Genre - New Age
Producer - Brian Eno
Selected Personnel - Gavin Bryars (Composer); Rhett Davies (Engineer)
Standout Track - The Sinking Of The Titanic
Oddly enough, Gavin Bryars' 1975 record entitled The Sinking Of The Titanic is one that eventually came to me via three completely separate musical strands in my life - Tom Waits, Brian Eno and my good friend John. As it happened, John was the one who actually first got me to hear this actual album, but I would almost certainly have eventually discovered it through one of the other avenues too. My first brush with it was through my love of Waits - back in 2010, when my fanaticism for Waits' life and music was at its peak, the man himself happened to guest edit an issue of Mojo magazine which I eagerly snapped up. The articles Waits contributed and curated were interesting enough, but the main point of interest was an accompanying CD in which he had hand-picked a number of songs of personal significance to him. Many were old blues, gospel and folk songs by the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Son House and Bob Dylan, while others were more eclectic - a heartbreaking rendition of "Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fuss Auf Libe Eingesteldt" by Beat legend William S. Burroughs, or Cliff Edwards' magical performance of "When You Wish Upon A Star" from the Pinocchio soundtrack. But the piece that really stopped me in my tracks was a four-minute edit of a composition entitled "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" by Gavin Bryars, which featured Waits himself on guest vocals. It's a heart-stoppingly brilliant piece and one I'll discuss properly in a minute, and over the next year or so it obsessed me and I listened to it all the time.
By 2011, while I loved that piece, I hadn't yet gotten round to hearing more of Bryars' work. Enter John. Over the years, John and I have always shared an enthusiasm for any music that's vaguely otherworldly or transcendental - Steve Reich, Bowie's Berlin trilogy, Sigur Ros, the Caretaker, and so on - and he lent me Bryars' 1975 album in the knowledge I'd enjoy it. After hearing it a few times, I researched Bryars further and was shocked to find that this very album was initially released on Brian Eno's Obscure label, which I discussed a little in my review of Eno's own Discreet Music (back at this time, I was already a big Eno fan but hadn't yet probed far into the more eclectic corners of his musical output). If John hadn't passed The Sinking Of The Titanic into my hands when he did I would almost definitely have heard it eventually via either the Waits or Eno link, and it would've been terribly disappointing if all these disparate links had led me to an album that was ultimately underwhelming. What a relief, then, that The Sinking Of The Titanic is one of the most captivating, unique and transformatively powerful musical recordings ever released by any artist.
Though now renowned principally as a composer, Bryars was never formally trained as such, first dabbling in music as a jazz bassist while studying philosophy. He quickly rejected any kind of musical performance that he felt was artificial, and started practising free improvisation before deciding he was more interested in composition. Like Eno, his interest in music wasn't strictly musical, per se, but far more conceptual and artistic. He was interested in constructing pieces of music by unconventional and challenging means, rather than necessarily writing a pretty tune. He was a founding member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the famed orchestra for non-musicians where every member was enforced to play an instrument they didn't know how to play, and it was within this orchestra that Bryars and Eno met. Far more enamoured of avant-garde New Age music than with rock or pop in his early days, Eno was keen to start up a record label which could showcase experimental compositions by himself and his friends in the Portsmouth Sinfonia circle, such as Bryars, Michael Nyman and Simon Jeffes, but it wasn't until 1975, when his solo career had picked up some steam, that he got his wish and launched Obscure Records.
