BRIAN ENO Interview

eno the interview

by Mark Cunningham

MIX September 1994 41

enouncovered

With new albums by James and Laurie Anderson, a major David Bowie project and an unexpected reunion with Bryan Ferry all arriving shortly or well under way, Brian Eno is getting back to what he does best: producing records. In this exclusive interview, Mark Cunningham chats to him about his theories, methods, mixes and his muse...

To say that Brian Eno has always been ahead of his time is to issue a classic understatement. Time has learned to accept his re-definition of the word ‘musician’. And while the uninformed critics of the early ‘70s took his self-inflicted job title ‘non-musician’ as a reference to his unworldly synthesiser doodlings and glam, androgynous image, the more astute realised that Eno was drawing attention to all the talents, both creative and technical, that contribute to the making of music – whether they are players, producers, engineers, DJs, or programmers.

The Eno canon is breathtaking, his pursuit of the next idea relentless. He shaped the early Roxy Music sound, and with solo works such as Discreet Music (1975), Eno brought the word ‘ambient’ into Rock. As one of the world’s most valued producers and collaborators, he has helped to steer the likes

of U2, David Bowie, and David Byrne to the peaks of their imaginations, and this month sees the release of two new Eno-produced albums: Wah-Wah

by James and Laurie Anderson’s Bright Red. Taking the recording studio from its once passive transmitter status, Eno has pioneered and developed its use as a musical tool.

He explains: “I started coming to the studio with less worked-out pieces, and eventually with nothing at all. I would just start working with that thing, ‘the studio’, as the instrument. I’d say: ‘OK, let’s start with a drone or single repeated piano note.

What happens if I put an echo on that? What happens if I make that echo wobble by sending it through a tape recorder with a bent capstan?’

As soon as I did that I’d start to get some feeling for the sound. It would start to become liquid or

42

MIX September 1994

spread out in a non-recognisable way. Then I’d think about adding other sounds, piling on more layers, and acting very much like an abstract painter and his canvas.

“To me, the image of the studio was rather like landscape painting, where you’d set the canvas up in front of the existing scene and the skill, in theory, was in getting the scene on to the canvas, just as the skill in old recording methods was in getting the song on to the record.

“What I was saying was that there was nothing outside of this process – this process called recording is the creative process. We don’t have the canvas standing in front of any landscape, you are going to make the landscape here and now.”

Working with pianist Harold Budd during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Eno began to explore the technique of subliminal mixing; the use and value of the different audio frequencies of the piano.

Despite experimentation and improvisation being high on his priority list, Eno is surprisingly economical with studio time, sometimes to the chagrin of insecure clients. “One of my mottos is that if you want to get unusual results, work fast and work cheap, because there’s more of a chance that you’ll get somewhere that nobody else did. Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is to make things more normal. Hollywood is the best example of that, where you have 56 lighting technicians and four camera gaffers, and you know that what they’re all for is to make it look like every other film you’ve ever seen.

“Most of today’s musicians are partly engineers.”

“I would split his piano signal into four or five different frequency bands, so everything equivalent to the lower string of a bass guitar would be put on to one track of the tape, then the next frequency band that is equal to the human voice range would be put on to another. I would make up four or five tracks like this, so I could split the sound spectrum up into different regions, and then I would work separately with these regions.

“Instead of putting echo on the piano as one might normally do, I’d say: ‘OK, on the bottom end of the piano, I’m going to spread that sound out, flange it or put it out of phase, or something. Then with the next band of sound, I’m going to just leave it out completely or put it far back in the mix and over on the right-hand side’. I could then maybe put a repeat echo on the third band, and so on.

“I started to get really atomic about sound and analyse it carefully to see what could be sucked out of it, what could be found within an existing sound and made more of. I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.”

“I place a lot of store on conceptual preparation before I go into the studio. A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start. It’s like going into a Chinese restaurant and being presented with a 322-page menu and thinking: ‘God, I just want something to eat!’”

ROLES To those in the business who shudder at the suggestion that the days of the traditional producer may be numbered, Eno offers some comfort: “When people sit at home with their home studios they are in a way looking after the territory that was more the province of producers, which is this quasi-artistic, quasi-technical ground that a lot of rock music is made in.

“So in one sense, the idea of the producer as someone who mediates and converses between the completely non-technical musician and non-ar-

MIX September 1994 43

tistic engineer, which was the old picture, is now dead because most musicians now occupy all three of those roles to some extent.

