Brian Eno

A música ambiente dá uma das respostas éticas e estéticas mais fecundas diante do excesso de informação, de rapidez no nosso mundo, Ao resgatar um espaço acústico, “sem um centro orientador, só muitos centros flutuando num sistema cósmico que honra só a diversidade” (MCLUHAN e POWERS, 1989, X), parte de um último encontro entre Oriente e Ocidente, no quadro da globalização tecnológica, sem o imperativo único do capital.
A música ambiente é um fecho dessa trajetória que começou com o sublime no banal, passou pela leveza, por uma poética do cotidiano e se encerra nesta discussão sobre a paisagem. Em meio à proliferação de imagens e sons em simulacros, colagens, samplers, pastiches e paródias; a música ambiente, “discreet music” (Brian Eno) deseja recuperar um frescor como narrativa do cotidiano, como poética da contenção diante do excesso e dispêndio cada vez mais incorporados a uma sociedade de consumo; uma poética de delicadeza e sutileza diante do grotesco e do abjeto cada vez mais banalizados pelos meios de comunicação de massa.

Se a música pop colocou como central os afetos, a noção de paisagem pode dar uma outra inflexão neste debate. A música pop se constituiu em grande parte na mística do  vocalista enquanto star e no  uso da voz  como forma de articulação das experiências dos ouvintes, marcando seus cotidianos e suas memórias. Mas, nos anos 70, emerge na música pop a noção de paisagem ou ambiência que possibilita uma alternativa ao excesso do envolvimento romântico com a música, nos complexos jogos de identificação e estranhamento entre fã e ídolo.
A introdução da categoria de paisagem sonora na cultura pop desconstrói o formato da canção curta e marcada por refrões, associada comumente à tradicional constituição das bandas de rock com vocal, guitarra, baixo e bateria. Isto está presente não só na música ambiente, entendida inicialmente como um subgênero da música pop  eletrônica, mas em várias formas do rock, chamado por alguns de rock de arte (ver BAUGH, B.: 1994),  no fim dos anos 60 e início dos anos 70, que bem pode incluir uma variedade de tendências, como o psicodélico e o progressivo, que, no diálogo com formas sinfônicas, na elaboração da música como uma viagem, constrói uma música mais para a cabeça do que para os pés. Na indissociação entre som e imagem, na incorporação de teclados, sintetizadores, em usos diferenciados da guitarra, para além do solo, estas tendências afirmam a noção da música como ambiência, paisagem. Dando um salto no tempo, podemos identificar esse movimento no pós-punk do início dos anos 80, em trabalhos de bandas populares como Cure a outras menos conhecidas como Durutti Column ou Cocteau Twins e no “pós-rock” (REYNOLDS, S.: 1995) dos anos 90) debandas como Tortoise, em detrimento de momentos mais puristas, de ênfase no formato básico e despretensioso, do rock dos anos 50 ao hardcore e ao grunge.

Part One, Chapter 5 in Sean Albiez and David Pattie, eds. Brian Eno: Oblique Music. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4411-2912-3. Starting largely from a study of the aesthetic writings of RG Collingwood and JRR Tolkien, I examine Brian Eno's Ambient Music albums as examples of sound expressions which work outside of traditional Western expectations of music. Ambient music expands the range of material which may be described as music, and challenges the broader definition of art itself.

Today, technology develops autonomously; we embrace its progression, its efficiency, as it propels our culture at breakneck speed toward a future that's hard to see clearly. Technology has infiltrated commerce, education, government and art of record production through many key contributions. One seminal technological contribution to music making was the synthesizer. It remains a conduit for creation for many musicians and producers, acting as a vehicle of sound exploration. In many cases, the synthesizer facilitated the musician or producer to take a more functionary role within the art of record production by simply becoming a controller, allowing the synthesizer to become the primary compositional voice. This paper explores the 'what if' principle through Brian Eno's 1975 album ​ Discreet Music. Here, creation, collaboration and connectivity are skillfully distributed between man and machine. ​ Discreet Music masterfully employs an EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer that once set into operation by Eno, creates soundscapes with little or no intervention on the performers part apart from occasionally alternating the timbre of the synthesizer. It examines the roles of collaboration, invention, innovation within technology that helped Eno bypass traditional record production mechanisms. Furthermore, the paper highlights Eno's contribution to notions of control within electronic music production, his influence within generative music making and questions current creative utopias that allow toward the control over every imaginable parameter within electronic music making through MIDI and automation.

