June 8, 2021 • 55 mins
Brian Eno’s 50-year career is teeming with innovation. He started out playing synths in the early ‘70s as a member of the UK glam-rock band Roxy Music and went on to create an entirely new musical genre—ambient music, and later he recorded a series of solo albums and eventually produced career-defining albums for a host of bands including U2, Devo and Coldplay.
On today’s episode Rick Rubin talks to Brian Eno about his new radio station through Sonos Radio HD called The Lighthouse, and his love for the musical space that exists between humans and machines. Eno also recalls predicting the birth of hip-hop in the back of a cab with David Bryne, and he explains why listening to Beyoncé through a wall is strangely satisfying.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Not many musicians cite design or architecture as their inspiration,
but sitting in a beautifully designed German airport in nineteen
seventy eight, Brian Eno was inspired to create atmospheric music
(00:39):
to complement the space. His landmark album Music for Airports followed,
and with it Eno created ambient music, an entirely new
genre that still thrives today. Brian ENO's fifty year career
is teaming with innovation. He started out playing since in
the early seventies as a member of the UK glam
(01:02):
rock band Roxy Music, went on to record a series
of solo albums and eventually produced career defining albums for
a host of bands, including YouTube Devo and Cold Playing.
His latest project is a radio station through Sono's Radio HD.
He'll be streaming three hundred unreleased songs from his decades
(01:23):
in music, including some that he's still making today. The
station is called the Lighthouse, and on today's episode, Rick
Rubin talks to Brian Eno a bit about that station
and also about his love for the musical space that
exists between humans and machines. Eno also recalls predicting the
(01:43):
birth of hip hop and the back of a Cab
with David Byrne and explains why listening to Beyonce playing
through a wall is strangely satisfying. This is broken record
liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's
(02:06):
Rick Rubin with Brian Eno. I'm gonna starting a funny
place because just now, before we started, I was thinking
about a lot of things, and the last thought that
came up before I made notes this morning was to
ask what was the last bit of technology to come
along that has influenced the way you work? There have
(02:26):
been a few. I've been working quite a lot with
my friend Peter Chilvers, who's an musician and a coda
and we've been working on ways of manipulating MIDI automatically
and effectively. What we're doing is taking a MIDI signal
and subjecting it to various probabilistic mutations. So, for instance,
(02:52):
you have a stream of information going into the MIDI
and you say leave out thirteen percent of that. So
if you have a drum part, it sounds like the
drummer's dropping a beat every so often, or we can
say things like every one in twenty beats, double it
or move it by a quarter beat. So we can
(03:16):
take parts that are fairly fixed, or which are loops
in fact, and we can suddenly bring them to life
in some very very interesting and uncanny ways. It doesn't
really sound like what humans would do, but it doesn't
sound like what machines do either, so it's an interesting
new zone. I think I've always liked those zones between
(03:39):
the human and the mechanical. This is why I love
all the voice treatments that are going on now so much,
because that's always what I wanted to hear. One The
one thing that used to be sacred you could never touch,
was the voice, and I always thought, why not. You know,
it's just another piece of electronic material, like anything else.
We can do what we like with it. Do you
(04:00):
ever feel like going the other way? Do you ever
start with something that synthetical programmed and decide to create
it with traditional instruments? Have you ever done that? I've
done that, and it hasn't always been very successful. In fact,
it's actually rather rarely being successful for me, and I
(04:22):
think it's because what I enjoy about the use of
the electronics and the computers is that they do things
that humans can't do, and I really like that area
just between what we can do and what machines can do.
There's this sort of new area that is appearing. I mean,
people are noticing it more and more, particularly with vocals.
(04:46):
Suddenly there are these ways of singing that you've never
heard before. And what's very interesting, of course, is that
a new generation of people are learning to sing like that.
I don't know if you've ever seen any of those
wonderful things on YouTube where young people have clearly heard
a Rihannah record or something like that and thought, oh,
that's great, I'm going to sing like that, and they
(05:09):
don't actually realize that it's done with an auto tune. Yes,
that it was not possible to sing like that until
somebody did it with a machine, and then somebody else thought, well,
it's possible, so I'll do it. In the case of
the first example, where you're removing bits of media information,
would you say that the random aspect of the process
(05:32):
is always at work for you? I like things when
there's a layer of surprise, I suppose, and it's not
because I have this John Cage and faith in randomness.
For him, it was a sort of religious feeling that
randomness tied you into the synchronicity of the world. Somehow,
by using randomness, you allowed the state of things to
(05:56):
affect your work. It's a nice idea, and I like
it and I respect it in his work. For me,
it's a way of searching a musical space that I
wouldn't do using just my taste. I mean, one's taste
tends to propel you into the same areas over and
over again. The interesting thing about randomness is that sometimes
(06:18):
you're taken somewhere that you didn't expect to go, and
sometimes that turns out to be a really interesting new place.
So randomness for me is really just a tool, just
a way of taking me somewhere different. So it's not
random for the sake of random. But through the random process,
you find something new that you're looking for that you
(06:41):
didn't know you were looking for. Essentially, that's exactly right. Yes,
something happens and you kind of recognize that, you think, yes,
that makes sense. The reason I think this is interesting
is because I think what makes any work of art
interesting is or gripping or effective, is the feeling that
(07:02):
somebody was living, somebody was living it, somebody was alert
and alive and passionate in some way, and the way
you get into that state is by being an unfamiliar territory.
I think you're you're most alive when you're not quite
sure what is going on, when you're you're slightly flying
(07:24):
by the seat of your pants and you have to
negotiate it somehow. That's that's why we love improvisation so much,
because people are deliberately putting themselves at risk in a way,
soaring out into the unknown, and somehow dealing with it.
