Brian Eno (morceaux choisis)

Annotation :

1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQa0ppRCDg

La chanson a une instrumentation particulière, un solo de hautbois, l'utilisation libre de la célèbre bande de "trois violons" du mellotron, beaucoup de traitement des autres instruments par Brian Eno via son synthétiseur Electronic Music Studios VCS3 et l'écho sur bande. Le son au début de la chanson a été créé par Brian Eno, après que Bryan Ferry lui ait demandé de produire quelque chose qui rappelle l'atterrissage lunaire.

Brian Eno – VCS3 synthétiseur, "tapes" (Mellotron)
Bryan Ferry – Hohner Pianet N, vocaux
Andy MacKay – hautbois, saxophone
Graham Simpson – basse
Paul Thompson – batterie
Phil Manzanera – guitare électrique

Annotation :

1973
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSniBxXjK_8

Lyrically, the song is a sinister monologue, part critique of the emptiness of opulence, partly a love song to an inflatable doll. Musically this is complemented by a cycling four-bar chord progression,(D# F# F G#) led by a 'cinema organ' style Farfisa part. After the lyrical conclusion "I blew up your body/but you blew my mind!", the song climaxes with an extended instrumental section, with the lead taken by guitarist Phil Manzanera.

Brian Eno: VCS 3 synthesizer, tape effects
Andy MacKay: Farfisa organ, saxophone
Bryan Ferry: vocals, rhythm guitar
Paul Thompson: Drums
Phil Manzanera: Guitar
John Porter (Guest Artist): Bass

Annotation :

1973
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elTuRy7OhgQ

Brian Eno invited Robert Fripp to his London home studio in September 1972. Eno had developed a tape system using two tape recorders set up so when a sound was played, it would be heard at a lower volume level seconds later, and seconds later again at an even lower level. With this method, new sounds could be laid upon each other without overwriting them. Fripp played further material over the top with Eno selectively enabling or disabling the recording. This allowed Eno to remove portions of the loop, or add further new layers on top of the existing material. The result is a dense, multi-layered piece of ambient music. This technique later came to be known as "Frippertronics".

This track recorded in two takes – first the background looping track, then adding an extended guitar solo over the backing track – the track features the sole sound source as Fripp's electric guitar, played through a tape loop system devised by Eno determining the amount of the time in which each piece of audio would be layered.

Annotation :

1973
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMt1Oy5uQ0w

It is an example of the predominantly glam/art rock style Eno employed at the time, praised for its guitar solo by King Crimson founder Robert Fripp.

The song begins with a tense high-hat and bass line, along several different kinds of electronic sounds. Eno's vocals enter after this, being described as "nasal" and "slightly snotty". Following this first section of lyrics there is a 2'59" guitar solo by Robert Fripp with shifting drum beats as backing ; Eno's vocal returns as the song ends.

The song is a bizarre fantasy about a photography session involving a burning infant and unthinking, laughing onlookers.

Annotation :

1974
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeIbUvBU39U

The Portsmouth Sinfonia was an orchestra founded by a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art in England, in 1970. The Sinfonia had an unusual entrance requirement, in that players had to either be non-musicians, or if a musician, play an instrument that was entirely new to them. Among the founding members was one of their teachers, English composer Gavin Bryars. The orchestra started as a one-off, tongue-in-cheek performance art ensemble but became a cultural phenomenon over the following ten years, with concerts, record albums, a film and a hit single. They last performed publicly in 1979.

Brian Eno was interested enough to join the orchestra, playing clarinet, and subsequently producing their first two albums.

Annotation :

1974
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVajcgZk2Tc

The sound of "Taking Tiger Mountain" has been described as more upbeat and bouncy than Eno's previous solo album while the lyrics have darker themes and subject matter. The lyrics of the album have been described as "remarkably literate and often humorous" with "quick fire rhymes, oddball couplets, abrupt demands, and ruthless statements". To create the lyrics, Eno later played these backing tracks, singing nonsense syllables to himself, then forming them into actual words, phrases and meanings. This lyric-writing method was used for all his more vocal-based recordings of the 1970s.

Brian Eno – vocals, electronics, snake guitar, keyboards
Phil Manzanera – guitars
Brian Turrington – bass guitar
Freddie Smith – drums
Robert Wyatt – percussion, backing vocals
Portsmouth Sinfonia – strings

Annotation :

1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeCqgsKs8EY

Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy is an experimental music/spoken word album by poet Lady June (a.k.a. June Campbell Cramer). It features musical contributions by Kevin Ayers and Brian Eno.