A 2,500 word encyclopedia entry outlining the boundary crossing between art music with popular music in the work of a number of musical artists since the 1960s such as The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Bjork, David Sylvian, Sonic Youth and Scott Walker whose work leaves them in a liminal space between avant-garde and popular music.

A 16 page essay on Brian Eno's installations and how, in reflection, they relate to the Long Now. Eno coined the term “Long Now” from which the Long Now Foundation acquires it’s name. He is a founding member and has, even in his first installations, always shown an approach to slower/better thinking. This was a student essay submitted for an Art History class.

In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak’s ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music’s historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading, however, given that Ambient music’s dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno’s Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.

Problematika významu progresívnej hudobnej kultúry so zameraním na psychedelický rock a kraut-rock v rámci tzv. kontrakultúry je vo vedeckej monografii reflektovaná z viacerých interdisciplinárnych, kulturologických a filozoficko-estetických hľadísk – skúma vzájomné vzťahy a prieniky hudby, životného štýlu s filozofiou, resp. svetonázorom a politickými východiskami kontrakultúry daného obdobia. Odborná reflexia témy sa pohybuje od uchopenia kontrakultúrnych fenoménov vo všeobecnosti až po jej konkrétne prejavy v tzv. kraut-rockovej subkultúre vo vtedajšej Nemeckej spolkovej republike (v komparácii so situáciou vo svete).

Corrupted version of 'The Contingency of the Void: Archive as Hallucination', which was a text developed during research with the archives at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Exploring the speculative dimensionality, and component of (science) fictioning, that is present in the interpretation of archival materials, this essay employs Brian Eno's 1986 exhibition - 'Place #13' - at the Douglas Hyde Gallery as case-study in order to think through the problematics associated with archiving and documenting artworks that are fundamentally resistant to this process. The finalised text has been glitched by inserting remnants from the archive into the digital text document, resulting in the emergence of a partially mutilated form that oscillates between zones of meaning and unmeaning.

Presented as part of 'Old Invitations: A DHG Student Forum response to the DHG archive'. (http://www.douglashydegallery.com/events#/old-invitations)

‘In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly’ (Eno & Schmidt, 1979)

It is time for a reconsideration of Eno’s visual projects. This article considers how Brian Eno has used simple but innovative ideas, programmes and processes to inform his films, apps and installation work, and how they have been disseminated. Avoiding spectacle, noise and complexity, Eno and his collaborators, has produced an array of intriguing and engaging art works. In The New York Times Style Magazine, Eno stated that he ‘was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way music changes’ (2013).

Collaborators Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell use remix, juxtaposition and creative writing, along with more traditional research methods, to cast light onto the ways in which appropriation, process and collaboration have informed Eno’s creative output. They use Eno’s words, drawn from interviews and his own writing, along with critiques of his work and writing by those who have inspired him, to consider how Eno creates his quiet rooms and visual music. Each consecutive response was dictated by the turn of a card selected from the third edition of the Oblique Strategies deck issued in 1979.

With the exponential expansion of information technology, it is superfluous to expound the virtues of computers in reproducing and making written works available to large numbers of readers. It is however crucial to understand that such technology is not simply a neutral vehicle for conveying words and messages, for the fundamental reason that language is not primarily about meaning and communication of ideas.
It therefore becomes apparent that the complementary acts of reading and writing necessarily involve the material and the subjective (understood in logical terms as Lacan’s subject of the unconscious) dimensions of human existence.
We can then see that Computer technology entails the eradication of the material aspect of writing: kept at an incalculable distance behind a screen, the book becomes ‘virtual’. At least two consequences can be observed. Firstly, one can read only the page which appears on the screen, the rest vanishes. Secondly (the ‘Google effect’), we are lead to believe that nothing is forgotten or lost, that everything is immediately available thanks to a search engine.
What is lost is the material and tactile aspect of reading and writing: both concern the material and physical trace on the page, that correspond to the original inscribing of the subject’s body into the humanizing world of language. Thus, reading, for example, requires the dialectic movement back and forth through the pages of a physical book, a movement that involves alternation between forgetting and recall, rediscovery and anticipation. The same physical dimension involved in inscribing is called upon in all forms of creation (dance, painting…).
Our research thus aims to explore what is at stake for individual liberty and creativity, taking into account the physical – or even carnal dimension – of existence that is systematically evacuated from post-modern approaches.


