Friday, July 22, 2011

Eno Blog





Just thought I would share some interesting blog entries from Brian Eno's blog page in relation to his newly released album, "Drums Between the Bells." It is interesting, in that you get a look into the mind of a world class producer / musician and how he thinks. The second blog dated July 21, 2011 is very philosophical /psychological in regards to the mindset of an artist.

The full blog can be found at http://re-view.brian-eno.net/


Hope you enjoy.




July 21, 2011
Running Orders

We spent a lot of time listening to the tracks on this album in different sequences...trying to find a good sequence in which to present it. This is a traditional issue in record-making - because a song can flatter or kill the one following it. It was easier in the days of vinyl, because you were dealing with two distinct suites of music - Side 1 and Side 2 - and it was relatively easy to divide the material into two groups of say 5 or 7 songs. But when CDs came along, you suddenly had a continuous stream of up to 80 minutes of music to deal with.

Now we're in a different era again, where many people are downloading tracks individually and you really have no idea in what order (or in what company) they're going to be listening to the works. Nonetheless, as though downloading didn't yet exist, we put in a lot of time trying to come up with an order that sounded good if you played it through from beginning to end.

To give you an idea of the dimensions of this problem: I was working with a band once on an album of 15 tracks, and we were starting to wonder about how to sequence them. Someone in the band said "Couldn't we just listen to all the alternatives?". I decided to work out how long this would take. The number of sequences is 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1.... which comes to a magnificent 1,307,674,368,000 - or approximately 1.3 trillion possible sequences. If each of these sequences takes an hour to hear, that amounts to about 150 million years of continuous listening. If you'd like to sleep and have a social life, you should multiply that by 3, which would take it up to 450 million years - so you'd need to have started listening around the middle of the Paleozoic Era, surrounded by puzzled very early life forms, to have met the deadline of early July, 2011 in the Holocene Era.

Clearly, for us mortals, going through all the alternatives isn't an option. So Rick and I, both unfortunately mortal, listened on 'random shuffle' - just let the CD player throw the tracks out in any order, and paid attention to combinations which made sense (or sounded dreadful). That's how we built up the running order, but there was one fly in the ointment: BREATH OF CROWS. Whatever we seemed to do, that one didn't seem to sit comfortably. It really wanted to be all alone, separated from everything else. That's why we put the one minute silence in...so that, for those listening to the album as a continuous experience, there'd be a hiatus before it started. ( It isn't a silence actually - I put some white noise, fake tape hiss, in there...to make a psychological cue that something was still happening.)


My suggestion is to occasionally listen to the album on random shuffle. It produces some nice surprises, like suddenly noticing a track you hadn't really noticed before.

July 21, 2011
aaa

The biggest problems with becoming successful in any form of art are the following:

You receive a huge amount of encouragement to repeat yourself, whereas what inspired you in the first place was the discovery of something new
(Rule: welcome encouragement, and then try to ignore it)

Everyone wants you to be involved in everything, and you find all your time filled with doing things that aren't exactly what you felt like doing
(Rule: when invited to do something in the future, ask yourself if you would do it right now)

You no longer have time to actually do anything anyway because you're constantly doing interviews about what you did in the past
(Rule: block out days in your diary and FIGHT to keep them free. Leave the phone at home, tell your friends you're on holiday)

Your life is filled with gadgets because you can afford them
(Rule: every object takes up your time. Ask yourself what it gives you in return)

Options multiply: you do a lot of things
(Rule: Do fewer things better)

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