And that process of hearing someone dealing with it is
(07:45):
the difference between life and death in a piece of work.
I think. So I suppose all all of the strategies
and techniques that I use, and they are quite a
lot of them. Besides randomness, are really ways of trying
to find myself in a new place, because I get
(08:06):
excited when I'm in a new place. I like being
in unfamiliar surroundings. I always used to say that artists
are either cowboys or farmers, really, and they're both both
ways of being an artist to find you know, the
farmer wants to find a piece of territory and fully
explore it and exploit it. You know. You could say
(08:28):
the last twenty years of Mandrea and was like that.
When Mondrea finally settled on the style that we all
know him for, he just carried on doing it. But
the other kind of artist is the one who just
wants to find somewhere new. He just wants to find
the next frontier, the next piece of territory, and that's
(08:50):
what he gets turned on by. So I think I'm
more in the second category, though, people listening to my
work would say, but it all sounds exactly the same, Brian.
Do you have that same approach in life beyond? Are
you an explorer? Have you lived all over the world?
(09:12):
Do you continue to put yourself in new situations as
a human being as opposed to an artist. I have
such an amazing amount of inertia, you wouldn't believe it.
I wouldn't leave my studio if I had the choice. Probably, No,
it's not that bad. But the only reason I ever
go anywhere really is because I don't have a choice.
(09:34):
For instance, I had to go to New York in
nineteen seventy eight do something for a week, and it
was a nice, lovely weather. When I arrived, it was
this time of year. Somebody said, well, I've got a
sublet if you want to stay, And I ended up
spending five years there just because it was a nice
(09:56):
day when I arrived. Yes, I didn't have any intention
of living in New York. And then I left New
York because I had to go to Tokyo to do something.
And I was away in Tokyo and somebody robbed my
studio and took everything. Actually everything was gone, and somebody
rang me up and said, your whole studio has disappeared.
(10:18):
And I suddenly had this feeling of relief. I thought, oh,
I don't have to go back to New York then,
So then I moved to Toronto after that for a
little while. But I don't really move very much unless
I have to for some reason, or unless I don't
plan things very well. I'm pretty happy wherever I am. Actually,
(10:39):
I think we have that income and it's funny. I'm
wondering if the urge to adventure creatively is the balance
for the fact that we lived such her metical lives.
I think that's a very good theory. Yes, I know
that whatever I'm doing in my work always seems to
(11:01):
be balancing what is happening in the rest of my life.
For instance, when I lived in New York. I lived
on a very very very noisy corner. It was on
the corner of Broom and Broadway, so Broadway very busy street,
and then Broom was the cross street where all the
big trucks used to go on their way to the tunnel.
(11:22):
I lived at the top of the building, but it
used to kind of rock with this sound. And it
was whilst I lived there that I made the quietest
music I've ever made. And I'm sure what I was
trying to do was to make the place in the
music that I needed to be able to get to
sometimes as a relief from living in New York. And
(11:44):
then I moved back to England about two years later,
three years later, and I moved to the countryside, to
the town that I grew up in, very quiet, small
country town. And then I made the loudest music I'd
ever made in my life. Again, I think I needed
(12:05):
a bit of city, I needed some grit, some noise.
So yes, I think I think that's kind of what
artists do. They're always making worlds, and sometimes worlds that
they would just like to visit and look at. Sometimes
worlds they would like to spend time in earlier, you
said we're born with a particular taste. Do you feel
(12:27):
like your current taste is the taste you were born
with and or has it evolved and changed over the
course of your life. That's a very good question. I
remember when I first started painting, because painting was the
first artistic thing I did. I never learned to play
an instrument, so I was a painter as a kid.
(12:49):
And I remember I loved combinations of red and blue
that produced the mo violet range of the spectrum, and
I did loads of paintings just exploring that sort of
what I felt was a melancholy, deep area of color,
and certainly the melancholy of it was a big part
(13:11):
of what attracted me, and I don't think that's ever gone.
I still have that feeling for It's sort of a
nostalgia for other futures that could have happened but didn't.
If you see what I mean. How old were you
at this time that you were painting. Oh, I started
when I was about nine or ten, but I got
(13:33):
into the purple area when I was about thirteen or fourteen.
I was very, very impressed by Mondrea, and from early
on I used him as an example earlier, but I
loved the simplicity of his pictures because I kept thinking,
how can something that is so simple objectively, you know,
how can that have such an effect on me? It
(13:55):
was the closest thing to magic that I had ever seen,
And at the same time I was I loved duop music.
Now you're probably probably a bit too young for duap,
aren't you, But I'm a fan of duo up. I
am too young for it, But there was a growing
up in New York there was a radio show on
the oldie station on Sundays. They played two or three
(14:19):
hours of duop every weekend, dan Quae Reid and I
listened to it religiously, and I absolutely love dua Yeah,
well this that had the same sort of effect on me,
because duop is a very simple music in many senses,
you know, it's mainly about voices, not not about lots
of instruments and lots of playing. And in fact, the
(14:40):
closer it was to a cappella, the more I liked it.
And I just loved the fact that four voices could
produce such a range of colors and feelings that seemed
to me like on a par with Mandrea and you
know how. And I was always very drawn to this
idea of doing as much as possible with as little
(15:01):
as possible. I was never impressed by the kind of
music that used you know, complicated time signatures and amazingly
brilliant playing and so on. It's sort of impressive, but
for me, there was not the same magic in that
you could see the trick being done, you know, So
that part of my taste hasn't changed. I really am
(15:24):
always drawn to things that look like anybody could do them,
where you think I could have made that, but I
fucking didn't. Why didn't I part I don't know if
you have this feeling that part of the feeling of
one of the feelings I always have that tells me
(15:44):
something is great is kind of anger that I didn't
do it. I don't have that, but I understand it.