Lady June: Vocals
Kevin Ayers: Guitar, bass, Vocals
Brian Eno: Electronic Guit, Bass, Imminent, Linearment, Lunar Lollipops, Voc
Pip Pyle: Drums
Martha: Vocals
David Vorhaus: Kaleidophon, Mix
Jakob Klasse: Piano

Annotation :

1975

Sur les cinq morceaux qui composent l'album "Evening Star", le dernier retient plus d'attention que les autres. Rien que par sa longueur (presque 29 minutes), "An Index of Metals" est incontournable. Le morceau en lui-même, quant à lui, est un monstre de réussite et de terreur. Pendant une demi-heure, Fripp et Eno, après avoir installé une ambiance sombre dès le départ, créent un paysage sonore riche et ténébreux, mais non brutal et relativement linéaire. "An Index of Metals" est une plongée progressive dans un monde froid, voire glacial, où peuvent être projetées des émotions et sensations plutôt négatives. Il est d'ailleurs tentant de l'écouter pour ce qu'il est, et non seulement en tant que fond sonore, ce qu'il accomplit à merveille.
(Waltersmoke, Nightfall, 2014)

Annotation :

1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWc89nOFGI4

Another Green World represents a turning point in Eno's musical career. While his previous albums contained quirky rock songs, only five of the fourteen tracks on the album have lyrics.most of the album has "paced instrumentals that, while often closer to ambient music than pop, are both melodic and rhythmic", and are accompanied by few pop songsThe instrumental tracks explore a new kind of sound that is more quiet and restful, marking the change between Eno's earlier rock songs and his later instrumental works in which texture and timbre are the most important musical elements.

Brian Eno — vocals, synthesiser, bass guitar, guitar, percussion, drum machine, piano, keyboards, Hammond and Farfisa organs, Yamaha bass pedals, sound effects, producer

Annotation :

1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiw9nageo9w

Discreet Music marked a clear step toward the ambient aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports".

Brian Eno's concept of ambient music builds upon a concept composer Erik Satie called "furniture music." This means music that is intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room rather than be directly focused upon.

The inspiration for this album began when Eno was left bed-ridden in a hospital by an automobile accident and was given an album of eighteenth-century harp music. After struggling to put the record on the turntable and returning to bed, he realised that the volume was turned down (toward the threshold of inaudibility) but he lacked the strength to get up from the bed again and turn it up. Eno said this experience taught him a new way to perceive music:

"This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience."

This album is also an experiment in algorithmic, generative composition. His intention was to explore multiple ways to create music with limited planning or intervention.

The second half of the album is three pieces collectively titled "Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel." These pieces were performed by the Cockpit Ensemble, conducted and co-arranged by Gavin Bryars. The members of the ensemble were each given brief excerpts from the score, which were repeated several times, along with instructions to gradually alter the tempo and other elements of the composition.

Annotation :

1976
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psn9pgsOO30

801 Live is the debut live album by 801, released in November 1976. In 1976, while Roxy Music had temporarily disbanded, 801 got together as a temporary project and began rehearsing at Island Studios, Hammersmith, about three weeks before their first gig. The music consisted of more or less mutated selections from albums by Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno and Quiet Sun, plus a full-scale rearrangement of Lennon-McCartney's "Tomorrow Never Knows" and an off-the-wall excursion into The Kinks' 1964 hit "You Really Got Me".

Phil Manzanera – guitar
Brian Eno – keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, tapes and vocals
Bill MacCormick – bass and vocals
Simon Phillips – drums and rhythm generator
Francis Monkman – Fender Rhodes piano and clavinet
Lloyd Watson – slide-guitar and vocals

Annotation :

1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuKv_ThpItQ

Cluster & Eno is a collaborative album by the German electronic music group Cluster and English ambient musician Brian Eno. The style of this album is a collection of gentle melodies: a mixture of Eno’s ambient sensibilities and Cluster's avant-garde style.

In June, 1977 the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius joined with Brian Eno for recording sessions at Conny Plank's studio. The first release from those sessions on Sky Records was Cluster & Eno. Guest musicians on the album included Can bassist Holger Czukay and Asmus Tietchens on synthesizer. The association with Eno brought Cluster a much wider audience than previous albums and international attention.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Dieter Moebius
Brian Eno
Holger Czukay – bass
Okko Bekker – guitar
Asmus Tietchens – synthesizer

Annotation :

1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrZYP8SzlN8

Here we are
Stuck by this river,
You and I
Underneath a sky that's ever falling down, down, down
Ever falling down.

