Brian Eno - Discreet Music

Released - November 1975

Genre - Ambient

Producer - Brian Eno

Selected Personnel - Brian Eno (Synthesiser/Keyboards); Gavin Bryars (Arranger/Conductor)

Standout Track - Discreet Music

Discreet Music is actually the second of the two solo records Brian Eno released in 1975, and the first, the ever-so-slightly more accessible and conventionally song-based Another Green World, is one I'll talk about here too. However, I seem to remember reading in Eno's biography that Discreet Music was actually conceived and recorded prior to Another Green World, and I feel it represents a shift in Eno's approach to music that can be traced through his subsequent recordings from Another Green World onwards, so I'm going to write about it first. Discreet Music is essentially Eno's first full-blown foray into what would come to be called ambient music, a term he would coin himself in 1978 when he first attempted to categorise and codify his new approaches to music starting with Ambient 1: Music For Airports. But, for all intents and purposes, the title track of this record is the first time a piece of music that recognisably fulfilled the aims and ideas of ambient was heard. Eno's earlier experimental collaboration with Robert Fripp, 1973's (No Pussyfooting), had been a step towards the idea of formless music devoid of melody or rhythm, but didn't yet have the textural and atmospheric qualities that would become key to Eno's summation of ambient music.

The appearance of Discreet Music in 1975 is the result of two distinct stories. Firstly, Eno, always an artist first and a musician second, had fallen in with the Portsmouth Sinfonia in 1972, an art-house orchestra consisting exclusively of non-musicians or of musicians playing instruments they were unfamiliar with. Its discordant, horribly screeching string section can be heard gracing sections of Eno's second solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Some of the other figures involved with the Portsmouth Sinfonia included avant-garde composers such as Gavin Bryars, Simon Jeffes (later to form the Penguin Cafe Orchestra) and Michael Nyman. These artists kept Eno in touch with a more pioneering, artistic approach to composing and conceiving of music than Eno was allowed to encounter much in the world of art rock that his Roxy Music days had kept him tethered to, and he soon set about establishing a record label to showcase the talents of these figures that he found so inspiring. Through him they would be able to reach a far wider audience than they could ever hope to on their own, and through them he would be able to experiment with avant-garde ideas about composition that he wouldn't be able to get away with on a more mainstream rock album. So it was that Obscure Records was launched in 1975 with Gavin Bryars' magisterial The Sinking Of The Titanic. Discreet Music would be the third record released on Obscure, and would represent the evolution of a new idea Eno had had about music due to a nearly fatal accident.

Up until 1975, Eno had been very interested in treating sound and in unusual approaches to making music, but this had often been tied to conventional song structures. Even in the more unusual case of (No Pussyfooting), he was still ultimately applying his treatments to what was basically just a lengthy guitar solo. In 1975, Eno was nearly knocked down by a car and cracked his head open, prompting a lengthy convalesence. After being bought a record of 18th century harp music, he found himself lying in bed too weak to get up to adjust the volume, but the music playing so quietly it was almost inaudible. As such, he suddenly became aware of a whole new quality within music, of its ability to become part of an atmosphere around it, to blend in with and affect the tone of a space rather than to be a construct to be focused on in its own right. In some ways it was an extension of Erik Satie's "furniture music" in the early 1900s, music that was intended deliberately as unobtrusive background music. But Eno's ambitions were far more atmospheric and textural - he wanted to be able to treat sound in a way that made the music as easy to ignore as it was to listen to. So it is that we end up with the title track of Discreet Music, easily one of the most majestic and glorious ambient pieces of Eno's career.

Whereas Eno's later ambient pieces would frequently be founded on randomness and impulse, on the idea of clusters of notes or particular textures emerging on a whim, "Discreet Music" is very much built on a concrete set of rules, to the extent that the original album included a diagram to illustrate how the composition was created. The piece relies heavily on the system of tape-loops Eno had developed with Fripp that would later be dubbed "Frippertronics," involving a recording of a sound to be played back into itself and looped so that the original sound can be treated and distorted while also being played back at the same time. Or something. The details escape me. Basically, "Discreet Music" involves two separate, very simple, melodic phrases played on synthesisers that are then looped for half an hour, gradually phasing in and out of sync with each other while Eno occasionally applies treatments and effects to the sound. It's one of his very finest ambient pieces due to its absolute simplicity - it achieves the goal of ambient music with total perfection, being something that can be totally ignored and become an almost imperceptible tonal quality of an empty space just as easily as it can be obsessed over and listened to in minute detail, with every tonal shift taking on a great weight of meaning. It's also magnificently beautiful, able to create a mood of total surrender and bliss with, essentially, zero effort. The piece actually originated as a piece for Fripp to add guitar parts to, but stands magnificently well on its own merit. Fripp and Eno's second collaborative album, 1975's Evening Star, features a much shorter version of the piece entitled "Wind On Wind," but they still wisely let it speak for itself without the need for Fripp to embellish it.

