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, 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 - 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."

 

As always with Eno, music sells concepts and - behind this 24h - the idea of ??the "generative" is sold, that is, the algorithm of the Machine that becomes art. A bit like in those Cagian Chance operations, in this case 'the computer' randomly mixes heterogeneous video material to recompose (let's say) 'always new' films.

 

The material used comes from an unreleased 90' documentary "Eno", as well as vintage clips taken from a pre-quel documentary already screened at Venice Biennale, plus a new audio-video composition by Eno, the first screening of a film on a Laaraji NYC concert, + interviews with director & crew of the documentary and new audio-video-graphic elements.

 

The idea is described 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."

 

"Endless dream" may be a bit of a hyperbolic word to describe the documentary, but it fits fine to frame the concert of Laraaji, screened for the first time last night (world premiere.) It's entitled

 

"IT'S ALL LIGHT: LARAAJI AT NINE ORCHARD"

 

and Laraaji recorded it in a space located on the tower of the Nine Orchard hotel, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it is music '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.

On this occasion live he uses a dozen pedals (distortions flanger phaser delay etc.) plus what seems to me a modern Gizmo (a device that makes the strings vibrate 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 sultry concert, a rather unique soundscape (with voices, laughter, singing and the sounds of splashing water) and alive thanks also to the delicious psychedelic visualizations invented by Liquid Light Lab, of which I have reported some photos here, because they are worth it.

 

Among the oddities I would add the "listening sessions" of Devon Turnbull (creator of the OJAS speakers) in which the vinyl of "Plateaux Of Mirror" or "Discreet Music" spins on the turntable and listening to them the unheard detail. And among the novelties add the world premiere of "BLOOM: LIVING WORLD," a "video piece" by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.

 

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 is that the 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.