Connections

Last week I drove to Austin to see The Residents at Stubb’s. This post is not about that show, but I will say that I expected it to be really lame and was pleasantly surprised at how interestingly creepy it was (and if you’re wondering, there were no eyeball costumes). Instead, this post is about connections my brain made this week. As such, I’m not going to break this into paragraphs, in order to make it read more like the way I thought about it. I know this decreases the chance that any of you will read it, but this is the price we pay for art. Onward. The day after the show I found myself with an hour to kill before meeting an Austin friend for lunch, so I figured I would go to Waterloo Records and look around. It wasn’t my intention to buy anything because, as many of you know, I’m cheap. Anyway, I was only there a couple minutes before I realized there were things that I should buy. Namely, the new Spoon album and the Another Green World 33 1/3 book. The former I thought I should buy, not because I was so impressed by the one listening I’d had, but because I buy all Spoon albums. I want them to be successful and this is my small way of helping them. The latter I bought because, well, it’s a 33 1/3 book about a Brian Eno album. Earlier this year, Cherry Blossom chatted up its author, Geeta Dayal, at some function in Boston. Cherry Blossom sent me a text message asking if I had read Dayal’s book and I replied that I hadn’t. In fact it hadn’t even been released yet. I messaged back asking why she chose Another Green World, because of Eno’s pop albums, that’s probably my least favorite. The reply from Dayal was that it was the one with the most interesting story. Fair enough. Also, I’ll add, it’s the one with Phil Collins playing drums, which is something I’ve always wanted to know the story behind. After lunch, I set off for Houston, through the nonstop rain and, having listened to all of the Conormixen I brought with me, I cracked open the Spoon album and started listening to it. At a stop light in one of those small towns between here and there, I looked down at the liner notes on the CD packaging and noticed that Dave Sardy had mixed several of the songs. I thought this pretty odd, because Sardy was the mastermind behind Barkmarket (covered in this space previously). Barkmarket were loud and, dare I say, grungy, which is about as far from Spoon as they could be, without being gamelan or something. I engineered a Barkmarket live performance on KTRU many years ago and I’ve been digitizing many of those old cassette tapes, so arriving rain weary, I decided to digitize that one. The other side of the Barkmarket cassette happened to be another live performance by a band called Willis, featuring a certain Found in the Alley. You’ll find a song from each of those performances at the end of this wall of text. A few days later, I read the Eno book that I had bought. I won’t ruin the ending for you, but it turns out that on Another Green World, Eno used a lot of his Oblique Strategy cards to further the creative process. The cards are an idea that Eno lifted from John Cage, who used the I Ching for the same purpose. It’s an idea that is apparently still popular. If you’re still wondering about Phil Collins, Eno Recruited Percy Jones to play bass and Jones suggested Collins, as they were both playing in a funky outfit called Brand X. Dayal notes that at the time, Eno was very opposed to funk, but apparently changed his mind. One wonders whether Remain in Light would have been the same.

Gatherer
Big Idea

Finally, there is this excellent BBC documentary about Eno. You should watch it.