“Bon Anniversaire” to Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. The polymath musician, intellectual, visual artist and noted pornography enthusiast was born on this day in 1948, making him now officially a senior citizen.

Brian Eno: A Sandbox In Alphaville by Lester Bangs

Brian Eno Frisbee vs. Bryan Ferry Kite

Music for Wanking: Brian Eno discusses his porno collection with Chrissie Hynde, 1974

Below, Brian Eno interviewed recently in New York as part of the Red Bull Music Academy. Of special note, his notion of “scenious” or the special kind of creativity that happens when there are large numbers of collaborators in a particular “scene.”
 

Photo by Lance Loud, courtesy of Kristian Hoffman
 
Brian Eno’s reputation as an aficionado of rather extreme pornography is by now well-known, but at the time of future Pretender Chrissie Hynde’s 1974 profile in the NME, he was just letting the cat out of the bag. What an extraordinary thing for a pop star, even one with Eno’s avant garde pedigree, to admit to in 1974!

But what’s even stranger is the casual reference to Eno being an “elite” film star. What the hell does that mean? Is he referring to actually being in the films himself?

“It’s a burning shame that most people want to keep pornography under cover when it’s such a highly developed art form - which is one of the reasons that I started collecting pornographic playing cards I’ve got about 50 packs which feature on all my record covers for the astute observer.

“There’s something about pornography which has a similarity to rock music. A pornographic photographer aims his camera absolutely directly, at the centre of sexual attention. He’s not interested in the environment of the room.

“I hate the sort of photography in Penthouse and Playboy which is such a compromise between something to give you a hard-on and something which pretends to be artistic. The straight pornographers aim right there where it’s at.

“Which is analogous to so many other situations where somebody thinks one thing is important, so they focus completely on that and don’t realize they’re unconsciously organizing everything else around it as well. I have such beautiful pornography - I’ll show you my collection sometime.

The last guy invited me up to see his etchings.

“One theory is that black-and-white photography is always more sexy than colour photography. The reason for this is provided by Marshall McLuhan, who points out that if a thing is ‘high definition,’ which colour photography is, it provides more information and doesn’t require participation as much as if it is ‘low definition’.” I.e. a horror play on the radio is always very, very frightening because the imagery is always your own. If youUre choosing your own imagery, you’ll always choose the most frightening, or in the case of pornography, the most sexual.

“The idea of things being low definition has always interested me a lot - of being unspecific - another thing which is a key-point of my lyrics. They must be ‘low definition’ so that they don’t say anything at all direct. I think the masters of that were Lou Reed and Bob Dylan (on “Blonde on BIonde”). The lyrics are so inviting.

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘burning shame’ is by the way? It’s a pornographic term for a deviation involving candles.

“Ouch!”

“Very popular in Japanese pornography. They’re always using lit candles because Japanese pornography is very sadistic, partly because of the Japanese view of women, which is a mixture of resentment and pure animal lust.

“In the traditional view, a woman is still expected to be at the beck and call of her husband, so that manifests itself in that kind of pornography. Of which I have a few examples, of course.

“Mexican pornography is an interesting island of thought because they seem to be heavily into excretory functions. The traditional American view is that anything issued from the body is dirty. It’s incredibly puritanical and it resents bodily fluids, so if one is trying to debase a woman, you cover them with that and hence you get the fabulous term ‘Golden Showers’ - the term for pissing on someone, which some well- known rock musicians are said to be very involved in . .

“Here come the warm jets?”

“That’s certainly a reference.”

That he’s considered to be a film star of sorts in a few very ‘elite’ circles. - Any chance of him making a comeback to the Screen?

“Some of the movies I did were very funny - they had to pretend to have a plot. Ha ha. [Emphasis added]

“Can I show you my pubic area?” (! ! !) He exposes his stomach down to his, ah - about six inches below his Navel. “Absolutely bare! Now I’ve got this beautiful bare belly! I’ve got this new Japanese thing, you see and the Japanese don’t have much hair on their bodies ‘Japanese culture I tip as the next big thing.”

I glance nervously over at the flickering candle on the windowsill. Out of nowhere, Eno produces a very extraordinary looking object which he explains to be the ‘Double Punkt Roller’, a massage device used in Victorian times. I marvel at its aesthetic qualities and he assures me that it can only be fully appreciated when used on the bare buttocks. We conclude that art which demands participation holds the greatest appeal.