Through the day
As if on an ocean
Waiting here,
Always failing to remember why we came, came, came:
I wonder why we came.

You talk to me
as if from a distance
And I reply
With impressions chosen from another time, time, time,
From another time.

Annotation :

1978
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9kPIp4MtX0

Music for Airports was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album's material and "the products of the various purveyors of canned music".The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent to diffuse the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal.

All tracks were composed by Eno except "1/1", which was co-composed by Eno with former Soft Machine drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt and with Rhett Davies.

Music for Airports employs the phasing of tape loops of different length in some tracks, where, for example, in "1/1", a single piano melody is repeated and at different times other instruments will fade in and out in a complex, evolving pattern because of the phenomenon of phasing: at some point these instrumental sounds will clump together, at some points, be spread apart.

Talking about the first piece, Eno has said:
“ ... I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow.

Brian Eno – synthesizer, electric piano
Robert Wyatt – acoustic piano

Annotation :

1978
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_OV0SAnI2U

Music for Films (1978) is an ambient album by Brian Eno. It is a conceptual work intended as a soundtrack for imaginary films.

Performed by: Eno, Bill MacCormick, Dave Mattacks, Fred Frith

Annotation :

1978
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEaOUoKI-T8

After the Heat is a 1978 album by Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (last two are both members of Cluster). The album represents the second collaboration by the trio, the first being 1977's Cluster & Eno. As with the previous album, After the Heat was created in collaboration with the influential "krautrock" producer, Conny Plank.

The song "The Belldog" is notable for its sequenced analogue synth bassline. "The Wanderer" from U2's album Zooropa (which Eno co-produced) shares heavy similarities to "Belldog", and makes use of a similar sounding bassline.

Annotation :

1980
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXUA6WaT5j0

"Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror" is a 1980 album by ambient musicians Harold Budd and Brian Eno. This is the second instalment of Eno's Ambient series which began in 1978 with "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", identifiable by its similar cover art which looks like it depicts rural terrain on a map.

Eno said of Budd that he indulged in "live improvisation on "The Plateaux of Mirror" ... I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something : but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created".

Piano and electric piano: Harold Budd
Other instruments, treatments: Brian Eno

Annotation :

1980
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hes0hRY9v8

"Ambient 3: Day of Radiance" is an album by the American ambient musician Laraaji (alias Edward Larry Gordon) which was produced by Brian Eno.

This album is the third edition of Eno’s Ambient series, which began in 1978 with "Music for Airports", and was preceded by "The Plateaux of Mirror". The series ended with "On Land".

Compared to the rest of the series, "Day of Radiance" features very little in the way of electronics. Laraaji uses a variety of acoustic stringed instruments such as a hammered dulcimer and 36-stringed open-tuned zither.

Annotation :

1980
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGrDS7EFqbw

Fourth world music is a synonym of world music. Trumpeter Jon Hassell uses it to describe a style of music employing modern technological treatments and influenced by various cultures and eras. He wanted the music in this album to be "future primitive", or "a coffee-coloured classical music".

Hassell had studied Indian classical music with singer Pandit Pran Nath, and later applied the vocal techniques to his trumpet playing. Together with Eno, he melded the sounds from his instrument with digital delay, echo, and electronic effects to produce a unique blend of ambient and world music.

Hassell's trumpet is the dominant instrument on the whole album, yet, it almost never sounds like one.

The trumpet sounds like a broken recording of a wounded animal and also plays a light, high drone in the background, providing a sense of literal ambience. The same trumpet-sound dominates "Ba-Benzélé", which features congas, and a synth background.

Annotation :

1981
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH0EqSbb46o

The extensive use of sampling on "My Life in the bush of ghosts" is widely considered ground-breaking—it was one of the first albums to do so—but its actual influence on the sample-based music genres that later emerged continues to be debated.

Rather than featuring conventional pop or rock singing, most of the vocals are sampled from other sources, such as commercial recordings of Arabic singers, radio disc jockeys, and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similar sampling techniques, but critic Dave Simpson declares it had never before been used "to such cataclysmic effect" as on My Life.

In 2001, Q magazine asked Eno whether he and Byrne had invented sampling. His response was:
“ No, there was already a history of it. People such as Holger Czukay had made experiments using IBM Dictaphones and short-wave radios and so on. The difference was, I suppose, that I decided to make it the lead vocal on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts ”

On this song, the sampled voice : Reverend Paul Morton, broadcast sermon, New Orleans, June 1980.

Annotation :

1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3t3ua68Qg

"On Land" is arguably the "darkest" of Eno's four as-titled Ambient albums and could be said to be an archetypal example of dark ambient, though it does possess a wistful, meandering, longing, organic quality as well.