Keywords: Book, Computer, Writing, Psychoanalysis, Memory, Language
Stream: Books, Writing and Reading
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English or French
Paper: Books and Computer Technology, Books and Computer Technology

‘Contemporaneity ... is situated in postmodernity, when postmodernity is understood as a field of forces that are not only new and orbiting the global circuit, but are also innovative and antagonistic. To be contemporary one has to confront the end of the 1900s, the historical upheavals that characterised it, and the counterreformation happening today...’
Antonio Negri

Introduction by Frank Barron

Part I: The Uncovered Heart
1. Henry Miller / Why Don't You Try to Write?
2. Federico Fellini / Miscellany
3. Pamela Travers / The Interviewer
4. Anna Halprin / The Process Is the Purpose
5. A. E. Housman / The Name and Nature of Poetry
6. Rainer Maria Rilke / Letters to Merline

Part II: The Opened Mind
7. Cathy Johnson / Lost in the Woods
8. Richard Feynman / The Dignified Professor
9. Kary Mullis / The Screwdriver
10. J. G. Bennett / Living in the Medium
11. William Butler Yeats / The Symbolism of Poetry
12. Annie Dillard / Heaven and Earth in Jest

Part III: The Web Of Imagination
13. Mary Shelley / The Genesis of Frankenstein
14. Carl G. Jung / First Years
15. Italo Calvino / Visibility
16. Michel Foucault / The Order of Things
17. Marion Milner / The Plunge into Colour
18. Virginia Woolf / Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
19. Mabel Dodge Luhan / Edge of Taos Desert

Part IV: The Creative Ecology
20. Maurice Sendak / The Shape of Music
21. Maya Angelou / A Life in the Day of Maya Angelou
22. Ingmar Bergman / The Magic Lantern
23. Sidney Bechet / The Second Line
24. Tony Kushner / Is It a Fiction That Playwrights Create Alone?
25. Irving Oyle / Odyssey
26. N. Scott Momaday / The Magic of Words
27. Brian Eno / Why World Music?

Part V: The Dedication to Mastery
28. David Ogilvy / How to Manage an Advertising Agency
29. Leonardo da Vinci / Anatomy
30. Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky / Composing a Symphony
31. Muriel Rukeyser / The Genesis of Orpheus
32. Igor Stravinsky / Poetics of Music
33. Frank Zappa / All About Music
34. Eugen Herrigel / Zen in the Art of Archery

Part IV: The Courage to Go Naked
35. Isadora Duncan / The Mother Cry of Creation
36. Karen Finley / License for Madness
37. Laurence Olivier / Lessons from the Past
38. Mat Callahan / Creation Myth
39. Ursula K. Le Guin / The Fisherwoman's Daughter

Editor's Note
Suggested Readings
Permissions
Contributors

This paper proposes an experimental approach to interactive evolutionary computation-assisted musical improvisation through practice-based research and aesthetics discourse on evolutionary art. The harmonic series of a snare drum acts as source and fitness function for a real-time performance environment created in Max/MSP. The processing is based on the partials of the acoustic drum that, by way of genetic algorithms, populate, evolve and control sound synthesis timbre, tonality and rhythmical patterns. This presents a dynamic human-computer performance augmenting the acoustic instrument or as a mutating artificial agent. The paper seeks to map novel approaches to generative electro-acoustic music by suggesting a rapid variety and flow of fitness in both genetic algorithms and neural networks resembling modes of listening in free improvisation. The results span from prototype recordings, discussions of aesthetics and perspectives on further development, all anchored in the author's artistic practice.

