Calvin Sumsion, an artist, designer, and visual communications consultant, whose signature also appears on the work. Chance extends into the buyers' eventual display of the work, with the intention that the panels be placed in a different order each time the work is shown.

The title comes from another of Cage's friends, Jasper Johns. "I had been asked by one of the magazines to do something for Marcel," he wrote. "I had just before heard Jap say 'I don't want to say anything about Marcel,' because they had asked him to say something about Marcel in the magazine, too. So I called both the Plexigrams and the lithographs, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, quoting Jap without saying so."

The work is enclosed in a black box which measures 38 x 62.5 x 5 cm. and is accompanied by a text by Cage which describes his compositional method for creating the work.

"There’s the 'multiple’ that I made with a designer, Calvin Sumsion. It was in 1969 and was called Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel. It’s a tribute to Marcel Duchamp. But I didn’t want to say anything about Duchamp, as the title indicates. So I subjected a dictionary to the I Ching; I picked words, then letters from those words, and finally, their arrangement in space by chance operations. I distributed these words, according to a typography likewise based on chance, on sheets of plexiglass. I put the eight sheets of plexiglass parallel to each other on a wooden base. Thus the letters appear in depth, they are superimposed and combined as we look at them. There are four bases, each holding eight sheets. The whole thing comes from chance, including the colors. It is an object that has no meaning and which cannot be said to refer to a text. And yet, it seems to me that Duchamp would have been, as he used to say, 'amused’ by that object.”

- John Cage

Hearts, spots, eggs and peas

 

New Yoko Ono Phaidon monograph

[Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Eriko Osaka, Theirry Raspail]

Yoko Ono

London, UK: Phaidon, 2024

160 pp., 25 x 29 x 1.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

The Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series is a consistently reliable collection of monographs surveying important contemporary artists. Titles in the series each include an interview, survey, focus, artist’s writings, “artist’s choice”, and an extensive chronology. They feature good reproductions, thoughtful writings and - perhaps most importantly - excellent distribution, bringing contemporary art to suburban shopping mall bookstores. 

First launched in 1996, the series includes books on Marina Abramovic, Francis Alÿs, Lynda Benglis, Vija Celmins, Tacita Dean, Mark Dion, Tom Friedman, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Mary Kelly, On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Christian Marclay, Wangechi Mutu, Lucy Orta, Nancy Spero, Simon Starling, Sarah Sze, Gillian Wearing, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei, and many others. 

As far as I can tell, this is the first instance in which the artist appears on the cover, instead of an art work. Abramovic and Alÿs are both pictured on the cover of their titles, but mid-performance, their faces obscured. Yoko Ono is pictured posing for the camera while installing her 1966 Indica Gallery exhibition.

This may be the result of trying to grapple with the fact that Ono herself is better known than any of her works. “The world's most famous unknown artist,” is how her husband John Lennon frequently described her, “...everyone knows her name but no one knows what she actually does."

Or perhaps it’s a response to Ono eschewing a signature style or medium. In her essay Yoko Ono: Transcendent Freedom and Hope, Eriko Osaka observes “Having come to the art world via a training in music, literature and philosophy, with only a passing interest in painting and drawing, [Ono] was freer in her thinking, less fixated on any one technique or medium than others who went to art school.”

This site is dedicated primarily to Artist’ books, Multiples and Editions, with a secondary focus that  

reflects my interests in Artists’ Records, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Mail Art, Advertisements, Text, etc. Yoko Ono has not only created works in each of these often disparate media, she has frequently produced defining examples. 

Grapefruit is the quintessential Artist Book, and in some ways functions as a blueprint for the rest of Ono’s seven decades-long career.1 The title is still in print over fifty years later, and has been translated into Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and back to its original Japanese.2

Her Fluxus edition Box Of Smile ranks among the best of the hundreds of boxed works George Maciunas produced for the group. It is simple, poetic, funny and participatory: a small square plastic box with the title foil stamped onto the lid opens to reveal a mirror reflecting the viewer’s face, who completes the work with a grin of recognition. 