“Most of today’s musicians who play an electric instrument are partly engineers – they have some feeling about how things should connect together and how things should sound. But I think there is another kind of producer coming into existence who is not an interface between the artistic and the technical, but an interface between different areas of the existing culture.

“What I do a lot when I work with people is try to connect ideas and tie them all into a bigger cultural picture, because it clarifies things and is less one-dimensional. It’s a more conceptual role.

any means. I have a rule when I produce, and that is not to spend too much time on a record.

I come into the studio in spurts, like a week in every month, and it puts me in a position where I can hear things freshly and make some kind of an assessment about what’s being done. People get fatigued with hearing the same songs over and over, so they often put more sounds on tape to keep themselves awake! It’s important in those circumstances for someone like myself to come in and say: ‘Just leave all of that off and listen to what is here, these basic ideas’.”

I suggest to Eno that one of his main qualities as a producer may be his ability to allow an artist’s true musical personality to ooze out on to tape.

He agrees. Sort of. “What I’m saying is: ‘Don’t be ashamed of your own ideas’. Most musicians, when they go into sessions, get applauded for sounding like someone else, or a slight variation on someone else’s style. I hear this all the time from people who try something out that they think is exciting, and everyone looks a little unsure.

Then they play an old James Brown riff and everyone’s saying: ‘Wow! That’s what we want!’

“Most of the time, musicians are being encouraged to sound recognisable. What I’m doing is encouraging them at the points when they’re not. It’s more about them finding confidence than bringing out their true personality.”

Producing now is more about locating something where it falls. It’s not obvious any longer. If you were making a beat record in 1963, there wouldn’t be much question about what to do. You’d know you were making a pop record and it had to fit into a particular culture. But with the moving on of time, the field has become so wide and there are so many edges to it, and so many ways you can have a successful career doing this, that it isn’t obvious which course you’re on and where your music fits in.

“Of course, producers can also offer another intelligent pair of ears which is something they’ve always done, and that certainly isn’t obsolete by

STRATEGY One of the most refreshing aspects of Eno’s approach to music-making is his ongoing series of ‘Oblique Strategies’ - philosophies which can just as effectively be applied in life as inside the recording studio. These theories have their origins in Eno’s earliest studio experiences when time was at a premium, yet the pressure to achieve interesting results was great. Beginning as a list of aphorisms, the Strategies emerged as a guide to back-alley session stances.

Eno explains a few of them. “An important question to ask is: ‘What wouldn’t you do?’ Imagine you’re sitting there working, things are getting difficult and the situation reaches an impasse.

You keep trying things but they don’t work, so it’s at that point where you should ask yourself ‘What wouldn’t I do?’ ‘What are the things I wouldn’t think of doing?’

44

MIX September 1994

“I try to connect ideas and tie them into a bigger picture.�

MIX September 1994 45

“You’ve already thought of the things you thought would work, but they didn’t. It’s a little bit like when you’ve lost something and you go around the flat looking in all the obvious places where you might normally leave something. Clearly it isn’t in any of those, so you then think about all the places you wouldn’t usually think of looking. Chances are you’ll probably find the object...

“Change instrument roles. Do something boring.

Consult other sources, either promising or unpromising. Cut a vital connection - that’s a very interesting thing to do because most pieces of music are based around some centre, like a drum track or a drone, which really holds everything together.

Just try taking that element out of the music and

see what happens. Suddenly, when you take it out you start to hear everything else that’s there and you may realise that some of it is redundant, obsolete or, even more interesting, that it stands completely alone and is in fact another new piece of music to develop.”

SIMULTANEOUS PROJECTS Last year, James became yet another rock act to fall under the Eno spell. The result? The interntionally-acclaimed album, Laid. This month, from the same sessions at Real World Studios, another James album emerges: the highly improvised WahWah. Unlike its sister album, its aimless, sideways approach provides a snapshot of a band that didn’t realise the audience might be listening in.

“There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a studio when you’re not interested in the track.”

46

MIX September 1994

But what are the benefits in recording two albums simultaneously?

“It’s actually a very good strategic decision. One reason is you can have two studios going at the same time and that offers great creative benefit.

If you have a bunch of people sitting in one room and working on one piece of music, and getting immersed in that piece of music, everyone’s thinking they should say something just to prove that they’re still paying attention, because it’s embarrassing to sit in a corner for four hours. It’s much more important for people to genuinely feel they have something to contribute than just interject for the sake of it.