XAGGERA is the new Fenylalazine (magazine of art), from Fenylalanine Publishing. This initial issue celebrates the 40th Anniversary of Ed Video Media Arts Centre. Over the course of the past many months, Fenylalanine has identified the desire for an art magazine of Guelph. This then transformed (as is always welcome at Fenylalanine) into a magazine of art with contributions from writers, poets, graphic artists, painters, doodlers and asemic conceptualists – twenty-two contributions from the local, national and international scenes.

The contemporary music festival of 1984 in Venice was suddenly cancelled, apart the performance of Prometeo by Luigi Nono, that marked deeply the history of the festival. The paper presents the rest of the program, that was not realized, highlighting in it several cultural paths that, if pursued, would have influenced deeply the musical culture in the '80s.

‘Record production as a practice is little more than a century old and responds to societal and technological shifts’ (Burgess, 2013). The term 'record producer' or, more commonly, 'producer', is an umbrella idiom that can describe a range of different creative practices involved in the making and recording of music. Burgess goes on to divide these practices into six categories: artist, auteur, facilitator, collaborator, enabler and consultant. Broadly speaking, these different articulations define the roles of the producer from overseer to maker.

Through the application of Ableton software in combination with live analogue instrument playing, the performance will contribute to a current of contemporary practice that includes work by fellow improvisational producers such as Tim Exhile, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, Bugge Wesseltoft and Henrik Schwarz.

This presentation explores a potential addition to Burgess's taxonomy; that of the producer as improviser.

"Kad si mlađi i ne razumeš, drma te, ali uzmeš nešto i pročitaš, saznaš dalje, odlaziš u nevine teritorije. To je ta razlika između prošlog i sadašnjeg vremena, jer su nevine teritorije tada postojale, danas bi ti trebao elektronski mikroskop da ih nađeš. Sve je danas ultra-hibrid i ultrabrzina, na neke ljude ta količina slojeva pada kao kamenolom i satre ih, događa se kompleksifikacija svega i ne snalaze se svi najbolje u tome." - Goran Vejvoda, 2021.

This is the first full-length study about the British artist Roy Ascott, one of the first cybernetic artists, with a career spanning seven decades to date. The book focuses on his early career, exploring the evolution of his early interests in communication in the context of the rich overlaps between art, science and engineering in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. The first part of the book looks at Ascott’s training and early work. The second part looks solely at Groundcourse, Ascott’s extraordinary pedagogical model for visual arts and cybernetics which used an integrative and systems-based model, drawing in behaviourism, analogue machines, performance and games. Using hitherto unpublished photographs and documents, this book will establish a more prominent place for cybernetics in post-war British art.

Documenting No Wave: Brian Eno as urban ethnographer

In May, 1978, a five-day music festival was held in New York City’s Artists' Space, a small gallery in the downtown neighborhood of Tribeca. The ten bands performing throughout the week fused a DIY punk aesthetic with funk, jazz, disco, Afro beat and the pop avant gard.

Among the audience was Brian Eno who was in New York to produce the second album by Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food. Marc Masters (2007) notes that Eno recognized a spirit in the bands performing that he perceived was missing from bands emerging from the UK at the time. Following the festival he decided to document what he considered to be the festival’s key performers James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and Mars on a compilation album No New York (1978). In so doing he also helped define the term No Wave, which the New York scene would become most commonly known as.

"The New York bands proceed from a 'what would happen if' orientation; the English Punk thing is a 'feel' situation", he told New York Times journalist Rockwell at the time. "I've always been of the former persuasion. But there's a difference between me and the New York bands. What they do is a rarefied kind of research; it generates a vocabulary that people like me can use. These New York bands are like fence posts, the real edges of a territory, and one can maneuver within it." (1978).

This chapter will discuss the importance of No Wave’s territories to Eno as cultural tourist and ethnographer. Through his own participant observational documentation he was introduced to the possibilities offered by the musics and approaches associated with Afrofuturism that informed No Wave. In framing the scene’s sound through the specific choice of artists he acted as both documenting tourist and defining guide. While
the boundaries of the scene’s music offered spaces in which to maneuver. The earliest results of which could be heard on Talking Heads’ ‘I Zimbra’ from Fear of Music’ (1979) and would reach fruition through his subsequent work with David Byrne.