White Chess Set - first exhibited in the Indica Gallery show featured on the book’s cover - is an all-white chess board with white playing pieces, emphasizing concentration over competition. Sometimes known as Play it By Trust, the piece has been editioned a few times, made into large scale public art, presented as public participation pieces, and in performances reminiscent of the Toronto chess match by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.

Cut Piece is as powerful and influential a work of Performance Art as anything by Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, or Carolee Schneemann. Ono sits on the stage in her best dress and places a pair of scissors in front of her. Audience members are invited to come up one by one and cut away pieces of her clothing. Osaka notes that the work “brought out people’s latent feelings of desire, anger, vulnerability, destructiveness, confrontation, dedication, forbearance, acceptance”. 

Film works like Fly or Film No. 4 (better known as Bottoms) are rightly celebrated as important early examples of artists’ cinema, but lesser known works like Erection (not what you think), Self-Portrait (what you thought) and Apotheosis are equally compelling. Apotheosis [1970] is a 17-minute film shot from an ascending air balloon. Following the initial landscape view, audiences are presented with a test of their patience by several minutes of white-out, when the balloon reaches the clouds. The pay off is the “huge poem”3 of the reveal once the balloon ascends above the clouds.4 

Ono’s use of advertising spaces such as public billboards5 anticipated Jenny Holzer’s public works and the Time Square Jumbotron by over a decade. Her presentation of text-only works predate Joseph Kosuth and can rightly be considered the first exhibited examples of Conceptual Art.6

Phaidon’s Yoko Ono examines these works and countless others, from pieces made in the artist’s childhood, to projects realized in the last few years. The two essays are well-researched and share little overlap. The Artist’s Writings section features early examples of Ono’s essays, often presented in facsimile.  

The Artist’s Choice section presents Ono’s 9 Concert Pieces for John Cage, from 1966, which were originally intended for inclusion in Cage’s 1969 Something Else Press book Notations. Only a single example made its way into that legendary collection, but all nine are reproduced here, one to a page. 

The major disappointment in the book was the thing I was most highly anticipating: an interview with Ono conducted by Laurie Anderson7. The latter’s questions are interesting enough, but Ono opts to answer in single sentences only. This was likely a deliberate strategy - and nod to the direct short Event texts of Grapefruit -  but is not particularly illuminating. I would have preferred a long rambling conversation. 

The most interesting takeaway from the exchange was the fact that Ono provided comforting words to Anderson following the loss of her husband. She tells Ono “You were very encouraging and consoling to me when Lou [Reed] died. You helped me see that he had become a sum of all the thing he was in his life. This completely changed my ideas and feelings about time and loss, life and death. And it helped me accept that he would always be a part of my life in ways that continuously change.”

Grief is a difficult subject for an artist to explore without succumbing to over-indulgence, or saccharine platitudes. Both Ono and Anderson have brilliantly worked through the loss of their partners in their practice: Anderson with the 2015 feature film Heart of a Dog8 and Ono with Season of Glass9. Recorded and released only half a year after Lennon’s murder, the LP features several heart-breaking songs about loss, the sound of gunshots, and a cover graphic of Lennon’s blood-stained glasses. 

There is very little in the book about Ono’s musical output, which includes thirteen solo studio albums, six in collaboration with Lennon, and one with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore10. Her activism also, is mostly overlooked, other than when it dovetails with her visual art. 

The book is - of course - not intended as comprehensive biography or catalogue raisonné. There would not be enough room to do justice to Ono's multi-faceted practice within the confines of the Phaidon series’ 160 pages. It is a welcome and long-overdue addition to the ongoing series. 

If you own no monographs on Ono, this is a good a place as any to start. If (like me) you have dozens, this book will be a necessary addition to the library. 

