Brian Eno, Midnight Chats, 2024-04-29

https://www.loudandquiet.com/podcasts/brian-eno-midnight-chats-episode-127/

SPEAKER_04: in terms of the other contributions the artists have made to this sounds right campaign I don't know if there's anybody else that you know if it's going to be involved that you're excited about their participation I can't remember fair enough and I wasn't told because it's top secret like we're I should remind listeners that we are recording this like well ahead of actually this this campaign's dying I'm looking forward to hearing about that sort of challenge the artists have almost been set to to feature nature yeah well you know a lot of it's sort of a thing

SPEAKER_02: in pop music to feature nature anyway you know there there are lots of outstanding tracks that have that kind of stuff coming in I mean I'm thinking of remember walking in the sand for instance of that that song but lots and lots of songs beach boys songs beetle songs that and my songs as well you know that just dragged in sounds of the outside world one of the reasons I like that is because I like the idea of having a music that sort of bleeds at the edges into the sounds we hear around us anyway so a music that isn't so cut off from the rest of our experience you know classical music is is totally boundary you know exactly what the music is and you you know exactly what's outside of it but a lot of the music I've been interested in particularly my my own ambient work I've deliberately used material that was ambiguous it could have it could be in the music or it could be the sound of traffic outside or the sound of something else happening that wasn't intended to be musical and I like that idea of a sort of soft-edged art form where there's a bleed with the environment listening

SPEAKER_04: to you speak about this I can't help but think of how like retrospectively when you think of all the music that is lent on the sounds of nature over the decades and every every time that nature is either informed an actual sound or a lyric or the inspiration of how big that the size of that credit would be if we'd actually been doing this for 70 years so hopefully in a few years time maybe this could be adopted as a you know a default thing that just you know with nature we wouldn't be having

SPEAKER_02: pretty much any of these songs what we really hoped for is that gradually people would come to think well it's completely normal to want to make a contribution to to the planet that's what we're here for we are here to look after it so we want to make it exceptional and odd if people don't we want them to feel oh what have we forgotten oh yes we've forgotten to include the planet the ground that we're standing on here and it is quite easy to forget and obviously quite a few people have completely forgotten you know the the very wealthy of the world have so forgotten the planet that they're now looking for others to go and live on and make a mess off one thing i was gonna say

SPEAKER_04: [...] you do also have a documentary film coming out called Eno and also have an album that you're sharing of the same name that is music from the documentary and does feature some unreleased music. If we start with the documentary, it's it's a generative documentary [...] it's using ai and it's going to be different every time somebody views this documentary and i'm guessing that over the years you've had plenty of opportunities to make a sort of very conventional linear story of your life in a documentary form so i wondered whether you've always been reluctant to do that and have you just been waiting for the right opportunity to come along to do something that felt more in keeping with the way that you might want to tell.

SPEAKER_02: Yes, so I don't like biographical documentaries very much in general and I think it's because in order to make one in the conventional way you have to decide on an order of things and it always looks like this person started their life you know at 16 or 17 and had the big plan into the future and it was all imagined and look it all happened how wonderful whereas my experience is that actually not only for me but for nearly everyone it's a sequence of blunders and bits of good luck and bad luck and sometimes grasping an opportunity sometimes failing to grasp one collisions that you didn't plan it's so much more messy than than it's ever made to look in documentaries so documentaries are nearly always misleading in that they give this impression of a life carefully planned and organized i think it's much braver to say no it wasn't planned and organized a lot of it was chance and i was quite lucky and there are a lot of people that i owe thanks to. i'm not a self-made man i've been made up by all the circumstances around me including you know for instance the fact that i was born into a a new welfare state that actually worked at the time the fact that i was lucky to get a scholarship and a decent education the fact that art schools were free when i was younger the fact that i happened to step onto a particular tube train and meet Andy Mackay one afternoon when i could have stepped through the next door and had a different life you know there's so many contingencies and so i've always resisted a straightforward narrative of a documentary because i just think it isn't true and then when Gary came along with this idea to say let's make he he calls it a generative documentary so he's taking all the bits and pieces of he can find from my life several of which i didn't even know existed he's the film of me talking here and there and walking down Portobello Road in 1972 and things like this and he's kind of shuffled them and every time you see the film you see them shuffled in a different order and i have to say that is really so much more appealing to me so that if you go and see the film you'll see a different version than i've seen and if you go again you'll see a different version than either of those two versions and that seems to me it seems to me that throughout our lives we always keep repairing the narrative of our lives anyway we we sort of tell the story differently different things now seem important than that didn't seem important before and different some things that seemed really critical have faded into the background so we're always doing that shuffling anyway in our minds and i wanted to really have something that acknowledged that and said we are shufflers that's what we do we keep retelling the story to support where we want to be now and how we want to view our past it's not a single fixed story

