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Fact #148409

When:

Short story:

Brian Eno records the ambient systems music piece, Discreet Music, in his own recording studio in England, UK, Europe.

Full article:

DISCREET MUSIC by BRIAN ENO
by Johnny Black

This extraordinary album took a slew of avant-garde ideas and seeded them into the heart of popular music culture where, amazingly, they took root and flourished.

In the early 70s, Eno was the flamboyant keyboard player of Roxy Music, an eccentric muso clad in peacock feathers and make-up who coaxed weird electronic bleeps out of primitive synthesisers.

He quit Roxy in 1973 to pursue a solo career which took a radical turn on 18 January 1975 when Eno walked in front of a London taxi. Confined to a hospital bed for weeks, virtually immobile, he found himself listening one day to an album of harp music, playing with the volume too low. Unable to move enough to increase the volume, he found himself hearing the music as an aspect of the ambience of the room, like the changing qualities of the light, or the sounds of the weather outside. And, to his surprise, he found that he enjoyed it that way.

On his release from hospital, he decided to create a piece of music designed to be heard at a low volume. He also decided that, rather than being composed, it should be generated. To achieve this end, he played a couple of simple melody lines, on a synthesiser, which were harmonically compatible but of different lengths. He then fed both pieces through an echo unit and a delay system which looped them so that they would play simultaneously and repeatedly. Being of unequal length, they would inevitably drift out of sync, creating a potentially endless pattern of variations.

Unusual as this was in a pop/rock context, Discreet Music was not a revolutionary work per se. Indeed, most of Eno’s innovations had clear precedents in the avant garde fields of minimalism and electronic composition. There had even been earlier electronic albums which found some acceptance with the rock audience, notably Terry Riley’s Rainbow In Curved Air (1969), and two German works, Kluster’s Klopfzeichen (1970) and Tangerine Dream’s Electronic Meditation (1970).

Eno himself, in collaboration with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, had helped pioneer the use of ambient music loops on their 1973 album No Pussyfooting, and the original intention for Discreet Music was that it would become a musical background on top of which Fripp would improvise.

Many experimental composers set out to shock the musical establishment, but Eno took pains in the album’s sleeve note to point out that his concepts owed more to the spirit of early 20th century composer Erik Satie, “who wanted to make music that could ‘mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner.’”

For some, this reduced Eno’s composition to the same level as the despised Muzak systems but others perceived it as a refreshing contrast to the self-aggrandising high-volume bluster of rock music. Yet, without Eno’s standing in the rock world, Discreet Music would have been confined to a much smaller audience, and it was rock giants like U2 and Talking Heads, who would ultimately embrace many of Eno’s ideas and introduce them to vast mainstream audiences.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2005)