1. Curator Thierry Raspail proposes the opposite: that Grapefruit represents Ono’s first retrospective, including pieces that date back more than a decade prior to its publication. 

2. When translated back into Japanese the title somehow ends up as Grapefruit Juice. 

3. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas described the moment as: "suddenly the cloud landscape opened up like a huge poem, you could see the tops of the clouds, all beautifully enveloped by sun, stretching into infinity..."

4. Apotheosis is similar to Michael Snow’s Wavelength (a work which Ono greatly admires), in that the image is limited by a particular camera movement: Snow used the zoom of the camera, and Ono employed the ‘pedestal’ shot. 

5. From the groundbreaking War Is Over (If You Want It) campaign, to the more recent Imagine Peace billboards and full page ads in newspapers. 

6. The rightful credit denied to Ono is unsurprisingly owing to racism (or "cultural differences", if we’re being generous). Presented in her native Japanese, the all-text works featured characters that were ‘drawn’ in a calligraphic style by Ono’s first husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and were therefore dismissed as being ‘graphic’ works, and not strictly ‘conceptual’.

7. Laurie Anderson herself is a perfect candidate for the Phaidon treatment. I’d also like to see titles on Kay Rosen, David Hammons, and Cary Leibowitz. 

8. Heart of a Dog is ostensibly about remembering her late beloved dog Lolabelle. I don’t recall Lou Reed’s name mentioned at all (maybe once?) but it’s clear that Anderson is working through grief from his loss two years prior. 

9. Songs from Season of Glass have been covered by Anohni, Apples in Stereo, Deerhoof, Roberta Flack, Japanese Breakfast, Holly Miranda,  Harry Nilsson, Sudan Archives, Sharon Van Otten and others. 

10. In addition to the studio albums, Ono has released two live recordings, several EPs, compilations, a collaboration with The Flaming Lips, and an ill-advised off-Broadway musical. 

Peter Frank | Fluxus Music

Peter Frank

Fluxus Music

Berlin, Germany: Ricochet, 2015

8 pp., 20 x 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 50 

A six page ‘zine about the importance of music to Fluxus, reprinting an article from the Southern California Art Magazine issue #22, 1979, by Peter Frank. 

Frank is an American art critic and curator, living in Los Angeles. His curatorial work includes projects for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the  Guggenheim,  and many other national and international venues.

As a writer, he has contributed to The Village Voice, The SoHo Weekly News, the Huffington Post, Art in America, ARTnews, LA Weekly. and Visions Art Quarterly (where he served as editor). He is the author of the 1983 title Something Else Press, the only overview of the influential publisher. 

"In New York, where Fluxus began, John Cage - himself a product of unrigid West Coast thought in the 1930s and 1940s - exercised increasing influence over younger thinkers and devisers in all the arts. This influence was made possible by Cage´s own responsiveness to work in various arts, a responsiveness brought about by involvement with Merce Cunningham´s dance company, summers spent at the Black Mountain school (where all the arts were taught), and study of Zen Buddhist thought and practice. In 1956, and for two subsequent years, Cage taught a course in new music composition at the New School for Social Research. In this course several younger artists, musicians, writers filmmakers and others were led, or were encouraged to lead themselves, to means of escaping the restriction of given media and modes of thought. Allan Kaprow devised the first Happenings immediately after attending Cage´s class. Classmates of Kaprow, including George Brecht, Dick Higgings, Phillip Corner, and Al Hansen, broke through mediumistic boundaries with Cage´s encouragement and example mind. But, despite the friendships and aesthetics alliances that began in that class, there were divergent sensibilities. The complex, heavily theatrical, and painterly format of the Happening favoured by Kaprow, Hansen, and others who came on the scene was eschewed in favor of more restrained, reflective modes by such as Brecht and Robert Watts. Higgins, who was unusual in his ability to work with equal comfort on grand and minuscule levels, recalls that, after the flurry of excitement shared by Cage class alumni at the advent of Happenings ( and related forms in Europe), a contrasting interest arose.

