BRIAN ENO: DRUMS BETWEEN THE BELLS (2011)
1) Bless This Space; 2)
Glitch; 3) Dreambirds; 4) Pour It Out; 5) Seedpods; 6) The Real; 7) The Airman;
8) Fierce Aisles Of Light; 9) As If Your Eyes Were Partly Closed...; 10) A
Title; 11) Sounds Alien; 12) Dow; 13) Multimedia; 14) Cloud 4; 15) Silence; 16)
Breath Of Crows.
So apparently this guy Rick Holland is a «poet
and independent artist», as Wikipedia tells us (but really, isn't «independent
artist» sort of a pleonasm? I always thought that the more «dependent» you are,
the less you are of an artist), and his first book, Story The Flowers (how deliciously delightfully ungrammatical!),
was published in 2010 and was constructed in the tradition of psychogeography.
Up to now, I thought «psychogeography» meant getting naked, taking acid, and
wrapping yourself in a world map, but oh boy was I ever wrong about that.
Knowing what we know of Eno, it was only a
matter of time before he'd enter into a collaboration with an expert on
psychogeography — besides, he'd had joint albums with all sorts of musicians
before, and written music for all sorts of artistic installations, but this is
the first time that he tried out a symbiosis between ambient music and recited
poetry, and if anything, the album was at least instrumental in introducing yet
another word to the oversaturated English language: poetronica, the ingenious art of hybridizing verbal textures with
digital sounds and breathing new life into two established forms of artistic
expression.
Immediate disclaimer: I am almost totally
desensitized to any form of modern poetry — conservative, innovative, English,
Russian, whatever — and leave it to you, much more sensitive or much more
pretentious reader, to decide for yourself whether the words of Rick Holland
elevate you to a new level of consciousness or degrade you to the state of
thinking really bad thoughts about people. One sample, I believe, is enough:
"Bless this space / In sound and rhyme / As we suspend it / Arrested from
the race / For meaning / By these slices / Of cityscapes / Each one / To the
site of a thousand Londoners / The reburied and reborn / Brought together / In
one life". Personally, I think the word ʽLondonersʼ does not belong, but
then I'm not an editor or anything.
However, somewhere deep inside I nurture a hope
that Eno did not really choose Holland as a collaborator for the unfathomable
beauty or deeply hidden meaning of his words — but rather just because the
rhythmic basis of that poetry was eccentric and diverse enough for him to experiment
with various ways of not only setting it to music, but also of playing around
with the words themselves. Besides himself and The Poet, there are five extra
ladies and one extra gentleman delivering the words in a variety of
silver-and-gold vocal tones, to which Eno may or may not add psychodigital
processing, depending on his mood, the weather, and stock market values. And it
works! Some people have said that they liked the completely instrumental
version of this album better (it is available as a separate CD in the Deluxe
Psychogeography Edition), but I disagree — the music here is not jaw-dropping
on its own, but is made more fun and less predictable by the addition of this
varied set of vocal overdubs.
The record begins in «clubby» mode, with a
couple rhythmic tracks (ʽGlitchʼ, in particular, comes close to acid house, and
has the most robotic-sounding vocals on the album), but then switches over to a
more comfortable ambient mode, with recitations accompanied by minimalistic
piano (ʽDreambirdsʼ), Lanois-style guitars (ʽPour It Outʼ), cloudy synth hum
(ʽThe Realʼ), industrial grumble (ʽFierce Aisles Of Lightʼ), and... well,
suffice it so say that, amazingly, no two tracks here sound the same — there's
15 of them here, and each one is a separate autonomous part of the sonic
kaleidoscope. In a way, it is almost as if Brian took this concept as a pretext
to run a condensed retrospective of everything he made so far — you will find
echoes of Thursday Afternoon, of Apollo, of the Budd collaborations,
even of Brian's vocal pop glories (ʽDowʼ, where his merry listing of Holland's
groups of objects somehow reminds me of ʽKurt's Rejoinderʼ). So even if the
album does not have a specific point to make, at least it's never truly boring.
Two of the tracks, ʽThe Realʼ (near the middle)
and ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ (the finale), take nearly seven minutes to wind down to a
close, but there's got to be something
on an Eno album to put you in trance, right? A bit too much Autotune on ʽThe
Realʼ for my tastes, making the lady singer sound like a chromium clone of
Björk, but ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ is a fine, stately conclusion, all chimes and deep
bass vocals, like a mourning song without dread/desperation or a last lullaby
before the inevitable apocalypse. The sort of stuff you'd expect from a Dead
Can Dance on a dark day, or from Current '93 on a bright day.
I do urge you, even if it runs against your
modernistic / futuristic / nihilistic attitude to A-R-T, to ask the question
«what the hell does this whole thing mean?»
every once in a while, if only for psychological sanity reasons. The album
title, actually, does sound meaningful to me — reminding me of The Bell And The Drum, a classic
monograph on ancient Chinese poetry with which Brian may very well have been
acquainted and whose major point was to seek out the origins of the poetic form
in ritual music and dance; and what we have here is a reverse merger of the
poetic form with ritual music, so that's hardly a coincidence. Let's be real
stupid, then, and say that Eno's major purpose here is to generate magic through the marriage of spoken
word and played sound. Whether he succeeds in that or no depends on whether,
upon playing this record in its entirety, you are able to uncover a hidden
portal in your wardrobe. If you're not, this probably means that your faith was
insufficient, so go on and do it once more, this time with feeling. But if you are not floating in space third time
around, Rick Holland will be happy to return your money and go back to coal
mining, panhandling, and ghostwriting for Dr. Seuss.
Okay, read the Wikipedia article and still not sure if psychogeography is a philosophy, art form, game, or all of the above. I love geography and wandering about aimlessly but not sure I want to turn it into an "urban situationalist" experience.
ReplyDeleteThank you for introducing me to the word "pleonasm," George.
ReplyDeleteI AM an editor, and for what it's worth the lines of Holland's poetry that you quote tend to degrade me into thinking bad thoughts about (some) people.
"To the site of a thousand Londoners / The reburied and reborn"
ReplyDeleteI'm sure this is a reference to The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot ... Yes, that makes sense.
I love to read you, by the way.