I do. I'm so thankful when there's something that I
like that I didn't make, because it's so exciting, it's
like Wow. Often I make things more out of the
(16:08):
need for them to exist. Yes, that's exactly right. I
want this music to exist. Yeah. The only reason I
make music, The reason I got into this line of
work was because I was experiencing hip hop music and
the records that were being made didn't reflect what it
actually was. So my earliest work was really just documenting
(16:31):
something that I was already a fan of and it
just didn't exist in the world, so I didn't really
have a choice. So when I do hear something that
I like, I get very excited because I'm always looking
for something that feels like a new way in Yes,
what you said there is something that I've often thought
(16:52):
that the things that influenced me most in terms of
actually making things are the things that I hear that
don't quite succeed where I listened to them. I think
that's a brilliant idea, And do you know what if
they had done this and that and this other thing
(17:12):
and left that bit out, that would be even better.
So quite often when I'm thinking like that about something,
I realize that I'm I'm inventing something new which isn't
that thing, but isn't something that I really had thought
about before either. So it's it's quite often hearing something
just missing the mark that makes me think that could
(17:35):
be better. That's been an important thread for me. Do
you find that if you look back, the most interesting
things have hit you that way, like when you first
hear something or see something, you don't know whether you
like it or not, or maybe it makes you laugh,
or it seems ridiculous or yes, but then you come
around to loving it or maybe loving it the most. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
(18:01):
I really admired the who I'd loved that, my generation
and things like that, And then they released a song
called Happy Jack. I thought they shouldn't release lightweight material
like this. They are a serious, revolutionary, radical band. What
are they doing releasing this kind of material? And I
(18:24):
even wrote to Pete Townsend saying saying, you shouldn't be
releasing stuff like this, You're much too important, or something
to that effect. And it was about three or four
months later that I suddenly got it that this was
(18:44):
a kind of pop art. So that's one example of
something where I had a real change of mind. And
I've had more of those in painting than in music.
In music, I kind of very often have a pretty
good feeling of what is about to happen. I don't
mean that I could make it, but I'm not incredibly
(19:09):
prized by it. For instance, I remember saying to David Byrne,
we were in a car in Los Angeles in nineteen
eighty and I said, I think there is going to
be a kind of music where people kind of shout
poetry over beats. And indeed there was. It wasn't entirely
(19:32):
an unscripted idea. I'd heard something on MPR. It was
a poet, a black poet from somewhere in America, reading
this poem called Cadillac. I spent years trying to find
this thing. I never found it. I wrote to MPR
(19:54):
and I phoned them up and everything. It was called
Pink Cadillac. And he just did this amazing, very rhythmic
poem about how he wanted a pink Cadillac and how
cool it was and how it turned rounded the corner
and things like that. And I thought, this is a
new kind of music. I mean, I had I knew
(20:15):
about the last poets. They they were sort of in
the back of my mind as well. But I just
suddenly had this vision of a popular music, not a
music that would only be on NPR, but a popular
music that people would want to hear, that had heavy
beats and speech, not songs. Was the pink Cadillac piece
(20:39):
that you heard, did it have a beat or was
it a cappella? I think it was a cappella or
just had a very I can't remember it very well now.
In fact, I only heard it that once. It just
stuck in my mind, and I can still remember the
cadence of some of it. And there may have just
been a you know, that pink callac that kind of
(21:06):
feeling to it, you know, and I thought, yeah, that
is definitely new. We'll be right back after a quick
break with more from Brian Enow. We're back with more
from Rick Rubin and Brian Eno. Can you remember any
other forms of music that either do or don't yet
(21:26):
exist that you've imagined. Yes, there's one that has just
come into existence, I think, and it's something that I
have been sort of playing around with. Do you know
this listening practice? I don't really know what to call
it exactly. I could call it music, but I'm not
sure this is the right word for it. It's called
(21:48):
as mr H. This is where people are listening very
close up. Noisest like this, and there's lots of smacking
lips and that kind of thing. And basically people tell
quite long stories, but they're hardly stories. It's about that sound,
(22:09):
and they often use stereo microphones so they can move
their voices from one from one of your ears to
the other and back and forth. It's very, very interesting
because these are quite long pieces, and just go on
YouTube and have a look. They've got millions and millions
of listeners, so there's a lot of people doing this.
(22:30):
So I heard these first of all, I think three
or four years ago. I heard the first ones and thought,
this is really interesting. This is like having somebody wandering
around inside your head whispering to you. And I thought,
this is kind of a night. It's like ambient music. Actually,
(22:50):
there's a sort of diminution of content in favor of sound.
So it's a kind of live of the moment sound
experience that doesn't really have a past or a future.
You know. It's not what philosophers called teleological. It doesn't
doesn't go somewhere, it doesn't have a goal. It's a
(23:13):
steady state experience. And this, of course is what I
always wanted ambient music to be. Like a like a
picture on the wall. You don't expect it to change
all the time. What changes is you, the listener. The
art stays relatively still. So I heard this as mr
Stuff and thought, this is a kind of ambient music,
(23:34):
And I thought, what about making music that is vocal music?
But like that, I had never really thought about ambient
music being vocal before then. In fact, it was for
me specifically not vocal. It was a sort of deliberately
personality free music. And putting a voice in there to
(23:58):
me was to say to draw all the attention to
the voice and say, oh, here's somebody with something to
tell you, And I really didn't want that. But then
when I heard this ASMR, I thought, this person clearly
has nothing to tell me at all. They're talking about
how they comb their hair and doing it for twenty
(24:20):
five minutes. Clearly the message is not about combing hair.
