Eno

Prophecy Theme from Brian Eno's Film Music 1976-2000 collection, composed by Eno, his brother Roger, and Daniel Lanois for David Lynch’s Dune.

New Eno Song

Listening to this music may not necessarily make you more intelligent, but it will heighten your awareness and increase your concentration, and when you think about it, that's really more important than mere intelligence.

The vocals can be a little off-putting though.

In C

Music Dissolves Water approves of this video, which brings together some of our favorite things, including Malian music and Terry Riley's composition.  Performers include Damon Albarn on melodica and Brian Eno on vocals, as well as Adama Koita (kamel n'goni), Alou Coulibaly (calabash), Andi Toma (additional percussion and kalimba), André de Ridder (violin, baritone-guitar, and kalimba), Badou Mbaye (djembe and percussion), Bijou and Olugbenga (vocals), Cheick Diallo (flutes), Defily Sako and Modibo Diawara (kora), Guindo Sala (imzad), Kalifa Koné and Mémé Koné (balafon), and the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Nick Zinner (guitar), with additional guitar by Jeff Wootton.

Atlanta 1996

1996 was kind of a big deal in Atlanta as it was the year the Olympic Games were held in his home city.  In the mists of his memory, the Olympics overshadow any musical event.

He didn't go to Music Midtown that year.  He had been dating a new girlfriend since the autumn of 1995, a Delta flight attendant who was away at work as much as she was home (three days on and three days off). She moved in with him at the beginning of '96, and when the Music Midtown weekend rolled around, they preferred to enjoy each other's company in the solitude of home rather than immerse themselves in the crowds and the heat and the noise of the festival.

They traveled a lot, a benefit of her employment by an airline, scuba diving in South Florida or the Bahamas, weekends in New York and Boston, backpacking and dayhiking in the North Georgia and North Carolina mountains.  They occasionally went out to hear music, but not as much as they dined out or went to movies. CD shopping trips were a weekend ritual, each buying three or four discs, and when they got back home they competed over who got to hear who's purchases first.  Their tastes were different, but they usually managed to come back home with mutually agreeable selections of current rock, some jazz, some blues, maybe a soundtrack or two, and a lot of salsa and tropicalia, a taste that they'd picked up on diving trips down to Miami.  Celia Cruz and Cesaria Evora were as frequently purchased as Depeche Mode, Beck, and Bjork.

One of the songs that stands out to him from that period was from the collaboration of Brian Eno, U2, and Luciano Pavarotti known as Passengers.  The song Miss Sarajevo captured the gestalt of the times - the Balkan Wars and the Clinton presidency, as well as their own eclectic tastes in music.  

For those who are too young to remember or whose memories are short, the siege of Sarajevo stemmed from the ethnic struggle between Serb and Bosnian government forces in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs had surrounded the capital and initiated the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, lasting from April 1992 until February 1996. Sarajevo was reduced to ruins, and the citizens had no access to public transit, water, gas and electricity.  But the besieged Sarajevans stubbornly refused to be demoralized, and despite all of the horror and bloodshed around them, in 1993 they still held their annual beauty pageant, won that year by a 17-year-old blonde named Inela Nogić.  A documentary film of the event and of the seige of Saravejo contains a clip of the contestants gamely holding up a sign reading "Please don't kill us."

So for a year in which Olympics, travel, international politics, and romance overshadowed music, he offers Miss Sarajevo as his representation of 1996.

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts

The lean, bearded, Fiat Spider-driving, cowboy-hat-wearing, 27-year-old incarnation of myself had left the girlfriend and their little apartment in Boston behind to set out for a new life in Atlanta, Georgia.  It was 1981. He was young.

Wordy Rappinghood may have been the fun party song of the year, but this is the music he primarily remembers listening to in 1981, on cassette, generally while driving around in that little, unreliable car.

Robert Fripp & The League of Gentlemen - The incredible Sara Lee on bass, while Fripp lays down all of those polyrhythms that the punk rockers of the time were hearing in their heads but didn't have the chops to play.

After No Pussyfooting (1973) and Music For Airports (1978), in 1981's My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, Eno redefined for him for at least the third time what music was capable of doing, and exponentially broadened his horizons.  He owes Eno so much for how he thinks about and experiences music to this day.    

For those of you keeping score at home, I expect this nostalgia kick to end pretty soon and regular posting to resume shortly.

Chemistry

It appears that I've somehow backed myself into posting a retrospective of favorite songs from long-ago years.  Hearing The Slits (1979) reminds me of undergrad days in Boston, and Wordy Rappinghood (1981) reminds me of being a young man out and about in Atlanta.  Fourth World, Volume 1 conjures up memories of the transitional period - post-grad Boston, before I left for a new life in Georgia.  This is what I remember listening to in 1980 and how I recall that in-between year.

    

James Blake + Brian Eno

Blake and Eno.  Worlds collide, and I can't even begin to describe how cool this is.  You'll have to hear for yourself.

Dylan

In Thursday's interview, William S. Burroughs talked about visionaries and forward thinkers such as Galileo, Cezanne, and James Joyce, and how their work and vision was not only initially misunderstood, but attacked, censured, and ridiculed until the shock of the new had finally worn off, and how, once the public's eyes had been opened, the creative process marches on.

