discreet music - brian eno

Eno's Discreet Music was recorded one afternoon in May 1975. It's a series of tape loops of the same few notes played a varying speeds and pitches, overlaid on each other for just over half an hour. This was the maximum that Eno could fit onto one side of an LP. 

The original intention was that the music would used as a mood at the upcoming series of gigs that Eno had lined up with Robert Fripp. The guitarist would solo rhapsodically over the discreet music. 

Later that year Eno decided that, as he'd been using the music as a background to reading, perhaps others might like it too. So it became side one of his new album, on his newly created label - Obscure Records. This piece usually gets played very quietly, as the background ambience it was intended to be. But play it loud and it takes on a whole new air. It's utterly absorbing and you find yourself listening intently for the subtle differences as the loops of notes keep repeating in ever changing combinations. Really rather marvellous. 

Then we have the spellbindingly lovely side 2 - the three variations on Pachelbel's Canon. Again, played quite loudly into my earphones these are stunning pieces of music. I love the way each piece seems to drift further from the original score. It's mesmerising and almost dreamlike as the sounds swirls around your head. The gradual disintegration of the music was achieved by giving the musicians only some excerpts from the full score. They were told to repeat their sections and then to gradually slow the tempo whenever they felt ready. Eno had a version of the original piece on an album recorded by a French orchestra. The sleeve notes had been badly translated into English and the titles of Eno's three movements were directly lifted from these inaccurate translations. 

Interestingly the Pachelbel pieces were recorded at the same time, September 1975, and using the same musicians, as Gavin Bryars' astonishing "Sinking Of The Titanic". Play "Titanic" followed by side 2 of Discreet Music - they flow together extremely well, both have the same hazy dreamlike quality, like hearing music through gauze, or, indeed, underwater... The strings on "Titanic" swim around your head, lapping at your ears as you slip beneath the cold icy waves of the North Atlantic. It's a stunning work. There've been a couple of re-recordings of "Titanic" over the years, but as with most remakes, they're simply not as good as the 1975 original. In particular they lack, to my ears at least, the incredibly haunting qualities of the original. 

"Titanic" and Bryars' gorgeous "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" were the reason that Eno set up Obscure Records in the first place. He couldn't believe that no-one else wanted to issue these two pieces and so he set up his own label specifically to do that. "Titanic" was the first Obscure release, issued at the same time as Bryars' and John Adams' Ensemble Pieces and Eno's Discreet Music.  

There are only 10 Obscure releases, the last being Harold Budd's Pavilion Of Dreams. Obscure 11 was prepared, but at the last minute Eno changed his mind and decided that he'd start a new label. So Music For Airports' subtitle was hastily changed from Obscure 11 to Ambient 1. Early pressings apparently still have OBS11 scratched into the run-out grooves… Other Obscure related trivia - the original version of Music From The Penguin Café was credited to Simon Jeffes. It was only on later reissues, after Jeffes realised that he was actually onto something, that the Penguin Café Orchestra properly came into being. 

But that's a story for another day...