The message is about being inside a voice for a
decent length of time. So I started to think, what
would you do to existing music to make it occupy
that same space, And then I started experimenting with my
(24:45):
favorite tool of all in the studio, which is the
low pass filter. Just taking off all the high frequency
of things has an amazing psychological effect to me. It
creates scale, distance, warmth, and a weird sort of intimacy,
(25:05):
which is quite strange, I think because you know, missing
a lot of detail. Your brain very actively engages with
those kinds of sounds. That's my theory about why it's
interesting anyway, So I started thinking, perhaps there could be
a kind of music like that where we take existing songs,
(25:27):
you know, a Rihannah record, or and we just put
it through a low pass filter, but really a really
radical low pass filter. So nothing above say two hundred
and fifty hurts is audible. If you listen to a
Beyonce record through a wall, it's not exhausting, it's warm.
(25:49):
So about a week ago somebody said to me, oh,
have you heard this new as Mr Music thing, and
described exactly that same experiment. So it's like you're listening
to records that are being played in another room. So
you just have that sort of comforting. You can't really
(26:15):
figure out what it is, but it's sociable somehow, it's friendly.
It's like having other people around. It's like a daydream almost. Yes, yes, yes,
that's a good way of saying it. Yeah, sounds fantastic.
On the other side of that, are lyrics ever important
to you? They're very rarely the thing I'm most listening
(26:38):
to in music. I think the base requirement for me
in lyrics is that they don't make the music stupid,
which turns out to be quite a high bar in
many cats Now people say do up lyrics are stupid,
but I don't think they are at all. They serve
(26:59):
the music absolutely. Do up lyrics are the way of
making a voice become musical. What is always awkward to
me is when somebody feels they have something to say
and it's important and you get these clumsy pieces of
scanning and the rhymes don't sound stupid, and so I
(27:21):
can't bear that. I'd rather just leave out the voice
completely than have that. But I mean, there are lyricists
who I absolutely adore, like I always say Joni Mitchell,
who's for me, one of the greatest songwriters of all time,
and her lyrics are so clever and intricate and always
(27:43):
worth returning to that I'm always hearing new things in
her singing and new interpretations of what she's saying. And
there are a few people like that, very very few
whose work I actually do really want to know. The
lyrics of where do you think the line is between
sounds and music? It's where that line is is actually
(28:07):
one of the things I've thought about most in thinking
about music, I had an accident years and years ago
where I was confined to bed for a while and
one afternoon, a rainy afternoon, a friend of mine came
over and I said, as she left, I said, can
you just put a record on for me? This is
(28:28):
I had a record player, but it wasn't close to
the bed, so she put this record on. It was
a record of Welsh harp music, and she just put
the needle on. She left, and it was actually very quiet,
but I couldn't get up to change the volume, and
the rain was beating down outside, and I suddenly had
this realization that I loved the fact that the music
(28:54):
seemed to be arising out of the rain. It wasn't
on top of the rain. Sometimes it was submerged by
the rain. But these notes, the loudest notes, were appearing
out of the rain, and I thought, how lovely to
co opt the surroundings to become part of the music.
So this was in nineteen seventy four, I think or five.
(29:16):
So I started thinking, what about if you made a
kind of music that didn't have a hard edge to it,
that didn't have a hard boundary, that wasn't done so
that you knew that that was a musical sound and
that everything else was just random everyday noise. I thought,
what about softening the edges of the music so that
(29:37):
you include some things that could be noise outside of
the music. That could be the street, or the rain,
or the wind or something like that. So I started
building in this sort of where ambient music started coming from,
was this idea of making music that had a soft
edge that blended into the rest of the world. So
(29:58):
this idea of saying, let's make the edge soft so
that the music can invite in more of the rest
of the world. It draws it in and that becomes
part of the composition as well. And I think this
was at the time I was starting to think about
messiness as well, that I didn't want the work to
(30:22):
be sort of in a little capsule, tidily closed off
from the rest of the world. I wanted it to
feel like it was somehow connected to it that it
bled into the rest of the world. What did you
look like at the time at that point in time,
how were you dressing. I think I still had long hair,
(30:42):
I was still wearing makeup. I think then, yeah, mid seventies.
I was, yes, and I wore a lot of unusual clothes.
I'm just wondering, like, how the just the justa positions,
you know, it's like the person who's dressed like that
making the music that you don't look at or don't
(31:04):
pay attention to. It's it's really interesting. Now, you're absolutely right,
it's sort of inconsistent. And it became clearer to me
that they were inconsistent that my physical appearance was saying
look at me, but my musical output was saying it's nothing.
It's just a tint. It's just an atmosphere, you know,
(31:26):
no big deal, carry on with your life. And maybe
that was again looking for the balance. Yes, yes, you
know the art was looking for the balance, and yep,
I never thought of that. That's very very likely true.
From about the late seventies on, I started to not
want to be a pop star, and really that was
(31:49):
that was because I thought it was misleading people. You know,
if if the whole thing is about me, that's actually
not a very interesting subject. To be honest, I'm not
a boring person or anything like that, but I didn't
think that my personality was the thing that I had
to offer the world. Yeah, that you saw larger issues, yes, exactly,
(32:15):
like what is the edge? What is the edge of art?
That was the issue that really interested me. I think,
what do we call art? And why where do we
draw the boundary? And what do we what do we
mean by art anyway? You know, for me, the most
interesting question for a long long time has been why
(32:36):
do we want to make art at all? And why
do we want to listen to it? I mean, it's
an incredibly deep question. Why do we like music? Why?
You know, if you think about it, what is music?