I have a friend who swears up and down he once saw Eno in a sleazy mid-70s porno loop, in a big “daisy-chain” orgy scene (“Who else had such a hairstyle back then?” he’d ask). I always dismissed this, but maybe he was right?

Read more:
Everything you’d rather not have known about Brian Eno by Chrissie Hynde

 
Another Green World, a 2010 Arena episode profiles musician/polymath intellectual Brian Eno. He’s seen in the studio, talking about Roxy Music, working with David Bowie and U2, and conversing with friends like Richard Dawkins, Malcolm Gladwell, journalist Paul Morley and record producer Steve Lillywhite about science, art, and making things.

The title track of Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World has been used for the famous Arena title sequence since the program debuted that same year.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Brian Eno Frisbee vs. Bryan Ferry Kite
 

 
Here’s a vintage Brian Eno rarity, a 1974 promo video for “China My China,” which also features Judy Nylon of Snatch.

According to the poster:

A Pre-MTV pre-release promo for Eno’s 1974 LP Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Brian performs in front of a stack of tube TVs backed by Judy Nylon and Polly Eltes on guitars. Polly and Judy also sing on the LP. This was recorded in 1974 at Island Records in Shepherds Bush where it languished for all these years in the tape storage room.

 
Insanely great live Roxy Music performance from Montreux at the Golden Rose Festival, April 29, 1973. Even if the sound is a little ropey (and Eno’s microphone does not appear to be working at all) this is a pretty worthwhile clip for Roxy fans, as they’re really putting their back into it, here.

Like much European TV of the era, the camera operators hardly know where to point their gear, but eventually you do get a glimpse of Eno at work during the number’s crazed synth solo.
 

 
HT to WFMU

 
Hard to believe but it’s forty years since Roxy Music released their debut single “Virginia Plain” and made an unforgettable appearance on Top of the Pops. It was a moment that influenced a generation, the same way David Bowie had earlier the same year, when he seductively draped his arm over Mick Ronson’s shoulder as they sang “Starman” together. It was a moment of initiation, when millions of British youth had shared a seminal cultural experience by watching television.

Of all the programs on air in 1972, by far the most influential was Top of the Pops., and Roxy Music’s arrival on the show was like time travelers bringing us the future sound of music. 

Listening to “Virginia Plain” today, it hard to believe that it wasn’t record last week and has just been released.

This documentary on Roxy Music has all the band members (Ferry, Manzanera, MacKay, Eno, etc) and a who’s who of musicians (Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Jones, and Roxy biographer, Michael Bracewell), who explain the band’s importance and cultural relevance. Roxy Music have just released The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982 available here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Bonus clip of ‘Virginia Plain’, after the jump…
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal, Los Angeles-based architect John Bertram, is sponsoring a new design contest at his Nabokov-obsessed blog, Venus febriculosa. This time, however, the contest is to create alternate art for Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist (in every respect) Music For Films:

Brian Eno’s album covers have always tended toward the interesting, (one or two I find exceptional, notably Music for Airports), and he was fortunate to count work by the brilliant artists Tom Phillips and Russell Mills among them. On some level, however, the covers have always seemed more intent on establishing Eno’s artistic, intellectual, and theoretical bona fides (and, especially with the earlier albums, his overall weirdness) than anything else. The cover for Music for Films, however, is radically different.  Not so much designed as intentionally left blank, the chocolate brown Helvetica text is pushed to the extreme upper edges of the texture-less and indescribably beige cover (the same text layout was used to good effect for the Cluster collaborations After the Heat and Begegnungen). This apotheosis of neutrality avoided the plain brown wrapper look in favor of what in retrospect seems closer to the generic packaging popular in grocery stores in the late ‘70s (or perhaps a reference color from Interiors, Woody Allen’s beige-est Bergman-esque film, also from 1978). Importantly, the cover is not ‘conceptual’ in the way that Richard Hamilton’s design for The Beatles’ White Album is, nor has it the cool rigor and studied minimalism of any number of ECM or Factory Records covers that – brilliant as they are (and they are brilliant) – somehow appear positively baroque in comparison. Rather, music and cover co-exist nicely as a unit, the latter providing no commentary on the former (or anything else for that matter), simply existing as a visual analogue to the wordless music. It’s a nice conceit.

