Skip to main content

Eno: A 1973 Mini-Doc Shows Brian Eno at the Beginning of His Solo Career

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0_XIdbx6eY

We’ve seen bits and pieces of the 1973 mini-doc Eno over the years, as it is such a rare and wonderful glimpse into the very beginnings of Brian Eno’s career, and being the go-to footage for any doc about the man. Over the course of the film, we see Eno assembling/recording “The Paw-Paw Negro Blowtorch”, the second track on his debut album Here Come the Warm Jets. Right from the beginning, we see that Eno was true to his word and using the recording studio as an instrument. With Derek Chandler by his side engineering, we see Eno layering one sound after another, removing others, much like a painter. If you know the track, you notice it take form and shape, but there are things that would later be “painted over,” like a sitar solo (!) where the wigged out oscillator solo now sits. The film opens with Eno playing an arpeggiated bass line on a piano that also doesn’t make it into the song. (The bass instead is supplied by Busta Jones, seen playing a two note riff with a lot of feeling.) Chris Spedding stops by to play “something purely Duane Eddy” on his guitar, asking Eno “you’ll treat it later?” “Probably,” says Eno. (More like definitely).

“I have attempted to replace the element of skill considered necessary in music with the element of judgement,” Eno says early in the film, and a listen to the finished track reveals that judgement. And what do you know–the sitar *is* there, as are the piano lines, like a space in the canvas where the original sketch can be seen.

We also get an amazing, extended glimpse at Eno’s notebooks, which have popped up in various books on Eno, including More Dark Than Shark and Visual Music. From the profane to the profound, from drawings of genitals to detailed analog system diagrams, it’s all here, and as far as we know the notebooks, which he started at 14, continue to this day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2HfNJMq3w

The film also makes the case for a later Eno theory, that of the “scenius,” which he once described thus: “’Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.’”

For Eno in 1973, the scenius is the Portobello Road area where he can browse thrift stores, run into friends, and check in on designer/girlfriend Carol McNicoll, who made all Eno’s glam outfits. And he also talks about how Robert Fripp just stopped by on his way home one night and recorded side one of their team-up album No Pussyfooting.

All in all a terrific look into the beginning of an artistic legacy, and a film that desperately needs a pristine new transfer. (And no, you will never convince me that the Portsmouth Sinfonia is any good.)

Related Content:

Brian Eno Presents a Crash Course on How the Recording Studio Radically Changed Music: Hear His Influential Lecture “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool” (1979)

Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks

Brian Eno Explains the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

Discover the Apprehension Engine: Brian Eno Called It “the Most Terrifying Musical Instrument of All Time”

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Eno: A 1973 Mini-Doc Shows Brian Eno at the Beginning of His Solo Career is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/36wKxQ7
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more