[...]

The West Coast, Japanese, and sporadic European contingents merged with the New York group, attended one another´s loft performances, and began putting it all into words, into verbal instructions and position papers, into cards,flyers, and books. By the end of 1960 La Monte Young, a Cage disciple from Bay Area, had edited An Anthology of work participating in the new sensibility. In the version of the book published in 1963:

One of Young´s compositions bears resemblance to traditional musical notations: a fifth interval, B- natural and F-sharp, “ to be held for a very long time”. Another composition consists entirely of the direction, “ Draw a straight line and follow it.” Another: “The performer should prepare any composition and then perform as well as he can”. Another:” This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean”. The Piano Piece for David Tudor no. 3 reads: “ Most of them/were very old grasshoppers.” Composition 1960 no.9 consists of a small card with a straight line on it, enclosed in an envelope on which the following is printed: “ the enclosed score is right side up when the line is horizontal and slightly above center”.

The concision and poetry of Young´s formats, the wide range if interpretation they encourage and the availability of their language - anyone can realise a Young composition at any time, with no concert hall, instrument training, or even effort necessary- attracted other artists of the new sensibility, especially those whose performance scores were evolving toward a simplicity of form and statement anyway. George Brecht , Robert Watts, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Allison Knowles, and George Maciuanas, the designer of An Anthology, achieved new brevity, partly through Young´s model.”

- Peter Frank

John Cage | Concert for Piano and Orchestra

John Cage

Concert for Piano and Orchestra

Leipzig, Germany: Edition Peters, 1960

27.9 × 43.1 × 1.5 cm

Edition size unknown

A cardboard box containing 63 music scores, to be played - in whole or in part - in any sequence, for any duration, with any number of performers.

Concert for Piano and Orchestra was composed between 1957 and 1958 and premiered in New York, May 15th, 1958. It accopanied a choreographed piece by Cage’s lover Merce Cunningham entitled Antic Meet, which also featured costume and stage design by Robert Rauschenberg.

 

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.”

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. 

The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975-1978

[Gavin Byars, John Cage, Brian Eno, Michael Nyman, etc.]

The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975-1978

Milan, Italy: Dialago, 2023

33 x 33 x 7 cm.

Edition of 1000 numbered copies

For my money (a not insubstantial amount, here) this collection represents Brian Eno at his very, very best. Not just Discreet Music (Obscure #3) - which I’ll take over Music for Airports as his single finest recording - but also the label itself, and it’s entire output, collected here. This is Eno as curator, as evangelist, as collaborator, and as thinker.1 

Obscure Records published ten albums between 1975 and 1978, most of them excellent, a few of them sublime. The esoteric boutique “Special Price" label  began as an outlet to diseminate the work of overlooked experimental composers, and as a way for Eno to leverage his profile at Island Records to satisfy his wider interests. Eschewing truly difficult and dissonant works, he selected pieces that were certainly outside the mainstream, but that might have the potential to reach larger audiences. 

“The music on Obscure was not turbulent or wildly confrontational,” writes David Toop (Obscure 4#) in the new set’s liner notes, “but it did signal a rejection of certain well-established trends in 20th century modernism - the world of serialism, high seriousness, ultra-complex scores, academic electro-acoustic music and free jazz.” 

"The main decision is whether I like a piece or not,” Eno told Time Out magazine in 1975, who called the label "the best thing to have happened in the British industry since LPs.” Island Records bankrolling the project was an act of faith, but for Eno it was religion. He was convinced that the intersection of pop music and experimental composition was the most compelling area, and that others might come to agree, given the right promotion. 

A meagre £6,000 was not the ideal figure for such promotion, but the shoestring budget allowed the label to move forward without much interference from Island. Eno had similarly promised them that he could record four discs - in the off-hours at the studio - for the cost of one pop record. He often served as producer and ended up designing the album covers himself, also.