The very first recording put out on the Obscure label was a showcase for Bryars and was to include his two most impressive compositions to that date. The second of these was to become perhaps his best-known composition, the aforementioned "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet." The core idea of the piece came from a documentary film project that a friend of Bryars was working on in 1971 about street life in and around Elephant & Castle in London. Going through the footage his friend had filmed, Bryars found a brief snippet in which a homeless man sang a simple refrain that went "Jesus' blood never failed me yet, this one thing I know, for he loves me so." From this simple, humble beginning Bryars developed a grand, orchestral arrangement of enormous emotional resonance, building up layers of strings and brass around the simple melody of the man's tune. The first few minutes of the recording comprise of nothing but the loop of the old man, a loop Bryars had inadvertently left playing in his office as he went out. Coming back later he found that the repetitive loop of the man's singing had moved everyone in his office to tears, convincing him of the emotional power within this frail, trembling man's rendition of such a simple musical motif. Across 26 minutes the refrain is sung again and again, its emotional resonance building in intensity gradually as the orchestra swells and builds around it. The 4-minute version I first heard in 2010 condenses all the piece's emotional heft into a short burst, but the slow, slow build and release of emotion across the piece's full length is far more satisfying and moving. Legend has it that Bryars eventually tried to find the homeless man who had created this piece of music for him to show what he had done with it, but that the man had passed away. That he died with no idea of what a powerful piece of music he had been so crucial to the creation of makes the optimism and hope and faith in his voice all the more poignant and affecting.
"Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" is perhaps the more accessible and easily understandable piece of the two on this album thanks to the very simple and very human story at its core, but, in my opinion, it is the less rewarding. Don't get me wrong, it's an astoundingly powerful piece of music that moves me to tears to this day, but the altogether more alien, terrifying and unapproachable title track is the one that ultimately provokes and challenges and moves me the more, and therefore lingers in the memory the most. "The Sinking Of The Titanic" is a heavily open-ended and indeterminate piece, one that originally had no actual score when it was first composed in 1972. Inspired by the legend that the string band on board the Titanic continued to play as the ship sank, Bryars devised a conceptual idea that would be a testament to the disaster in which so many lives were lost, and is one of the most toweringly accomplished tributes to loss ever recorded. Much like the technique Eno and Bryars would use on Discreet Music to cut up and arrange three different reinterpretations of Pachelbel's Canon, Bryars would use the traditional hymn "Autumn" as his starting point, the piece which the Titanic's wireless operator Harold Bride claimed the band were playing as the ship went down. A full string section plays slow, disjointed fragments of the piece throughout the 25 minute run-time of "The Sinking Of The Titanic," and Bryars explores the idea of how the music would reverberate and change as the water swallowed it up. So we have the low, apocalyptic drone of tape loops and effects applied to the strings themselves that render the simple beauty of the melody itself all the more glacial and terrifying. In the distance, music boxes and piano tinkle away almost inaudibly within the watery caverns of the sound, and occasionally muffled voices are heard, distant and hazy as if the listener themself is totally submerged. Supposedly the voices also consist of sources relating to the sinking of the Titanic - letters, diary entries and the like. The overall impression is that of drowning along with the hundreds of others who lost their lives, and is one of the most frightening, humbling and desperately moving musical collages ever made.
While none of the Obscure Records sold particularly well compared to the more mainstream solo albums Eno put out with Island Records (the parent company who had granted permission for Obscure to go ahead), this recording of Bryars' two masterpieces undoubtedly brought wider attention to the composer that he would have achieved on his own, and now stands as an often forgotten masterpiece of avant-garde composition and New Age music. Bryars would go on to be an enormously respected composer, though these two pieces would always be his most respected and admired. In the early 90s a new, far longer version of "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" would be recorded that featured Waits singing along with the homeless man, and it was from this newer version that my 4-minute version was culled. I've not heard the full version of this later rearrangement, but the consensus tends to be that it tries to overcomplicate the beautiful simplicity of the piece's original vision, despite sterling work from Waits. "The Sinking Of The Titanic," meanwhile, being an indeterminate piece, would change and shift with every recording or performance depending on how that orchestra or conductor wanted to rearrange the collection of sources and musical ideas Bryars had prepared for them. In 2012 it was performed in a new arrangement to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the event itself.
Track Listing:
All pieces composed by Gavin Bryars.
1. The Sinking Of The Titanic
2. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
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