Imaginary Landscapes is a profile of visionary composer, artist and producer Brian Eno. It brings into focus Eno’s seemingly disparate work in sound, vision and light, and explores his music in visual terms, based on landscapes and images that have shaped his life as an artist.

John Cage is the subject of a new museum exhibition in Barcelona. The exhibit looks at Cage’s works in various media and his impact on all forms of contemporary art.

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross shares his thoughts on the highlights of the exhibit – but also raises this conundrum:

The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan.

The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.

It is striking that someone as influential as Cage – as a composer, author, electronic music pioneer and artist – hasn’t found an audience that reflects his influence.

Ross is right. Many people that might appreciate Rauschenberg or Pollock would cringe at the idea of sitting through a concert of Cage’s works.

Maybe the answer to Ross’s conundrum is as simple as this: you can’t close your ears.

If you see a painting that’s confrontational, ugly or incomprehensible, you can close your eyes or walk away. You are in control of the experience.

At a concert of music by an artist like Cage, you can’t close your ears or move on to the next thing. You aren’t in control of your experience – you can just react to it.

This seems to be a fundamental challenge of electronic music (and to a certain degree, music in general); when anything is possible, how do you create music that is original, yet still has the power to seduce someone’s ear?

via disquiet; Image: fallwithme

This is extra-rare fourth edition of Oblique Strategies.

Thr fourth edition of the Oblique Strategies was produced in 1996. Unlike the 1975, 1978, and 1979 editions of the decks, this version was not commercially available; it was a project undertaken by Peter Norton and his family in conjunction with Brian Eno and published in a limited edition of 4,000 distributed to Peter Norton’s close friends and colleagues.

MoMA is selling the set for $200, which means it’s a pretty special deck of cards.

Yes, I want them and no, I can’t afford them. I’m thinking about saving up for MirlitronOne’s $6 music sequencer, instead.

Details below.

Description:

In 1975, Brian Eno, together with collaborators, addressed the challenge of breaking out of creative roadblocks by writing a series of evocative phrases he dubbed “worthwhile dilemmas.” These phrases, which suggest approaches to an impasse from another direction, became known as Oblique Strategies.

Originally published as a deck of cards in an austere format, they became an underground hit and sold out in three revised editions.

In 1996, as the Strategies were long out of print, Peter Norton suggested to Eno a “fourth, yet again revised, and more universal edition.” Norton edited the newly revised phrases and commissioned their translation into the six languages collectively spoken by the majority of mankind (English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic). Artist Pae White was commissioned to turn the cards’ plain black-and-white format into an extravagantly colored graphic format. The set is housed in a Corian container that is known separately as “Bill’s Bad Bone.” These strategy cards have found widespread use in dozens of countries, at writers’ desks, in artists’ studios, and even in boardrooms.

via Dark Shark

The album features remixes of tracks from the classic album Tracks & Traces by Shackleton, Appleblim & Komonazmuk.

It will be available on limited white vinyl & as a download starting Monday, November 2nd.

Download the remix at the rcrdlbl site.

Brian Eno has had a career as producer, musician, sonic innovator and experimental artist that spans four decades.

He’s produced, arguably, the most important recordings by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Devo and others. He also pioneered the genre of “ambient music.” More recently, Eno’s helped create “sonic-art” app Bloom and the video game Spore.

Eno sat down with Minnesota Public Radio’s Steve Seel to discuss the recording studio as canvas, the idea of discovery and risk in music making, as well as his recent reunion with longtime collaborator David Byrne. The interview includes a discussion of Eno’s forays into “generative music,” his concept of composer as gardener, and his ongoing interest in the idea of surrender in music.

Artscape – Brian Eno In Conversation 2009 features some great vintage footage of Eno, then goes on to look at the last 30 years of his work and his work curating for the Luminous Festival.

Darker in tone, Trope immerses users in endlessly evolving soundscapes created by tracing abstract shapes onto the screen, varying the tone with each movement. Recommended for headphones and external speakers.