The contest will be judged by Geeta Dayal, staff writer at Wired.com and author of Another Green World; famed graphic designer and typeface maven, Frith Kerr; Medicine man and former DM blogger Brad Laner, who contributed to Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth album; Russell Mills, artist; illustrator and Eno collaborator on More Dark Than Shark and cultural critic Rick Poynor, who also collaborated with Mills and Eno on More Dark than Shark.

There are a lot of DM readers who are both graphic designers and Eno fans, so get your engines started. Deadline for entry is September 1, 2012 and the winner will receive $500 (and some additional Eno-related prizes that have yet to be announced.)

Go to Venus febriculosa.for more information.
 

 
A bootleg of an early version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s groundbreaking 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts can be downloaded at the My Wall of Tapes blog. Note that his boot has a different track listing from the “Ghosts” bootleg that has been in wide circulation since the early 1990s.

Interestingly, the blogger there mentions that his source for this tape was none other than David Byrne himself:

it is a pre release version of david byrnes first solo album, which was given me by david, when i stayed at his place in alfabet city, in 1981, i distinctly remember that there were two ukrainian funeral homes in the street.

There are several other tapes of Talking Heads studio and live rarities (and much more) at My Wall of Tapes, so maybe the provenance described is accurate.

I wonder if the neat-freak printing on the card below is David Byrne’s?

In any case, I’m still downloading it. My Wall of Tapes has some amazing stuff, check it out.
 

 

 
Happy Birthday Brian Eno, who is a Beatles song today.

Born Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno on the 15th May, 1948, Eno almost has a job description for every one of his names as a musician, a composer, a producer, a visual artist, a writer, a collector of pornography and an innovator of different musical forms. But Eno is more than the sum of his parts, he is a great inspiration to go take a-hold of life and do as much is as is possible. As he suggested in the documentary Another Green World:

“All of the encouragement from modern life is to tell you to pay attention to yourself and take control of things.”

Though he does go on to say we can also surrender, get by, and transcend, I prefer to opt for the starring role, rather than being an extra in the crowd scene or exiting stage left, chased by a bear. And so should we all, for this is your movie, and you are its star.

For me, that’s what I like best about Eno - he’s a concept to do better, to try different, to learn more. And perhaps to be a little nicer on the side.

Brian Eno: Another Green World is a profile of Eno, made for the BBC’s Arena series.

From the schoolboy who would cycle to the seashore to look for fossils, Eno has been driven by the search for the connections between things. Here, he gives an insight into his fascinating and unique take on the nature of music today. Eno discusses what music means to him, and how he uses it to create an alternate reality, as well as the influences of modern technology in changing the way we are able to understand and develop both music and sound.

You’ll learn bits and bobs from this documentary, though it never really seems to get much further than dusting the surface of this complex and talented man.
 

 
Bonus clip of Brian Eno interviewed on ‘The Tube’ from 1986, after the jump…
 

 
Brian Eno speaks about the evolution of music and the visual arts and how they converged historically in the 20th century.

Taped in Russia on November 2011.
 

 
I pretty much just posted this for the zany title. It’s from a NME article dated December 7,1974 by Chris Salewicz, which you can read here in its entirety.

 
Bowie Myths has posted what appears to be legit (yet illicitly obtained) excerpts from the upcoming coffee table book, BOWIE: OBJECT, wherein the Thin White Duke rhapsodizes on a few dozen of his favorite thangs.

Exhibit #22, a Minimoog:

Eno gifted this keyboard to me at the end of our sessions for the album that would become Low at the Chateau d’Herouville in the fall of 1976.

The tilting control panel is truly iconic, the wood finish superb, the feel of the dials top-notch, and the 44-key (F to C) keyboard is a delight — it certainly beats any vintage Model D I’ve played for both speed and responsiveness. Though it weighs in at a hefty 18kg, its ergonomics are quite superlative. At its inception, the Minimoog was surprisingly close to being the perfect solo synthesizer; indeed there’s arguably no serious rival for the role even today. Yet soloists demand to express themselves and there the Mini had obvious shortcomings: its keyboard lacks velocity and aftertouch, while the pitch-bender and modulation wheels never felt like the final word in performance control. Nevertheless, without becoming lost in the enigma that is the Minimoog, let’s agree that it must have possessed special qualities to set it apart from the crowd for so long — even from others in the Moog stable.