O conforto a ser buscado não é a aceitação pura e simples de convenções. Já que a vanguarda e a experimentação privilegiaram tanto o choque, a ruptura, o confronto, a agressão, parece que o conforto estaria destinado a uma arte burguesa e convencional, mas também com o declínio da vanguarda, o conforto possa  ser revisto.

El presente estudio consiste en un análisis en torno al origen de la música ambiental, localizado en el concepto de música de mobiliario, desarrollado por Erik Satie en 1920. A través de este análisis, se intentan dilucidar las características que podrían enlazar a la música de Satie con el estilo ambiental, más allá de que el término haya sido acuñado muchos años después por el compositor Brian Eno. Particularmente, se analizará la pieza Le Tango Perpétuel (El eterno tango) de Erik Satie.

The Box en anglais, The Box en français, est-ce la même chose ?
Bruno Fecteau, pianiste de Gilles Vigneault, interviewé par Jean Nicolas De Surmont (Montréal, le 24 octobre 2008).
Il s'exprime sur la relation texte-musique, en comparant en particulier la pratique en la matière chez les musiciens francophones et les musiciens anglophones.

Aussi publié à l'adresse :
https://www.uibk.ac.at/romanistik/institut/textmusik-in-der-romania/pdfs/bat/bat23.pdf

It is well known, of course, that all Windows versions except for 3.1 have a brief (four to six second) piece of music indicating that Windows is booted and ready for use. While the music may indicate Windows has booted, it bears no immediately discernable relation to the ...

Full Title:
Visual Landscapes and the Garden of Pixels: Reaching the Ambience through the use of Slow Motion in Digital Video

Abstract:
The last four decades of 20th century, the remarkable progress of technology affected the world of art and many categories in it such as moving image, sound and music. Early filmmakers’ and video artists’ experimentation in these sub-fields made visible the need of exploration and description of visual and audio deeper meanings, of ‘what lives behind’. This paper constitutes a critical approach on the role this cinematic effect plays into turning the real time elements of moving image into an ambient moving image landscape in which the viewer is being immersed. It also focuses on motion pictures philosophy and specific video works of contemporary artists such as Bill Viola (video installation), Brian Eno (ambient music), Marc Rothko (abstract painting) and James Turrell (light installation). Is there any relation of elements between a high-speed filmed image and ambient music or between ambient music, abstract painting and light art installation? Does a slow motion moving image piece gives birth to an experimental visual genre, that of ambient moving image? This paper is trying to establish that the element of slow motion transforms moving image into a visual ambient landscape, into a primordial secret visual garden where the viewer’s eye wants to be immersed.

Course tutors:
Andy Stiff / Jonathan Kearney

Part One, Chapter 5 in Sean Albiez and David Pattie, eds. Brian Eno: Oblique Music. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4411-2912-3.

Starting largely from a study of the aesthetic writings of RG Collingwood and JRR Tolkien, I examine Brian Eno's  Ambient Music albums as examples of sound expressions which work outside of traditional Western expectations of music. Ambient music expands the range of material which may be described as music, and challenges the broader definition of art itself.

“State the problem in words as clearly as possible.” (Eno & Schmidt, 1979)

Oblique Strategies, a set of 100 cards printed with a series of cryptic messages, was first published by Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt in 1975 as a device intended to jog their respective minds in periods of creative impasse.

In a radio interview with Charles Amirkhanian, Eno explained that the cards had evolved from “separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn't seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position - which was quite different from the one we'd been in prior to that” (1980).

Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell, a composer and painter respectively, will explore the notion of the remix through the use of Eno’s own words, drawn from interviews and his own writing, together with critiques of his work and those that inspired it. The collaborators will exchange 200-word pieces of writing in order to construct their paper, with each consecutive response directed by the turn of a card selected from the third edition of the Oblique Strategies deck, issued in 1979.

Through this writing methodology – of the collision and collusion of collaborative writing practices borne by an exchange of electronic letters – coupled with more traditional modes of research, the pair will cast light onto the manner with which notions of appropriation, cybernetics and chance have directed Eno’s creative output.