It's a kind of arrangement of noises. But you know,
we have incredibly strong feelings about them. If you said
(32:58):
to a Martian who just landed on Earth, you played
them four string quartets. You know, there's Shostakovich, there's a Brahms,
there's whatever else, and then there's one done by a computer,
and there's one played by a group of talentless fourteen
year olds who've just got those instruments. And you said,
what's the difference between those? They probably say, well, there's
(33:20):
no difference. They all sound exactly the same. But we
are hearing very very very fine distinctions between these things.
We obviously care about and value these experiences in quite
intense ways. And since I was about seventeen, I've been
(33:40):
thinking about this question, what are we doing it for?
What are we hearing? Why does it matter? We clearly
can live without music, It's not like food. We can't
live without food, and we can't live without clothes, and
we can't live without communicating with other human beings. And
there are all sorts of things we have to do.
(34:02):
Music isn't one of them, Painting isn't one of them, Sculpture,
none of those things that we call arts a thing
that we have to do. So why are we doing them?
And why is it so universal? We don't know of
a culture that doesn't have music, Well, then then I'm
not sure that we don't have to do it. If
that's well, yes, yes, of course, I mean it's it's
(34:25):
it's not functional in terms of survival. It doesn't seem
we have never tried the experiment to take it away,
but it seems to have some ability to allow us
to feel or understand ourselves. The music isn't what's important.
It's the reaction that's important. Yes, exactly, it's what is
(34:49):
happening to us. Yeah, I imagine it when we tap
into that in art, it makes us also feel less alone,
not even that someone made it. But there's something out
there that resonates with me, even if it's the paint. Yes,
I'm not this this thing that doesn't understand itself. Here's
(35:12):
something that is being reflected back that resonates with me.
I feel a connections that it's maybe it's like love,
might be like love. Now, I think this is such
an important point that the thing that binds communities together
is shared culture, and it's for exactly that reason. I
think it's the knowledge that there are a group of
(35:35):
other people who have these same feelings. You might not
even be able to articulate them. But you know, I
can remember this so strongly from when I was young,
that you defined yourself almost by the set of feelings
that you responded to. So, for instance, I remember it
there was a time when you were either a Beatles
(35:57):
fan or a Rolling Stones fan, and they were fundamentally different.
They talked about a different kind of person. You know,
doesn't matter that in the end day all in it
up millionaires and it doesn't matter, it's not important. What
was important was that they presented these two different pictures
(36:18):
of the kinds of feelings that were appropriate to have
about the world, and crossing over from one to the
other was a big decision. I can remember people having
real sort of identity crises about they were finding starting
to find the Stones more exciting than the Beatles, and
(36:39):
in fact they were starting to find the Beatles a
bit sort of whimpy, or vice versa. Actually as well,
it happened both ways. So I think you're right that
you you tap into a sort of community of feelings
and the sense that there are other people who value
the same feelings that I value. That's sort of what
(37:00):
it's about. Really, It's about saying these feelings have value
for me, and there's a lot of others that don't. Yeah,
there's also a great feeling in finding a new piece
of art and sharing it with someone and enjoying it
together is different than enjoying it yourself. There's a real
(37:21):
sense of community in enjoying something that you know, we
enjoy this, but maybe maybe many people don't, and that's fine. Yes,
it's a great feeling of connection, and maybe that's maybe
that's the greatest feeling of connection, is the feeling of
these shared responses to stimuli. Yes, and incidentally, I think
(37:45):
that's the that's the power of religion as well. The
power of religion is not the connection with God, but
the connection with the rest of the congregation. I think
the connection with all of the people who also believe
in that particular story. I'm not really religious myself, but
(38:07):
I really respond to that idea. You know, I got
into gospel music very young. In fact, when I came
to America, I was by then a big gospel fan.
And what surprised me was that all my hip friends
thought it was quite embarrassing if they found a little
(38:30):
bit a quaint or something that I liked gospel music.
To me, it was just like Dooop had been. It
was this amazing, exotic foreign music, and it really came
straight through to me. We're going to take a quick
break and then we'll be back with more from Briany.
Now we're back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation
(38:56):
with Briany. Now, I've heard the story before of the
moment of recognition or the need for what became ambient
music based on the Cologne airport. Sitting in the Colone airport,
how might it have been different if it would have
happened in a natural space as opposed to a man
(39:16):
made space. Well, the question really is would it have
even occurred to me if I was in a natural space.
I'm not sure that it would have done. It was
because I was in an incredibly carefully manufactured space, beautiful
airport where the architects had really looked at every detail,
(39:38):
and the light was beautiful and the lines of the
place were beautiful, and somebody in the cafe had put
on a cassette of German disco music which was ringing
through the airport. I mean, I wasn't postmodern enough at
the time to accept that. I just thought, that's not right.
That part hasn't been thought about. Everything else has been
(40:01):
thought about, but nobody's thought about that. Now. It was
a beautiful day and the airport was nearly empty, and
I was sitting there bathe in light, and it was
one of those cases like we were talking about earlier,
where you think I wish there was another kind of
music for this situation, and I started thinking, so what
would that be? Like? You know, it's an airport, so
(40:23):
you can't be too loud. Obviously, people have to hear announcements.
It has to be interruptible for the same reason it
shouldn't dominate the vocal register, because people need to communicate.
So I just was sort of thinking this out, and
quite soon I thought, right, I think I know what
I could make that music. I know how I could
(40:45):
do that. And that's how that first ambient record came about.
I mean, it wasn't unprecedented. I had been working on
music a little bit like that before, but I suddenly
realized what its role in life could be. If you like,
what the place of this music could be. I knew
it wasn't dance music. I knew it wasn't radio music.
(41:08):
It was functional, but I hadn't yet discovered the function.
It was then that I thought, I know what this
music could be for. Might there be other forms of
ambient music for different use cases? Yes, I did a
record called Narrowly. The subtitle was Music for Thinking. That
(41:29):
really came out of a response. Well, first of all,
hearing from a lot of particularly artists and graphic designers
that they liked having my music playing when they were working.