Moog had constructed his own theremin as early as 1948. Later he illustrated the mechanics of a theremin in the hobbyist magazine ‘Electronics World’ and offered the parts in kit form by mail order which became very successful, albeit of limited value to even the most esoteric composers. The Moog synthesizer, on the other hand, was one of the very first electronic musical instruments to be widely used across many popular genres. I only met Bob Moog on one occasion and we bonded not over music, but over the common mispronunciation of our respective surnames. Bob always pronounced his surname – and that of his eponymous electronic progeny – to rhyme with ‘vogue’.

The motifs for all of the instrumental sequences on Low were mapped out on this Minimoog. My fading memories of those sessions are dominated by images of Eno hunched over the keyboard turning dials by imperceptible fractions, as amazed and delighted by the sonic textures he was producing as were Tony V and myself:

“Do you know it has a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse-triggering signal?” said Eno, breathlessly.

I said, “Brian, if you hum it, I’ll sing it…”

More at Bowie Myths

Below, David Bowie performs Low’s “Warszawa” on December 12, 1978 in Tokyo, the concert’s opening number:
 

 
In 1977, King Crimson founder Robert Fripp—who left the world of music in 1974 when he dissolved the group—moved to NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen (later the Bowery) and immersed himself in the city’s punk and “new wave” music scene. Inspired by New York’s frantic energy and wanting to combine the new sounds he was hearing with “Frippertronics,” the droning tape loop system he had developed with Eno, the final product was his solo record, Exposure.

The ambitious Exposure is one of the ultimate art-rock documents of late 70s New York, a classic album that sadly seems to have fallen through the cracks for many music fans. It’s a brilliant and underrated missing link between what was to become King Crimson’s next incarnation, the “Berlin trilogy” of David Bowie and Brian Eno (and indeed Fripp and Eno’s own collaborations), Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and believe it or not, Hall and Oates!

That’s right Exposure was meant to be seen as the third part of a loose trilogy that included Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel’s second album (both produced by Fripp). Daryl Hall’s management threw a wrench in the works, concerned that Hall’s decidedly more esoteric solo material might confuse his fan-base expecting catchy, “blue-eyed soul” AM radio-friendly pop tunes and that this would harm his commercial appeal. Additionally, they insisted that Fripp’s own Exposure album be credited as a Fripp/Hall collaboration. As a result, Fripp used just two of Hall’s performances on the album, recording new vocals by Terre Roche and Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill.

Sacred Songs didn’t come out until 1980 and sold respectably well. Both albums include the snarling buzz-saw rave-up, “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette.”:
 

 
The first voice you hear in the “Preface” is Eno’s and the voice before the phone starts ringing is Peter Gabriel’s. The vocal however, is obviously Daryl Hall, but not as we’re used to hearing him. Fripp later described Hall as the best singer he’d ever worked with and compared his musical creativity to David Bowie’s. High praise indeed.

Another highlight on Exposure is Peter Gabriel’s amazing performance of his “Here Comes the Flood,” perhaps the best version of the many he has recorded: Gabriel disliked the orchestral arrangements for the song on his first album, considering it over-produced. He did a different version on Kate Bush’s Christmas TV special in 1979 and still another on on his Shaking the Tree greatest hits collection. The rendition heard on Exposure is sparse, haunting and moving. I think it’s one of his single greatest vocal performances. Eno, Fripp and Gabriel are the only musicians on this track:
 

 
In 1985, a remixed “definitive edition” of Exposure was released and finally, in 2006, a remastered 2 CD set came out on Fripp’s own label with the original 1979 album and a second disc containing yet a third version of Exposure with bonus tracks including the Daryl Hall vocals as originally intended.
 
Below, a promotional video for Exposure. Not a lot happens here, but in the context of 1979, this would have seemed absolutely futuristic. I’m assuming that this was shot by Amos Poe (director of Glenn O’Brien’s cable access show TV Party) or else Blondie’s Chris Stein:
 

 
After the jump, Robert Fripp being interviewed Wayne’s World-style on NY cable access in 1979.

Summer 1978: Read this issue in its entirety here.
 
Holy cow! What a goldmine! Someone wonderful uploaded all the 70s issues of Synapse Magazine for your reading pleasure. Seriously, if you’re an electronic music buff, be prepared to spend days soaking it all up!
 

January/February 1979: Read this issue in its entirety here.
 

Summer 1979: Read this issue in its entirety here.
 
More issues of Synapse Magazine after the jump…
 

 
Last night we (finally) watched the seventh episode of Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy. Some of the trippiest television I’ve seen in some time. I mean, a Brian Eno Frisbee!? A Bryan Ferry kite!? How creative! Just watch.