“There are two pieces of music being worked on at once and this really does something for the social balance of events, because there are two places you can be. You have a choice. You can go to the studio and work on the music that is more interesting to you at that point in time. There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a studio when you’re not interested in the track or don’t feel you have anything to offer.

“It’s also a fantastic device for perspective because if you walk from one room into the other, there are some aspects about the newer music that become blindingly obvious to you. You walk in and say: ‘The whole sound is too muddy’. Or: ‘This chorus is pathetically weak’. If you’re all sitting around the desk, working on one piece of music for days, that clarity disappears.

“Most people do not make just one kind of music; they have a lot of different ideas and I think a lot of records are ruined by people trying to half-heartedly mix them up in an unthought-out way. Doing things this way you can say: ‘OK, in this record we can have all of this kind of thing, and in this other record we can have all the other kinds of music’.

Of course, they can overlap, but you can take ideas as far as they can go without them starting to cancel out or fight with other ideas.”

Interestingly, the latest person to benefit from Eno’s double (or possibly triple-album) whammy work ethic is David Bowie, who has been working in New York during the summer with his former collaborator. Could we be in for a return to the glories of Heroes and Low? Don’t bet against it.

MIX September 1994 47

an eno mixology

Roxy Music David Bowie Talking Heads U2

48

>>>>>

MIX September 1994

ROXY & FERRY Both on-stage and in the studio, Eno was largely responsible for defining the early Roxy Music sound – evident on the band’s first two boundary-defining albums.

But by the time Eno recorded his debut solo project, the proto-punk Here Come The Warm Jets (1974) with sessioneers including Chris Spedding and Roxy’s Phil Manzanera, he had already decided to quit the band “most definitely with no intention to go back”.

A key item of hardware for Eno in this era was his EMS Synthi A ‘suitcase’ synth, which he used, among many other things, to morph Roxy’s sound on-stage. “I had a little mixer onstage which I designed, plus a couple of tape recorders that I used for echoes and things, and every one of the stage instruments came to my mixer,” he recalls.

“I did live on-stage producing, really. The first time anyone had done that, I believe. If I wasn’t sending an instrument to any effect, it would just go straight through to the mixing desk, albeit louder. But if I interrupted it and turned the send knob, I would divert it through all of my equipment and then I could start changing the sound, by putting it through a filter, distorting it, putting it through a ring modulator, pulsing it and all sorts of different things.

“From those treatments as I called them, it would be sent back to the desk. The engineer would be receiving the original instrument, plus whatever I had been doing to it, or if I wanted to, only my signal would go to the desk and totally bypass the original sound.”

In a curious twist of fate, after many years apart, Eno and Bryan Ferry bumped into each other on a Caribbean island earlier this year, and the result was an unexpected writing collaboration on one track of Ferry’s forthcoming album, Mamouna – their first for more than two decades.

MIX September 1994 49

BOWIE IN BERLIN Recorded at Hansa Studios in 1977 during David Bowie’s infamous Berlin interlude, both Low and Heroes were was aprime prime example ofofthe examples theBowie/Eno Bowie/Enocollaborative collaborativeprocess process.which Produced is stillTony by bearing Visconti, fruit today.

HeroesProduced featured by Eno Tony working Visconti, alongside Heroes featuredFripp Robert Enoto working createalongside astonishing Robert guitarFripp effects, to create againasusing tonishing the former’s guitar ‘suitcase’ effects,synthesiser. again using the former’s ‘suitcase’ synthesiser.

Eno explains: “I was sending the guitar to a ring modulator Eno explains: and doubling the “I was frequency sendingofthe it, guitar pulsingtoit,a filtering ring modulator it, all and doubling those kinds ofthe things. frequency Fripp himself of it, pulsing is veryit,sonically filtering it, aware, all those so notkinds everything of things. you hear Fripporiginates himself is from very sonically me, but he aware, would so not plug into everything my little synthesiser you hear originates and I would fromplay me,around but he would with plugsound. his into my little synthesiser and I would play around with his sound.

“Ring modulation is a whole subject on its own and people “Ring use don’t modulation it that much, is a whole but I find subject it fascinating. on its own To and bepeople able don’t to pulse usesomething it that much, is very but interesting.

I find it fascinating.