It is a mixture of synthesizer-based notes, nature/animal recordings, and a complex array of other sounds, most of which were unused, collected recordings from previous albums and the sessions that created them. As Eno explained, "... the making of records such as "On Land" involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and "composting".

Eno actually found, in the three-year process of making the album, that the synthesizer came to be of "limited usefulness" and that his "instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones ... I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work". Eno also had something to say about how music—this album in particular—should be listened to. In the liner notes, he suggested (even going so far as to draw a diagram) "a three-way speaker system that is both simple to install and inexpensive, and which seems to work very well on any music with a broad stereo image".

The album makes reference to definite geographical places, "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960" is named after the once prosperous seaport of Dunwich, England, which eroded into the sea over a period of three hundred years.

Brian Eno – various
Michael Brook – guitar
Daniel Lanois – live equalisation

Annotation :

1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4WxQ6dnn0

“An Ending (Ascent)” is one piece that some find desolate and depressing where others see rhapsody. It appears on the 1983 album "Apollo – Atmospheres and Soundtracks", an ambient collaboration between Brian Eno, his younger brother Roger and producer Daniel Lanois. The record is loosely inspired by the Apollo moon missions.

Annotation :

1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxlrLEal5IU

"Music For Films Volume 2" is an album by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Roger Eno. On the back cover Eno states, "I released the first volume of Music for Films in 1978, and it contained samples of my work, spanning the period of 1975-78. This second volume picks up where the first left off, but is somewhat different in that it contains fewer pieces with greater average length."

Annotation :

1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8q3Qool7PU

This album is similar to Budd and Eno’s previous collaboration "Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror", consisting mostly of subtly treated piano textures, but this time with more pronounced electronic treatments and nature recordings. This album was produced with Daniel Lanois, who is also credited on the front cover.

Annotation :

1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsPT8UdTMcU

"Hybrid" is an album by Michael Brook with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. A specialist in timbre and texture, Brook pioneered the infinite guitar - a guitar outfitted with a feedback transducer to produce non-decaying sustain of any note - which makes its first notable appearance on this album.

Annotation :

1988
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDPWbx5Ikcc

"Music for Films III" is the third entry in Brian Eno's "Music for Films" series. It features tracks by Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Michael Brook, Harold Budd Daniel Lanois, Jean-Pol Jones, Lydia Kavina and Laraaji.

Annotation :

2005

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKKfwAs8RUc

The album marked almost 30 years since the two musicians had collaborated on their previous album, Evening Star, in 1975.

Annotation :

2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcK8_kKCsq8

The album is actually built around the "And Then So Clear" song. He says "... In one day, actually, I pretty much finished it ... I liked it so much, and I thought, how I am going release this song, and I thought, I have to write some others."

Vocals, multiple instruments – Brian Eno
Keyboards – Jon Hopkins
Guitar – Leo Abrahams, Steve Jones
Violin – Duchess Nell Catchpole
Piano, Synthesizer – Peter Schwalm
Drums – Willie Green, Peter Schwalm
Loops – Brad Laner, Brian Eno, Peter Schwalm
Effects [Occasional Signals] – Dino
Effects [Splutters] – Barry Andrews

Annotation :

2008
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whRRR08A3Ac

"Strange Overtones" has been described as "a song about writing a song" ... the subject of the song struggles to write innovative music, but is overheard by a neighbor using beats that are "twenty years old." In terms of the genre of music, both Byrne and Eno have called it "electronic Gospel"—the backing tracks are the kind of electronic music for which Eno is known, paired with hopeful and inspiring lyrics from Byrne ... this song in particular features an uptempo backing track. Eno had been thinking about Gospel for several years, but couldn't write lyrics to hopeful songs.

Eno considers the album "[S]omething that combines something very human and fallible and personal, with something very electronic and mathematical sometimes." And they tried to "make that picture of the human still trying to survive in an increasingly complicated digital world... It's quite easy to make just digital music and it's quite easy to make just human music, but to try and make a combination is sort of, exciting, I think." ... Byrne considered his job as lyricist to "bring more humanity" to Eno's instrumentals, which can be "cold and academic."

Annotation :

2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0S5U9kklvA

The music recorded for this album was mostly improvised and inspired by the sound of soundtrack albums and film scores; some of the songs were composed by choosing random chords played for arbitrary intervals with improvised electronic parts on top of the melody and then edited together to make a proper song. When the music was recorded for the album, Eno sequenced it to create a "macro-composition" that contains themes that run throughout the album.