The album's second half consists of a wholly different musical experiment that stands separate from Eno's ambient works. It's arguably as successful an experiment, albeit one that's slightly less pleasant to listen to. Eno's experiments in avant-garde composition were largely restricted to ambient music, given his lack of formal training in composition, but the second half of Discreet Music sees him wrestling with a weightier and more technically complex idea, one that required the assistance of Gavin Bryars to realise. Essentially taking its cue from the cut-up literary technique popularised by William S. Burroughs in the 60s, the idea was to take an existing piece of music - in this case, Johann Pachelbel's famous "Canon In D" - and to see how the tone and sound of the piece was affected by rearranging its time signatures and structures. With assistance from Bryars, who had the formal classical training to transform such an ambitious idea into a reality, Eno prepared three separate arrangements of the Canon that involved only very short fragments of the piece being given to each performer in the orchestra, with instructions for those fragments to be repeated and for time signatures and rhythms to be slowly sped up and slowed down at the performer's discretion. As such, the album's second half is far less an actual piece of music and far more the realisation of an artistic idea, with Eno as the originator of the idea and Bryars and the orchestra as the actual mouthpieces giving that idea a voice, but such avant-garde premises were the entire goal of the Obscure label.

Those three pieces (each one named after an inaccurate French-to-English translation of the liner notes of a particular recording of Pachelbel's Canon) are fascinating if never 100% perfect. There's a really wonderful sense of dislocation and despair in the first arrangement, "Fullness Of Wind," which starts with an almost-recognisable performance of the Canon that soon slows and drawls into an apocalyptic drone over which occasional violins desperately try to play some semblance of a melody before slowing and dying again. It's a truly terrifying sound, and that something so frightening and empty-sounding was derived from something as pleasant as the Canon in D is all the more fascinating. If "Fullness Of Wind" had been the only arrangement then I might consider the whole experiment a total success, but by the end of the third I feel like the limits of what can be achieved with that idea have been worn out and it's become simply a rather discordant loop. But it achieves full marks for its ambition and the uniqueness of its conception.

Discreet Music went largely unnoticed on its release - while the Obscure label granted composers like Bryars access to a much wider audience, their release was still quite limited and didn't get the same kind of exposure as Eno's mainstream solo releases. In 1975, this kind of music was also hugely unappealing to the major music-buying public and it wasn't until Eno began to categorise and mass-market his ideas about ambient composition in 1978 that a wider public really began to pay attention to it, at which point Discreet Music became reappraised and is now rightly recognised as one of his finest musical achievements. The title track itself might well be my very favourite Eno ambient piece alongside Thursday Afternoon, and the second side easily demonstrates that, while he may have lacked the technical skill of some of his fellow composers in the Portsmouth Sinfonia, he still had incredibly ambitious and complex artistic ideas about the structure and arrangement and composition of music that ranked him as their ideological equal. Personally, I always feel like Discreet Music, if it was indeed recorded prior to Another Green World, is a major transitional point in Eno's discography as it marks the point at which he became more interested in the texture and atmosphere of music than in the idea of writing songs. Whereas Here Come The Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) had been entirely song-based, after Discreet Music he seemed to feel freer to indulge himself in textural, instrumental experiments, small snatches of a mood or an idea rather than complete song-structures, and that shift becomes more evident with 1975's more prominent solo release, Another Green World.

Track Listing:

1. Discreet Music (Brian Eno)

2. Fullness Of Wind (Johann Pachelbel, arranged by Brian Eno & Gavin Bryars)

3. French Catalogues (Johann Pachelbel, arranged by Brian Eno & Gavin Bryars)

4. Brutal Ardour (Johann Pachelbel, arranged by Brian Eno & Gavin Bryars)