If you putToabe low-freable to pulseoscillator quency something in is one very side interesting. of the ringIfmodulator you put a low-freand the quency oscillator instrument in the in other, one the sideeffect of theisring a pulsing modulator effect. and If the you instrument change the in waveform the other, of the the effect pulse is that’s a pulsing goingeffect. in and Ifyou you changeit the make a square waveform wave,ofit’s theapulse very sharp that’spulse. going If inyou andmake you make it a sine it awave, square it’swave, a softer it’spulse. a veryChanging sharp pulse. the Ifspeed you make cre- it a sineanother ates wave, it’s effect. a softer It all pulse. adds up Changing to a peculiar, the speed non-musical creates another effect. It all adds up to a peculiar, non-musical sound.”

50

MIX September 1994

BYRNE & TALKING HEADS In addition to projects with David Byrne, such as the ground-breaking My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1981), Eno helped to shape Talking Heads as a powerful international force, by producing their crucial albums, More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978), Fear Of Music (1979) and Remain In Light (1980).

“People are always insecure about new ideas,” says Eno, “But I’m never insecure about my feelings for other people’s ideas; in fact I have very strong opinions about them.

So whenever there is a brilliant idea, I actively encourage the players to develop it further.

“I used to do this a lot with David Byrne, where he would jam guitar parts and within something I might hear a four-bar pattern that was fantastic. I would learn it and because I can’t play guitar, I would sing it to him over and over

until he effectively re-learned what he had already been playing, but hadn’t noticed.

“It’s getting people to take seriously what they uniquely do. Quite often the things that only you can do seem like mistakes because you haven’t heard anybody else do them.”

MIX September 1994 51

WORKING WITH U2

On U2’s first three studio albums, Steve Lillywhite did an admirable job of transferring the band’s live spirit and energy from stage to record. By 1984, however, it was time to look deeper within the band and address the more complicated textures in their music that had so far been largely unexplored.

Brian Eno, together with Canadian musician and producer, Daniel Lanois, proved to be the ideal explorer, but at the outset of the recording of The Unforgettable Fire (1984), Eno had some doubts that the partnership would work.

“I honestly thought there was a danger of me ruining them as a band,” he recalls. “They were already successful and were ready to break very big. But I thought that if I stared working with them, they might end up with something arty and esoteric, and it might wreck them completely.

“So as insurance, I brought along Dan Lanois who is a fantastic producer with a real talent for working with groups. I knew that even if it didn’t work out with me, the record would be in a safe pair of hands. Working with Dan, I was allowed to be as far out as I wanted, but they

wouldn’t be left there thinking, ‘God, what’s going to happen to our record?!’ As it turned out, they were veryy happy to experiment.”

What does Eno regard as Lanois’ greatest strength? “He creates a climate that encourages people and makes them think that anything is possible. One of the ways he does this is by putting a great deal of attention into anticipating things.

“If he’s working with a guitarist, namely Edge, he will think: ‘Right, he’s playing this guitar at the moment, but at some point later he’s probably going to want to try something on this other guitar, so I’d better lay a line into this channel on the desk, so that if he does, I’ll be ready to record it’. Dan and I spent a lot of time evolving ways of making the recording process as seamless as possible.

“The worst possible scenario in the studio is where the band are really excited and fresh, and some dumb idiot of a producer says, ‘Can we hear the snare drum, please?’ Dan is extremely professional where that’s concerned.

He’ll arrive at the studio very early, to check all the headphone mixes and make sure that

52

MIX September 1994

if a musician suddenly changes his mind and wants to play something else, the whole session doesn’t grind to a halt.”

On Achtung Baby (1991) and particularly Zooropa (1993), U2 began to set a new precedent for studio improvisation within the rock sphere. While the band arrived at the studio, ready to work on some pre-written songs, most of the material was no more than sketched – a virtual blank canvas on to which Eno, Lanois, co-producer Flood and U2 could paint aural textures.

“When we started on Zooropa, I suggested to the band that they start improvising in the studio regularly,” says Eno. “They’d got out of this habit of improvising and for various reasons, they weren’t doing it. So I said: ‘We should imagine we’re making hypothetical film soundtracks, not making songs.’

“This is always a very liberating idea, because a film soundtrack doesn’t have to have a centre – the film itself is the centre. It allows you to make music that is pure atmosphere and that really allowed some good things to come through in their case. In our relationship, Dan would deal with the functional landscape and I would deal with the conceptual one, and I’ll tell you, you can’t have one without the other. You have to control both.”

MIX September 1994 53