Record labels with a strong visual identity (SST, 4AD, Factory, etc.) help inspire loyalty among listeners, and it may have been this rationale (and not the minuscule budget) that led to all ten LPs being issued with an almost uniform cover. They all feature the same cover graphic - a collage by John Bonis - which has been overprinted with black ink, distinguished only by different window reveals on each. This also helps each individual album feel like it is a piece of a larger puzzle.2

Eno enlisted composer Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman to to assist in the selection of material, and also to contribute albums themselves. The resulting ten discs featured works by John Adams, Bryars, Harold Budd, John Cage, Max Eastley, Eno, Christopher Hobbs, Nyman, the Penguin Café Orchestra, Jan Steele, David Toop, John White, and the painter Tom Phillips, who had introduced Eno to avant-garde music at the Ipswich Civic College. 

Bryars also proposed projects by Scratch Orchestra mainstay Howard Skempton, James Tenney, Ingram Marshall, Daniel Lentz, and Michael Byron. Some were rejected outright, and others fell victim to the realities of running a record label as a side hustle. 

In a letter to Robert Wyatt (who provides some vocals on Obscure #5), Eno outlined some of his larger plans for the label: 

"I have thought of a few interesting projects for Obscure records. The first is to invite fifty composers from all traditions each to write a piece of music beginning in C and ending in G and observing a metronome pulse of sixty. Then we’d perform them all and link them all together to make an album . . . Recently I’ve been more and more impressed by the old jazz session technique of recording, and I think we might well flourish under those circumstances. Or an alternative is to use the jazz session approach and then overdub onto it in the rock sixteen-track style. Another idea that I thought might be nice is some- thing of this nature – “Popular Music arranged by Unpopular Com- posers” – so it would include “Duke of Earl” arranged by Gavin Bryars, “Not Fade Away” arranged by Robert Fripp, “Louie Louie” arranged by Fred Frith, etc., etc., etc. Or alternatively it could use only songs based on the “Louie Louie” chord progression.”

Sadly, none of these projects came to fruition. 

Eno’s increasing profile both helped and hindered the series. Bryars recalls in the liner notes that it became shorthand amongst his peers when they were too busy or unavailable to joke “I can’t, I’m in Berlin recording with Bowie!”. The label ceased operations when Eno moved to New York City, and not entirely without acrimony. 

I interviewed Bryars once and brought up the slight sense of animosity I perceived when he spoke about Eno and Obscure. 

“Nobody got paid!” he replied, testily. He alleged that no contracts were ever issued, only handshake agreements, even after Island was absorbed into the Polygram group in 1976. Artists reportedly never saw sales reports or royalties. “We got paid for doing the sessions and that was it."

A brief lawsuit followed, but it was determined that recoupable losses were too insignificant to continue. 

Bryars apparently spearheaded the efforts of this re-release, though his liner notes still betray his frustrations. However, he is quoted in David Sheppard’s book On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, acknowledging the impact on his career: "Brian definitely went out on a limb. He backed something that was certainly not fashionable, we weren’t very well known and were even despised by the musical establishment. Those Obscure records were important – the reason many of us were able to work outside of England for example. Brian led us into all sorts of unexpected territory – and led a lot of unexpected people into our territory too.”

For his part, Eno has only ever had good things to say about Bryars: "I’ve always liked Gavin, and in my opinion his influence on the music scene has been greater than he’s given credit for.” 

“I primarily started the label to release those two pieces of Gavin’s that came out on the first album,” Eno is quoted in Bradford Bailey’s liner note text. “I thought they were such great pieces of music and the story associated with them was so powerful, that I felt like a lot of people would like them if they were actually able to hear them”. 

He was not wrong: The A-Side has been reissued several times (see next post) and the B-side3 hit number one on the classical charts, almost twenty years later (with a little help from the star power of Tom Waits). 