SPEAKER_04: i'm quite looking forward to i hope to see the film and also i'm looking forward to sort of going to the pub with other people that have seen the film at different times and being like almost like a sticker book where you're opening go what did your version when do Brian do that being the one that you saw yeah i quite like that idea everybody feels a little bit special by the version that

SPEAKER_02: they saw yeah well i i think i think Gary's done a great job actually and i think that i'm pretty sure that a lot of documentaries will now be made in ways similar to this not not be exactly the same way but i think that idea of which of course has been in literature for a long time you know this there are many many books written in that way where flashbacks and flash forwards get rearranged in different time sequences but it hasn't happened much in film and it i'm not sure that it's ever happened before in documentary yeah yeah i'm looking forward to it
SPEAKER_04: and the album that accompanies it there are three um release tracks that all previously unheard tracks that appear on the album how did you find that experience because i know that you're generally um you don't spend an awful lot of time kind of chronicling your own work or or kind of you know prefer to sort of generally look forward and are creating all the time so that this is a sort of retrospective experience sort of putting that together so how did you find that

SPEAKER_02: you're right i there are pieces on there that i haven't listened to for 30 or 40 years i don't listen to my own work that much i sometimes hear it by accident because somebody else is playing it or somebody wants a piece for a film and so suddenly i'm presented with it again and and i like that experience actually um usually immediately after i finish something i don't want to hear it again for quite a long time um then it starts to slip back into my life occasionally in that in those ways i've described i hear it through a window or something and i think oh that's good what is that i did that i've often had that happen where where i've thought oh i like that and then realized oh yeah i made that it's it's a really nice experience and it it occasionally happens the other way around as well fuck what's that oh yeah that's me um but funnily enough it more often happens the positive way around so it's it's kind of encouraging to think that you haven't been completely wasting your time um and i i have a new device i've been using um which i might be able to show you um but i don't know how you'll make any use of it in your podcast it's it's a way of i have an archive which has about 10 000 pieces in it well some of them are actual pieces some of them are very close duplicates of things in there you know there's quite a lot of repetition but i would say there's probably 4 000 different pieces of music in there um and as i said 10 000 pieces all together so my friend pita chilvers and i have now developed a new piece of software that just plays them one on top of the other it just makes a new piece out of those existing pieces and that's been incredibly interesting because the algorithm makes choices that i would never ever make i'd never dream of putting these things together but very often they work it's i'll show you in a minute yeah it's quite fascinating in fact shall i show you now it's yeah we can do i i because i don't think

SPEAKER_04: you'll be able to record it on here but um well what we can do we can uh yeah we can we can stop

SPEAKER_02: and have a look at it and come back and carry on just yeah just so you've got to yeah yeah - we just listened to a whole bunch of new music which sounded great pieces that have never existed before what a fantastic um tool resource opportunity to kind of pull on that sounds like a a real exciting new creative pathway well you know we were talking about the film the documentary so this is sort of another example of generative work in the same way that that documentary is so just to describe to listeners what's going on i have an archive in my studio which has about ten thousand pieces of music in it and some of them are very simple they're a single sound and some of them are quite complicated finished pieces um but peter and i designed some software which enabled the computer to just pick at random among those pieces and just stick them together and play them all together now that sounds like a recipe for chaos and probably it would be with most other people's music but because a lot of my music doesn't have rhythm and doesn't have changing chord patterns um it it actually works and so what happens is you hit the go button and a new piece of music a combination of three or four or five existing pieces um existing in my archive anyway are put together and surprisingly often produce really really interesting results things that i would never dream of doing if you listen to the individual tracks you'd think that isn't going to work with that but it does when it's with that other third thing you know um so it's been it's been a real education for me and left me with the difficult problem of having about trillion pieces of music yeah exactly and having kind of the algorithm or

SPEAKER_04: this tool is your sort of co-producer or co-writer is quite an exciting idea i think just to circle back to the the very beginning of the conversation you've called the climate movement the greatest movement one of the greatest movements in human history and i think a lot of us feel um quite nervous about um 2024 and where we're at and sort of there's more democratic elections taking place this year than than ever before in any year of human history given the climate context which is that we need to work across borders how do you how does that all that make you feel like do you fit share a sense of nervousness about the the sort of trajectory that we're on or or you actually like i are feeling sort of like this is an unstoppable thing that's happening and there will be progress or you can feel both of these two things at the same time?