“Trope is a different emotional experience from Bloom – more introspective, more atmospheric,” explains Eno. “It shows that generative music, as one of the newest forms of sonema, can draw on a broad palette of moods.”

Trope is available for $3.99 in the iTunes App store.

In a Trouser Press interview from 1982, Brian Eno shared his thoughts on ambient music:

Brian Eno On Ambient Music

I like it as an ambiguous term. It gives me a certain latitude.

It has two major meanings. One is the idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. This has widely been misinterpreted by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music that can be background or foreground or anywhere, which is rather a different idea.

Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could pay attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something while it was on. I can’t read with a pop record playing, or with most classical records. They’re not intended to leave that part of the mind free – my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of attention.

The other meaning is more pronounced on On Land: creating an ambience, a sense of place that complements and alters your environment. Both meanings are contained in the word ambient.

Critics don’t like these records, but people do. The response has been really encouraging.

People are doing the most interesting things with the records. I got a letter from a woman in Cleveland who works with autistic children. She had one child who never spoke; he had never made a single vocal noise in his life. Another one wouldn’t sleep; he was ultra-nervous, in a wretched state. She put Discreet Music on one day, and the kid who had never slept just lay down on a concrete floor and went to sleep. So she went to the group where this other kid was, and she kept playing Discreet Music. And this little child – not only because of the record, I’m sure, though the other one was – started talking. I’m not claiming Discreet Music can make the dumb talk, but it’s nice to know it can be used as part of an atmosphere that produces physiological change in people, or seems to.

When Music For Airports came out and sold fairly well, I thought people assumed it was going to be another Before And After Science. It takes a long while to learn whether you’re selling on the momentum of your successes. I don’t think that’s so anymore. I’ve almost shifted audiences. I meet people who never knew I made a record of songs.

Critics can’t stand these records, by and large, because in their search for eternal adolescence they still want it all to be spunky and manic and witty. They come back to rock music again and again, expecting to feel like kids. That isn’t what I want from music anymore – not in quite that way.

I’m interested in the idea of feeling like a very young child, but I’m not interested in feeling like a teenager.

Air

The iPhone music app was created by musician / software designer Peter Chilvers and Irish vocalist Sandra O’Neill. Based on concepts developed by Brian Eno, with whom Chilvers created Bloom, Air assembles vocal and piano samples into an ever changing composition, which will be familiar, but never the same.

Brian Eno’s Air

Air features four “Conduct” modes, which let the user control the composition by tapping different areas on the display, and three “Listen” modes, which provide a choice of arrangement.

For those fortunate enough to have access to multiple iPhones and speakers, an option has been provided to spread the composition over several players. Recommended for headphones and external speakers.

At $1.99, Air was a instant purchase at Synthtopia.

If you give it a try, let me know what you think of it!

In a Trouser Press interview from 1982, Brian Eno shared his thoughts on composing:

Brian Eno On Composing

I’m always starting pieces of work. It’s the only thing I do, really; these pieces don’t go anywhere. For some reason, one of them will touch something in me. I never understand why at the time. As soon as I’ve got that, I recognize it as being the seed for something. There follows a period of looking at it in different ways, putting things with it, seeing how it reacts with other things – as you might do with a chemical.

The breakthrough stage is when I suddenly get a strong sense of mood or place. It’s like a fetal idea at the time. I have to surround it with things that will nourish it, if you like; that’s when I start thinking about psychoacoustics and electronics. Then craft enters into it.

Craft has to be dropped at a certain point. You’ve gotten somewhere and you have to decide what you want to do there. The sense of place becomes a seed for the sense of what happens in that place. There’s another way of working which is quite different. I sit down and think, If I connected this to this, and I set this up this way so that this happens to that, something might happen. That’s the technological way of working: imagining a novel technological situation. If you understand those technologies to a certain extent, you have reason to believe a particular novel format might give you something.

I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising? I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my engineer, Daniel Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note – just one note – made the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around that frequency and all the harmonics.