But Bryars' LP was not successful upon initial release, and only two of the ten sold in numbers that would make Island pleased about their investment: Eno’s own Discreet Music, and The Music of the Penguin Cafe. 

But as a brief vanity label (as it might have been pejoratively called) it was remarkably consistent and achieved its goal of bringing greater attention to these artists. 

Bryars went on to a successful career as a composer and performer. Nyman sold three million copies of his soundtrack to Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano. Harold Budd increased his profile with future collaborations with Eno, and later the Cocteau Twins. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra performed together for 24 years and after founding member Simon Jeffes died his son Arthur continued the project with the abbreviated name Penguin Cafe. PCO songs have appeared in numerous films, from directors ranging from John Hughes to Oliver Stone. David Toop collaborated with the Flying Lizards, Thurston Moore, Bob Cobbing, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Camille Norment, Akio Suzuki and Elaine Mitchener. He is also the author of several books on Hip-Hop, Ambient Music and Audio Art. Tom Philips (who died exactly a year before this reissue was released) was awarded an OBE in 2002.

This deluxe new box set collects all ten recordings and a 126-page booklet featuring new essays by Bryars (The History), Bradford Bailey (The Obscure Sounds Of A Quiet Revolution), Max Eastley (Sculpture In The Recording Studio, 1978), Richard Bernas (John Cage's "Voices And Instruments"), Tom Recchion (Epiphanies) and Walter Rovere.

Housed in a lavish linen-covered clamshell box and released in a numbered edition of 1000, this feels more like an art edition than a collection of records. It’s a massive set (it took me a while to find the right place to store it, it’s larger than my turntable) with a price-tag to match4. It warrants several posts, so - for the next week (time permitting) I’ll feature a quick write up of each of the ten recordings. Obscure #1 alone, requires several posts, to accommodate it’s A and B-side, and the various reissues of both. 

1. Obscure Records appears only as a footnote in the two main published volumes about Eno’s work: Eric Tamm’s Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound and Christopher Scoates’ Brian Eno: Visual Music. David Sheppard’s biography On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno dedicates a couple of pages to the label. 

2. Later reissues of Eno’s Discreet Music, Harold Budd’s The Pavillion of Dreams and Music from the Penguin Cafe all had new covers.

3. The idea of a musician or band being defined by a b-side holds great appeal to me, for some reason. I once had a longer list, but “How Soon is Now” by the Smiths and “Dear God” by XTC come to mind. 

4. My only gripes: the steep, steep price tag, wasting a good chunk of the book reprinting redundant liner notes that are already available on the facsimile LP sleeves, and the hefty customs charge I was not expecting (Amazon.ca did not state it was arriving from Germany). 

"Arriving just in time for the festive period, The Complete Obscure Records Collection is confirmation that Santa believes I have been a good boy this year. It’s still remarkable to think what a different music ‘business’ existed some 50 years ago, and how a label such as this could even have existed. Obscure Records was initially conceived by Brian Eno as a vehicle for the work of his yet to be recorded friend, Gavin Bryars, before taking on grander ambitions. Having just departed Roxy Music in 1973, Eno became fascinated with the dynamic London experimental music scene, and even participated himself, with Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia. Originally issued between 1975 and 1978, these recordings remain inspirational, important and groundbreaking. Indeed, the first suite of works: Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, and Gavin Bryars’ Ensemble Pieces, Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, David Toop and Max Eastley’s New and Rediscovered Musical Instrument - are all essential listening for openminded souls. Though you may have some of these recordings, the majority have been out of print for years, with a number having never received a CD reissue. The vinyl and CD sets are accompanied by a lavishly illustrated booklet, with rare photos, archival material and texts by Gavin Bryars, Bradford Bailey, David Toop, Max Eastley, Richard Bernas, and Tom Recchion. Finally, the fantasy of this set ever existing, is a reality."

- Robin Rimbaud