SPEAKER_02: i do feel both of those very strongly at the same time i see a a worldwide trend towards fascism um you know i see it in countries like holland germany uh england the usa israel more and india there's more and more countries are facing an uncertain future by demanding ridiculous kinds of certainty um you know ethnic cleansing is a sort of stupid attempt at creating purity creating a problem free world by by inventing a false problem and then and completely unsuitable solution to it so i see that happening everywhere and i find it alarming on at the same time i see quite a few countries quietly getting on with making a better world um of course the scandinavian countries as usual i don't know why we just don't stop trying to govern ourselves and just invite them to come and give us a hand do you know way sweetie yes dear finland you're obviously better at this than we are can we hire you for a little while to to sort things out for us um and of course the the the huge threat i think is grotesque inequality now inequality people think yes it would be nice if everyone was equal um it's a nice thing but actually it's more than a nice thing it's really really important very rich people are very resource hungry they they're actually the problem very rich people create very difficult uneven circumstances you know in the last four years the five wealthiest men on the planet have doubled forward in wealth, the five billion poorest people on the planet have all become poorer so so that wealth spread is increasing and there are all sorts of really really good reasons for thinking that's a terrible idea inequality is is not just a sort of cosmetically unpleasant thing it's actually in ecological terms in ecosystem terms which is what we should be thinking and it's a disaster um it's if you think of it in ecological terms imagine it's a plague you know we have a plague of rich people people who've sucked wealth up as opposed to the libertarian theory was that wealth who trickled down; it doesn't, wealth trickles up, wealth is magnetic, it sucks more wealth to itself um and we have to really deal with that because of course the other problem is we're supposed to be living in democracies and everybody knows that the idea is one person one vote but does a guy worth a hundred billion dollars because have just one vote of course he fucking doesn't don't everybody knows that money translates into power so we have a situation where you and I might have one vote but somebody has a hundred million votes and to pretend that that is not a factor in a society that calls itself democratic is completely ridiculous so that's the bad news

SPEAKER_04: on the other hand yes and I but I think also let's let's end on the note we're talking about for example you'll work with hard art and the way that you for people don't know it's a kind of collective of creatives and artists across multi-discipline community you meet you do meet ups you know you help each other you exchange ideas and one event you did earlier this year 2024 was called the fate of Britain it was in Manchester and it was it was an example of the the exchange of those ideas and and to just because I'd like to end on a on a note of like basically addressing that those points that you just made that are incredibly important and depressing because it's the realization of the systems that we we are in and I want to say trapped in but actually no it takes people to challenge those to imagine different futures first to approach different futures and so just to speak to you go to hear how when you get together with the hard art community or whoever it might be do you feel positive about the direction of the things could go what's encouraging to me is that

SPEAKER_02: we're all starting to realize that community is our strength and so hard art is really an attempt to make a new kind of community, a community of people who want to agree with each other and want to work together want to reach consensus now that is profoundly anti-capitalist funnily enough capitalism really succeeded by telling us all that our strength was in being individuals Margaret Thatcher is a very good example you know she said there's no such thing as society they're just individuals and their families what I'm finding more and more now is people are realizing that okay the fuckers have got the money but we've got the people and we the people have to start working together and not be distracted by these idiotic culture wars that are [created] to keep us distracted they are and they're an invention actually of course you can always find people who do think like that but you don't have to put them on the front page in the newspaper all the time so it's it's where you choose to put your focus that matters and I'm finding now more and more people want to put their focus on the successes of communities rather than the failures of individuals at the moment we're stuck with this carapace of the old forms of government that have gone completely wrong they're completely corrupted by money now you know what's his name Tim Marshall and GB News this is this is money talking that's all it is quite literally it's money talking um and of course it says all the right things that press the buttons that there are too many immigrants that climate change activists are nutcases and so it has an audience we're hoping that what we're doing will start to build up another kind of story in another sense of value within.