They didn't want conventional records which kept stopping and starting
and the mood changing, and they were there was lyrics
(41:50):
and they were kind of annoying. They didn't want classical
music because it sort of felt too old. They liked
this music that had this sort of directionless, atmospheric quality.
So I thought, oh, good, so it's working. It's working functionally.
So I thought, so what about when you want to
(42:11):
sit and concentrate on something, You want to have something
that kind of calms the world down a little bit
around you, that softens, as Eric Sati said, softens the
clink of fork against dinner plate or something like that.
I forget the quote exactly, but you want something that
(42:33):
is sort of a slight barrier to the noises of
the world, and it becomes a barrier by sucking them
into itself. And so that I came up with this
piece Coordinarily, which is an hour long piece, which at
that time was the longest I could make it. And
I started thinking then about the idea of music that
(42:56):
doesn't have a beginning or end, that just is theoretically infinite. Well,
that didn't become possible until the nineties when I started
working with computer and it was possible to make the
kinds of programs I make now where where the music
effectively never repeats. And my ambition always then was to
(43:21):
try to make an experience a little bit like sitting
by a river. So you're sitting by the river. It's
always the same river, but as you know, it's never
the same river twice, So every time you look up
at the river, it's doing something a little bit different. Now,
(43:41):
it's not like watching a film where suddenly the river
turns blood red or gets much bigger or something like that.
I didn't want drama. I just wanted something like nature,
subtle variations. Subtle variations, yes, and variations that stay within
(44:02):
a kind of range of possibilities and explore that range
rather randomly. I just wanted the thing to be what
Harold Bud used to call eternally pretty. That was his
wif seting it. Dear Harold. He died about two months
ago from COVID, very sad. So I dedicate this thought
(44:24):
to Harold. So. Yes, So when Harold and I met,
we were both pretty much on this groove of thinking,
what about making music that isn't designed to upset anybody? Now,
of course that sounds pretty uncontroversial now, but in the
mid to late seventies that was considered to be the
(44:47):
biggest sell out of all time. You know, music was
supposed to shake the world and create revolutions and upset
your parents and all sorts of things like that. And
we thought, what about making music that is just really comfortable?
Comfortable was probably the most controversial word you could use.
Then what about music that makes you feel warm and
(45:12):
friendly and open and able to surrender? When I realized
that surrender was really the thing that I was interested
in for that kind of music. Obviously, I don't only
make that kind of music, but for that I wanted
to make something that would make you think I can
(45:33):
let something happen to me. I don't have to defend
against everything. I can get out of that posture of
self defense. If you think of the things that where
we achieve transcendence. If you like or ecstasy, it's sex, drugs, art,
(45:54):
and religion. Those are all the places where we say,
I'm going to let go and just let this thing
happen to me. I'm not going to control it. I'm
going to be taken somewhere. Now, it's interesting to me
that although we are constant trying to control, our biggest
thrills come from letting go of control. And so what
(46:16):
becomes obvious that is that it's the combination of those
two that we should really be specializing in. We should
and we should not forget the surrender part. We should
not think that surrendering is passivity or cowardice or incompetence.
We should say it's one of the ways we deal
(46:37):
with the world. So I think art is the place
where we go to have this feeling again, to remember
that feeling of going with the flow, of letting something
happen to us in real life. In the rest of life,
I should say, we are still able to do that,
we can remember that feeling. For me, there are certain
(46:59):
I can see a film that has an energy in
it that could affect me for months. Yes, and I'm
very open to the energies contained in things, So I'm
protective of what I watch for that reasons. I don't
want to have a bad time. A lot of the time,
(47:20):
I don't choose that. I just want to ask how
sensitive you are in that respect. Yes, I think I'm
very sensitive in that respect, and to the extent that
certain experiences I don't want to have them very often
because I don't want them to lose their power. So
just about the single album that probably influenced me more
(47:44):
than almost any other was the third Valve Underground album.
That was a really, really important record in my life
because so many things I had been wondering if they
were possible suddenly appeared on that album, and also a
lot of things I hadn't even conceived of. For that reason,
I've never owned the album. I haven't even listened to
(48:07):
it that many times because I really wanted it to
retain that power. I didn't want it to become commonplace.
Another piece like that is the Steve Ripe piece It's
going to Rain, that tape piece from I think nineteen
sixty four. That absolutely devastated me. The first time I
(48:28):
heard it. I understood so many things about music that
I had not even dreamed of before that piece, and
I still regard it as a key moment in my life.
And I think I've probably listened to it four times.
It turned a switch, and the switch stayed turned. Yes,
(48:49):
I didn't have to keep turning it again, you know,
it stayed turned. In your evolution up to ambient music,
it's fascinating to me that you could ever do anything
different than that. Do you know what I'm saying? It's
like it almost feels like that's the end of the
line in terms of the minimalist approach. You you got there,
(49:15):
so it's interesting that you do other things like you
didn't do the Mandrean staying in the same language only. Yes,
perhaps if I had carried on living in New York,
I would have done because I would have always wanted
more of that kind of music. But I've just had
the very interesting experience of do you know about this
(49:38):
Sonas project that I'm doing. I don't really tell me. Okay, Well,
Sonas asked me to curate a channel for them. Basically
it's like my own radio station, and I like the
idea of that, but I thought, what I'd really like
to do is to curate a station that plays only
(49:59):
my music because I've got so much unreleased stuff. You know.