This was a case of having a technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It would have stopped there if that sound hadn’t appeared. The avant-garde technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.

Of course, when I got that sound, I was back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately suggested a direction I still haven’t resolved. I didn’t find anything more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on covered up parts of the sound.

Eno will introduce the premier of the new arrangement at the concert on the 20th.

20 and 21 July 2009 (doors open at 19.00pm). £18 per person*

To book your place, call 0870 870 4771

* Children aged 14 and older are welcome to attend accompanied by an adult.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing the Science Museum, alongside Sound and Music, present the premiere of a new live arrangement of Brian Eno’s 1983 album ‘Apollo’.

The performance by amplified ensemble Icebreaker, with BJ Cole on pedal steel guitar, will be accompanied by original footage of the Moon landings by director Al Reinert (For All Mankind, 1989) projected onto the giant screen of the Science Museum IMAX cinema. Supporting the new arrangement of ‘Apollo’ will be performances of new material based on recordings from space.

Taking place in the Science Museum’s iconic ‘Making the Modern World’ gallery, which includes the real Apollo 10 Command Module, these performances will be by experimental artists Douglas Benford and Iris Garrelfs.

The concert will take place in the Science Museum IMAX Cinema and ‘Making the Modern World’ gallery.

Brian Eno had some interesting comments on genius vs “scenius” at the Sydney Luminous Festival:

I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.

he period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Certainly there was a “scenius”for electronic music in the 1970’s, when Eno did some of his most important work. We may have a scenius now, too, spurred on by the surge in creativity that Internet media is driving.

What do you think is more important – the contributions of individuals like Eno, or the time and the scene that they work in?

via MoreDarkThanShark

This video documents Generative Music ProtoType, an “implementation of Brian Eno”, or at least a generative music sequencer, created in Max/MSP.

Part 2 below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

via kinksaiz

The duplicability of recordings has had an unexpected effect.

The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell.

Of course, they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork.

People who won’t pay £15 for a CD will pay £150 for the limited edition version with additional artwork, photos, booklet and DVDs. They often already own the music, downloaded—but now they want the art. They’re buying art, and they’re buying it in a new way.

That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living.

So, as one business folds, several others open up.

As always with Eno – the entire piece is interesting.

This is a quick demo fo Star Melody for iPhone (App Store link).

Star Melody is a generative sequencer and recorder, created by Amidio, the developers of Noise.io Pro:

We liked the Bloom concept but found it somewhat limited. That’s why we decided to expand it as much as we could.

Now you have 5 different sample sets. Each sample set consists of 2 playable instuments and a background drone layer (generated automatically).

You can define the length and speed (bpm) of the loop. Switch between the instruments with a finger flick/tap. Change note scales and actually see which notes you are playing. Transpose scales if needed.

Star Melody features the “Raindrop Matrix”, which allows accurate panning position of your instruments (left and right), and precise note launch.

Details below.

Star Melody at a glance:

• 16×11 multicolor “Raindrop Matrix”
• Spatial sequencing
• 13 transposable scales
• 15 instruments (5*3)
• Variable tempo, speed
• Record voice along with playing
• Built-in help

Advanced features:

• Record, play from library
• Export to .WAV/.CAF
• Direct export to Intua Beatmaker
• Built-in Wi-Fi server
• Upload own .wav loops to ioLibrary
• Cross-compatible with other Amidio apps
  (Star Guitar, Star Piano, Noise.io)

Brian Green, who’s always coming up with strange and bent electronic music gadgets, put together this iPod touch guitar and demos it in this video.

Green explains:

Its something i basically did for fun, its not something i would use live and i don’t use the guitar in a normal sense for my music so it really would serve me no purpose.

Ok the main the i would like to clear up is NO NO NO i did not glue the itouch(s) to my guitar, there were several blogs that did a post about this and it seemed like one of the first ones that did said that i glued them to my guitar, this is false.

