Podcast Episode Summary
Bang On A Can All-Stars – Music For Airports 1/2 (live)
I’m very excited about the BBC4 Arena documentary on Brian Eno tonight. Eno is one of only a handful of musicians (the others including Miles Davis, John Cage, Sun Ra, Richard D James and er… William Shatner) who have changed the way I think about music by producing stuff that was simultaneously completely off-the-wall and also very listenable.
The general record-buying (maybe these days that should be “music-downloading”) public will know Eno best as a producer for bands like (at various times) Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay. But anyone reading this who is not familiar with the guy’s recorded output needs to get hold of his 1978 LP Ambient 1: Music for Airports pretty damn quick. The album is four long tracks based on different combinations interlocking, repeating, shifting piano, synth and vocal patterns. It’s a classic of ambient music, as the title would suggest. (His 1975 LP Discreet Music is arguably even better).
“1-2” (side 1, track 2 on the original LP) consisted of vocal tape loops with different length repeats on them so that the same combination of notes and timing would only occur once every few days. It’s probably the best track on the album although there is stiff competition. In this version, the New York based avant-garde ensemble Bang On A Can arranged the piece for live performance at an actual airport – London Stansted – in 1998.
Eno hadn’t thought that Music for Airports was performable live because live musicians “would never allow the long gaps that occur”. But in fact he was bowled over by the performance. In a recent interview in Mojo magazine he said:
You had a piece that was essentially made by machines – tape loops, that sort of thing. And s soon as humans try and reproduce it, they can’t help but be human. When they are not trying to be passionately human but they are trying to restrain themselves, whatever comes through, it’s the irrepressible part of being a human.
So they’re all trying to act like machines, but they don’t sound like machines at all, they sound like people and it’s quite touching when that appears.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to that Arena documentary.
(Note: this is an edited-down version of the track, which is actually about 9 minutes long. But it’s enough to give you a flavour.)
File Download (4:51 min / 7 MB)
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