Here's Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "delivering rock n' roll to the dissident soul of folk music and poetry."  Note the booing at the end of the set, as the audience was not yet capable of understanding the new version Dylan was presenting of their beloved protest music.  As Thurston Moore noted years later, "For many it was already a viable meeting, but Dylan set it on fire for the world to see."

It's easy now to dismiss those who were booing the "electric" Bob Dylan as being short-sighted and provincial, but one has to understand that they legitimately believed they were defending and preserving the purity of their cherished folk music.  Rock music fans today who react in a negative way to hip-hop, to electronic dance music, and to other cutting-edge forms of music are really no different from that critical audience of 1965, and rather than ridicule Dylan's hecklers, they should recognize them as their aesthetic predecessors.

Like A Rolling Stone has been hailed by many critics as the single most important American song of the 20th Century, and while that's certainly debatable, it's delivery and impact on arrival was unquestionably one of the most revolutionary.  According to NPR, Dylan had finished recording the song just 10 days before the Newport festival.  "As usual, he didn't bring arrangements or charts to the recording session. He came in, taught the musicians the song and then they recorded take after take, experimenting with different tempos. The version of Like a Rolling Stone that ultimately got released was six minutes long, almost twice as long as most standard pop songs. That made it difficult for radio disc jockeys to program, but they did." 

Well, some did.  AM radio station WABC, the dominant Top 40 station in New York at the time, didn't play it, and I never heard the song, or any Dylan for that matter, on the radio, although I was familiar with Dylan's name and the reputation.  I didn't actually hear his music until sometime around 1967 or '68, to the best of my recollection, when I purchased a copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits unheard, based solely on reputation and the press.  I was only 13 or maybe 14 years old, but I can still remember putting that record on for the very first time and hearing that nasal voice on Side 1, Track 1, singing "Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good. they'll stone ya just like they said they would",  and thinking to myself, "What the hell is this?"  I had never heard anything like that before and his sound took some time for me to get used to, but I stuck with it and by the end of Side 2 (Just Like A Woman) it had become my favorite album and I was forever changed.

Very shortly after that, around '68 and '69, FM radio came to my attention, first WABC-FM, a more album-oriented version of it's Top 40, AM sister, and then later WNEW, which departed even further from the commercial mainstream into what was then called "underground rock."  The FM stations played Dylan, as well as the Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and The Who. It was the start of a musical exploration for me, a journey which I'm still on to this day. 

Not to get too far ahead of myself, but it was on WNEW where I first heard King Crimson (In the Court of the Crimson King), which led me even further down the rabbit hole. Over the next five or six years, the voyage took me away from the radio altogether and to the import bins at the back on the record stores, where King Crimson led me to Robert Fripp, and Robert Fripp led me to Fripp and Eno, and Fripp and Eno led me to Brian Eno, and then things really began to get interesting.

But that's another story for another day.

Forward Into The Past

The time has come, if not already passed, to move the Water Dissolves Water music content off of Live Journal, where I've already used up most of my 1 gig of free storage and where I've experienced all manner of technical problems, and back to a Google Blogger platform.  I liked the "cut" feature of Live Journal that allowed me to post pictures behind a "(Read more...)" link, but that's about the only thing I'll miss.  The posts from the time I used the site will stay over there, sort of a document of that period, but for at least the time being, my music posts will appear here.

The real dilemma was in deciding what music I should post for my first entry here. All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma, so there was really nothing "wrong" to post, and the most natural thing might have been to simply just pick up the postings where I had left off without any self-conscious deliberations.  On the other hand, I remember a day back in the late 1970s when Boston radio station WBCN moved into their new studios, and for the first song played from their new location they reached way back to the 60s for a somewhat ironic airing of Iron Butterfly's Inna Gadda Da Vida, generally considered even at that time to be the very epitome of unhip "dinosaur rock,"  but at the same time, "familiar sounds in a new setting."

I guess I could have posted the same as a tribute to 'BCN's decision, but I really didn't want to hear that song again nor did I want to subject whatever readers wander over here to it.  But I did want to post something that would qualify as "familiar sounds in a new setting," something that reached way back into my own musical experience and at the same time still informs my current tastes.  After perusing some old American Bandstand and Shindig videos (and don't even get me started about the Soul Train clips), it did not take too long to arrive at the Velvet Underground, and this rare footage of Nico (1938-1988) singing Femme Fatale, a song written by Lou Reed for Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.  

By my recollection, I was listening to Velvet Underground and Nico at least as early as 1970.  I can remember the 1967 Velvet Underground & Nico album, the one with the Andy Warhol-designed cover featuring a banana with a sticker for its peel, scattered among all the other psychedelic flotsam and jetsam at my secret hideout during my high-school years - the VU music was required listening for when the dissonance of too much acid rock began inducing paranoia.  Brian Eno once said that although that album only sold 30,000 copies,  "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."  I may be the one exception (although, to be honest, I never actually purchased the album myself, only listened to it, and my friends who had purchased it did in fact play in occasional bands), but to this day, the Velvet's droning folk rock and frequent forays into noise and musique concrete (check out Black Angel's Death Song before writing the band off as "soft rock") are the very templates for my understanding and appreciation of modern indie rock.

It was equally tempting to post videos of some other Nico gems, like All Tomorrow's Parties or Chelsea Girls (not to mention VU standards like Venus In Furs and Heroin), but one clip seems like enough to get us started, no?

So that's the past and the springboard back to the present.  The usual postings will begin soon enough. Meanwhile, enjoy the video and follow the links if you've got the time. . .