I work in the studio every day pretty much, and
some of it is just experiments where I try something
out just to see what it would do if you
tried to make a piece of music like that. And
I have thousands of thousands of recordings like that. I
(50:23):
just mix everything, you know. When I finished the day,
I mix whatever I've done that day. Sometimes it can
be five or six different pieces. Even so I have
this vast library of stuff. Some of it is really
quite interesting, and I thought, how nice would it be
to have a radio channel where you just switch it
(50:45):
on and outcome pieces of music that you've never heard before,
will probably never hear again. And they're all quite different
from one another. There's quite a range of stuff. Some
of it is very ambient, some of it is very
hard beat stuff, some of it's really electronic. Some of
it is touchingly human, which is how you describe something
(51:09):
that is rather amateur. So for the first time in
my life, I thought, well, I'll just start listening through
to those things. And so they play on random shuffle
out of my computer, and I have to say, I
so like the collisions, the strange combinations of things. You know,
something from nineteen ninety one next to something I did
(51:32):
last year next to something from twenty five, and no
rationale to the choices that they're randomly selected. And although
some of the music is pretty challenging, a lot of
it is quite easy to listen to. And as I
(51:54):
would say to people, you'll probably only hear at once,
So if you don't like it, just wait, something else
will come along soon. Yeah, I have one last question
to ask, just because I'm really curious, what's your relationship
to spirituality? Well, as you can tell from the way
I talk too much, I think about this kind of
(52:19):
thing quite a lot. What I always want to do
is to cut away as much of the shit as
possible and see what's left. So I don't want to
be a believer. I want to be somebody who, as
far as possible, understands and knows things. Believing things leaves
(52:39):
me a little bit unsatisfied. If I find myself believing something,
I want to test the belief. I want to say,
how do I find out how valid this is? How
true this is? Now? In real belief, in proper faith,
you're not supposed to do that. Faith is supposed to be,
by definition, the acceptance of something that you cannot find
(53:01):
evidence for. If you can find evidence for, it's not
faith anymore. It's called knowledge. Then. So this is a
long way round of saying that I'm not anti spiritual,
I'm not anti religion. Actually, in fact, I can see
how religion really cements some communities together and really helps
(53:23):
people in their lives. But I'm not by nature a believer,
So it's difficult for me to use that kind of cement.
My cement has to come from trying to understand things
and to see how they work, and to share those
ideas with other people. Yeah so, I think one one
(53:44):
of the other things that surrendering prepares you for is
the experience of uncertainty, the experience of not knowing the
answer but still having to do something. You know, the
fact that you don't know the answer can't cripple you.
And of course a lot of people are crippled by
(54:06):
not knowing the answer, and so they just choose an
inappropriate answer just for the want of an answer. Yes, so,
you just have to accept that you don't know the answers,
and you will make mistakes, and you will need to
change your values and your tools, and some of them
(54:30):
might last you a lifetime. But you're lucky if that happens.
I haven't got any that lasted me a lifetime. Thank
you so much for doing this amazing pleasure speaking with you.
Yes you too, I must say I really enjoyed that.
Thanks to Brian Eno for sharing as artistic philosophy for
(54:51):
us to hear a favorite Brian Eno tracks. Head to
Broken Record podcast at part. Be sure to subscribe to
our YouTube channel, a YouTube dot com slash a Broken
Record podcast we can find all of our new episodes.
You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken
Record is produced a help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel,
Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help
(55:16):
from Nick Chaffee. Our executive producer is Mio Labella. Broken
Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you
like the show, please remember to share. Rate interviewers coming
a podcast. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richard.
Pushkin. Not many musicians cite design or architecture as their inspiration,
but sitting in a beautifully designed German airport in nineteen
seventy eight, Brian Eno was inspired to create atmospheric music
(00:39):
to complement the space. His landmark album Music for Airports followed,
and with it Eno created ambient music, an entirely new
genre that still thrives today. Brian ENO's fifty year career
is teaming with innovation. He started out playing since in
the early seventies as a member of the UK glam
(01:02):
rock band Roxy Music, went on to record a series
of solo albums and eventually produced career defining albums for
a host of bands, including YouTube Devo and Cold Playing.
His latest project is a radio station through Sono's Radio HD.
He'll be streaming three hundred unreleased songs from his decades
(01:23):
in music, including some that he's still making today. The
station is called the Lighthouse, and on today's episode, Rick
Rubin talks to Brian Eno a bit about that station
and also about his love for the musical space that
exists between humans and machines. Eno also recalls predicting the
(01:43):
birth of hip hop and the back of a Cab
with David Byrne and explains why listening to Beyonce playing
through a wall is strangely satisfying. This is broken record
liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's
(02:06):
Rick Rubin with Brian Eno. I'm gonna starting a funny
place because just now, before we started, I was thinking
about a lot of things, and the last thought that
came up before I made notes this morning was to
ask what was the last bit of technology to come
along that has influenced the way you work? There have
(02:26):
been a few. I've been working quite a lot with
my friend Peter Chilvers, who's an musician and a coda
and we've been working on ways of manipulating MIDI automatically
and effectively. What we're doing is taking a MIDI signal
and subjecting it to various probabilistic mutations. So, for instance,
(02:52):
you have a stream of information going into the MIDI
and you say leave out thirteen percent of that. So
if you have a drum part, it sounds like the
drummer's dropping a beat every so often, or we can
say things like every one in twenty beats, double it
or move it by a quarter beat. So we can
(03:16):
take parts that are fairly fixed, or which are loops
in fact, and we can suddenly bring them to life
in some very very interesting and uncanny ways. It doesn't
really sound like what humans would do, but it doesn't
sound like what machines do either, so it's an interesting
new zone. I think I've always liked those zones between
(03:39):
the human and the mechanical. This is why I love
all the voice treatments that are going on now so much,
because that's always what I wanted to hear. One The
one thing that used to be sacred you could never touch,
was the voice, and I always thought, why not. You know,
it's just another piece of electronic material, like anything else.