I seemed to get a lot of hate for the fact that i “glued ipods” to my guitar and that it was a dumb idea and so on bla bla bla, well i mean the whole idea of it was kinda a joke to begin with but my point of doing it was to do something inovative, i got the idea to try it after i seen a guy who added a guitar hero neck to a real guitar and then i made this.

Green’s iPod touch guitar appears to be more of a mashup than an instrument per se.

Leave a comment with your thoughts on the iPod touch guitar.

via BrianWilliamGreen

When Metal Machine Music was released in 1975, people did not know what to make of it. The album, influenced by the drone music of La Monte Young and John Cale,  consists entirely of guitar feedback played at different speeds.

Two guitars were tuned in unusual ways and played with different reverb levels. Reed then placed the guitars in front of their amplifiers, and the feedback from the very large amps would vibrate the strings — the guitars were, effectively, playing themselves. He recorded the work on a four-track tape recorder in his New York apartment, mixing the four tracks for stereo.

Reed recreated Metal Machine Music live with his Metal Machine Trio at the Gramercy Theatre in New York earlier this week:

The small venue was probably only half full and its patrons consisted mostly of intellectual types and hard-core Reed fans. Long before the band came on, the sound system was playing an unnerving dissonant loop that seemed to keep getting louder. When they took the stage, Reed and his band, tenor saxophonist Ulrich Kreiger and Continuum (a touch sensitive MIDI keyboard) player Sarth Calhoun wasted little time for pleasantries before they dove into the apocalyptic rush, although Reed announced appreciatively beforehand, “I just want to tell you how happy I am to see you all here tonight.”

There were no “songs,” but instead the musicians churned out a continuous blaring fog that rose and decreased in its deafening intensity, marked by shrill electronic shrieks, long demented sax solos and Reed’s occasional yelling voice.

At the end of the show the controversy surrounding the album had manifested itself visibly: almost a quarter of the original audience had left. Many people who had stayed seemed to have done so as a matter of pride. Their faces looked pained and anguished. Some people had a look of pleasant calm, however. The band themselves had been grinning through their performance, having a good time as the music got louder and more unbearable.

Brian Eno wrote about Metal Machine Music in his 1995 diary, A Year With Swolen Appendices:

Metal Machine Music was released the same week — twenty years ago — as Discreet Music.

Discreet Music soft, calm, melodic and reassuringly repetitive, without a single sound other than tape hiss about 1500 Hz, whereas MMM is as abrasive and unmelodic as possible, with almost nothing below — and yet they occupy two ends of what was at the time a pretty new axis — music as immersion, as sonic experience in which you float.

The roots of Ambient.

It’s interesting that Eno sees Metal Machine Music as one end of the spectrum of ambient music.

For most, though – Metal Machine Music remains a challenge to endure:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this official U2 video, ambient artist/superproducer Brian Eno talks about recording the latest U2 album.

via u2chanel

Brian Eno is curating this year’s Vivid Sydney Fest, being held May 28 to June 14 in Sydney, Australia.

Here are the details:

Sydney Opera House presents Luminous – an annual festival of music, debate, light and performance. Curated by Brian Eno, this inaugural year features a plethora of music acts alongside public talks and spectacular light and art installations from May 28 to June 14.

In a brilliant display of colour, Eno will launch Luminous with the lighting of the sails, transforming Utzon’s masterpiece into an artists’ canvas. The festival will also feature Eno’s image/sound installation, 77 Million Paintings. Acclaimed at the Venice Biennale, this constantly evolving, totally original audio/visual experience will run throughout Luminous as a free event in the Studio.

Music highlights include New York supergroup Battles, UK synth-popsters Ladytron, Irish singer/songwriter Damien Dempsey, Fourth World trumpeter Jon Hassell, Reggie Watts,  Laraaji, the voice of Underworld Karl Hyde, and Jon Hopkins.

This is Imaginary Landscapes, a film on Brian Eno that is part documentary and part interview.

via USO