A report of the "24 Hours of Eno" streamed live una tantum starting on Jan. 24th 2025 at 6pm CET.
My commentary has been published on Feb.1st 2025 on the "Visti&Sentiti" webpage of the Italian Music-mag BlowUp.
An almost live review of the "24 Hour of Eno", streamed on line for (just) a day, starting at 6PM on Jan. 24th 2025.
24 HOURS OF ENO
The celebration of the "sniveling bastard"
I'm on my eighteenth hour of watching/listening to "24 hours of Brian Eno" a paid streamed product by Anamorph.
It started yesterday at 6pm and it's a loop of 4h 30' of program repeated for 24 hours - each reiteration changes the composition, duration and order of the audio-visual fragments used as database of this generative video work. As Bob Ashley said about his "Private Lives": it is the premiere (and last show) of a music work to listen to when you're fixing a sandwich or brushing your teeth. By now, through the subsequent re-shuffles and having had my coffee... I can spot the repeated sections and new bits.
Yet, with a good six/seven hours of sleep, I'm ready to let ambient music become our home soundtrack, until evening comes. Ambient has been - for the last twenty years, and rightly so - the soundscape for day hospitals, and cosmetic surgeons' waiting rooms, music for spas and rooms in which (to paraphrase McLuhan) "the massage is the message." So why not letting it slip inside our homely walls?
As always with Eno, music sells concepts and - behind this 24h - Eno spoke about 'generative Art:' that is, the algorithm of the Machine becoming the artist. A bit like in that Cageian composition that let the performer do... nothing; or in those Cagian Chance operations, where chaos (in this case 'the Computer') randomly mixes heterogeneous video/audio material to (let's say, wishfully) re-compose 'constantly new' films. Through an old process. After all, wasn't his 1st Obscure record (1975) and possibly the first ambient music album ever, Discreet Music, a record based (in its heponymous first side) on a generative process? (And in its second side morphing into ambient music a popular, public-domain tune such as the classic Pachelbel Adagio?)
The video is mostly fed with the unreleased 90' documentary "Eno", with interviews with director & crew of the documentary and new audio-video-graphic elements, plus vintage clips taken from the pre-quel documentary already screened at Venice Biennale. Ultimately, there's also the world premiere of "BLOOM: LIVING WORLD," a new audio-video composition, a "video piece" Eno co-authored with Peter Chilvers.
24h oHrs Of Eno is described in its press release as...
"a continuous flow of art, music, and video for 24 hours straight. We will show six unique versions of the acclaimed generative documentary "ENO", as well as multiple doses of parts of "NOTHING CAN EVER BE THE SAME" which is the generative art video signed by Brendan Dawes and Gary Hustwit and based on original period photos, interviews and footage from sources used in the documentary "Eno" albeit remixed "in a feverish dream without end." And well... "Endless dream" may be a bit of a hyperbole to describe the documentary, but it fits to frame Laraaji's concert.
Indeed, the best part of this 24hrs tour de force is the first full screening of a film entitled "IT'S ALL LIGHT: LARAAJI AT NINE ORCHARD" on a Laaraji's NYC concert in a space is located on the tower of the Nine Orchard Hotel, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is music well 'beyond ambient.'
Usually Laraaji - even at the recent Tiny Desk concert - loves to play his usual brushed zither with a hyper clean sound, reverb aside. But on this occasion live he uses a dozen pedals (distortions flanger phaser delay etc.) plus what seems to me a modern Gizmo (a device vibrating strings ad lib), as well as an electrified kalimba. His music is quite intriguing and it compares to Laaraji's first album (for Eno's Ambient series) as Miles Davis's "On The Corner" would to "Kind Of Blue."
A rich and delirious concert, rather a unique soundscape (with voices, laughter, singing and the sounds of splashing water) and quite 'alive' also thanks to the delicious psychedelic backscreen visualizations invented by Liquid Light Lab, of which you can see some photos above, because they are worth your time.
Among the Eno-Marathon's oddities I would add the "listening sessions" of Devon Turnbull (creator of the OJAS speakers) in which the vinyl of "Plateaux Of Mirror" or the already cited "Discreet Music" spin on the turntable, and unheard-before details spring up from the costly hi-fi set-up into the ether.
As the 24 hours unfold, repetitions appear, despite the different “mixing,” which allows the filmmakers to talk about this “generative ENO documentary” as something always different. And it is as the 24 hours of reproduction of Enian music and speeches approaches - always straddling refined, “late lib” and technophilia - I begin to form two ideas, children of this Eno anthology.
One idea is that this 24h kermesse makes explicit the desire of this 76-year-old “sniveling bastard" producer (as he called himself in 1994) to plant solid milestones to punctuate his contribution to the history of pop music, the everlasting space he deserves in rock. For his fans today (certainly intellectuals, perhaps a little late-lib and often technophiles) this kermesse creates the definitive hagiographic tool. Indispensable work to cultivate the brand/Eno in an economically significant space.
The documentary and the fragments help to refresh the memory of the Eno impact in rock music. So the pre-Eno rehearsals of U2 sound truly horrifying… And Eno implies that had he had not put Fela Kuti on the turntable one fateful day, David Byrne would never have dreamt of the choruses of “Remain In Light.”
Although many never really understood what Eno really did in a recording studio, even Bowie goes on record admitting that Eno's presence in the recording studio was a game changer.
(...)