We can do what we like with it. Do you
(04:00):
ever feel like going the other way? Do you ever
start with something that synthetical programmed and decide to create
it with traditional instruments? Have you ever done that? I've
done that, and it hasn't always been very successful. In fact,
it's actually rather rarely being successful for me, and I
(04:22):
think it's because what I enjoy about the use of
the electronics and the computers is that they do things
that humans can't do, and I really like that area
just between what we can do and what machines can do.
There's this sort of new area that is appearing. I mean,
people are noticing it more and more, particularly with vocals.
(04:46):
Suddenly there are these ways of singing that you've never
heard before. And what's very interesting, of course, is that
a new generation of people are learning to sing like that.
I don't know if you've ever seen any of those
wonderful things on YouTube where young people have clearly heard
a Rihannah record or something like that and thought, oh,
that's great, I'm going to sing like that, and they
(05:09):
don't actually realize that it's done with an auto tune. Yes,
that it was not possible to sing like that until
somebody did it with a machine, and then somebody else thought, well,
it's possible, so I'll do it. In the case of
the first example, where you're removing bits of media information,
would you say that the random aspect of the process
(05:32):
is always at work for you? I like things when
there's a layer of surprise, I suppose, and it's not
because I have this John Cage and faith in randomness.
For him, it was a sort of religious feeling that
randomness tied you into the synchronicity of the world. Somehow,
by using randomness, you allowed the state of things to
(05:56):
affect your work. It's a nice idea, and I like
it and I respect it in his work. For me,
it's a way of searching a musical space that I
wouldn't do using just my taste. I mean, one's taste
tends to propel you into the same areas over and
over again. The interesting thing about randomness is that sometimes
(06:18):
you're taken somewhere that you didn't expect to go, and
sometimes that turns out to be a really interesting new place.
So randomness for me is really just a tool, just
a way of taking me somewhere different. So it's not
random for the sake of random. But through the random process,
you find something new that you're looking for that you
(06:41):
didn't know you were looking for. Essentially, that's exactly right. Yes,
something happens and you kind of recognize that, you think, yes,
that makes sense. The reason I think this is interesting
is because I think what makes any work of art
interesting is or gripping or effective, is the feeling that
(07:02):
somebody was living, somebody was living it, somebody was alert
and alive and passionate in some way, and the way
you get into that state is by being an unfamiliar territory.
I think you're you're most alive when you're not quite
sure what is going on, when you're you're slightly flying
(07:24):
by the seat of your pants and you have to
negotiate it somehow. That's that's why we love improvisation so much,
because people are deliberately putting themselves at risk in a way,
soaring out into the unknown, and somehow dealing with it.
And that process of hearing someone dealing with it is
(07:45):
the difference between life and death in a piece of work.
I think. So I suppose all all of the strategies
and techniques that I use, and they are quite a
lot of them. Besides randomness, are really ways of trying
to find myself in a new place, because I get
(08:06):
excited when I'm in a new place. I like being
in unfamiliar surroundings. I always used to say that artists
are either cowboys or farmers, really, and they're both both
ways of being an artist to find you know, the
farmer wants to find a piece of territory and fully
explore it and exploit it. You know. You could say
(08:28):
the last twenty years of Mandrea and was like that.
When Mondrea finally settled on the style that we all
know him for, he just carried on doing it. But
the other kind of artist is the one who just
wants to find somewhere new. He just wants to find
the next frontier, the next piece of territory, and that's
(08:50):
what he gets turned on by. So I think I'm
more in the second category, though, people listening to my
work would say, but it all sounds exactly the same, Brian.
Do you have that same approach in life beyond? Are
you an explorer? Have you lived all over the world?
(09:12):
Do you continue to put yourself in new situations as
a human being as opposed to an artist. I have
such an amazing amount of inertia, you wouldn't believe it.
I wouldn't leave my studio if I had the choice. Probably, No,
it's not that bad. But the only reason I ever
go anywhere really is because I don't have a choice.
(09:34):
For instance, I had to go to New York in
nineteen seventy eight do something for a week, and it
was a nice, lovely weather. When I arrived, it was
this time of year. Somebody said, well, I've got a
sublet if you want to stay, And I ended up
spending five years there just because it was a nice
(09:56):
day when I arrived. Yes, I didn't have any intention
of living in New York. And then I left New
York because I had to go to Tokyo to do something.
And I was away in Tokyo and somebody robbed my
studio and took everything. Actually everything was gone, and somebody
rang me up and said, your whole studio has disappeared.
(10:18):
And I suddenly had this feeling of relief. I thought, oh,
I don't have to go back to New York then,
So then I moved to Toronto after that for a
little while. But I don't really move very much unless
I have to for some reason, or unless I don't
plan things very well. I'm pretty happy wherever I am. Actually,
(10:39):
I think we have that income and it's funny. I'm
wondering if the urge to adventure creatively is the balance
for the fact that we lived such her metical lives.
I think that's a very good theory. Yes, I know
that whatever I'm doing in my work always seems to
(11:01):
be balancing what is happening in the rest of my life.
For instance, when I lived in New York. I lived
on a very very very noisy corner. It was on
the corner of Broom and Broadway, so Broadway very busy street,
and then Broom was the cross street where all the
big trucks used to go on their way to the tunnel.
(11:22):
I lived at the top of the building, but it
used to kind of rock with this sound. And it
was whilst I lived there that I made the quietest
music I've ever made. And I'm sure what I was
trying to do was to make the place in the
music that I needed to be able to get to
sometimes as a relief from living in New York. And
(11:44):
then I moved back to England about two years later,
three years later, and I moved to the countryside, to
the town that I grew up in, very quiet, small
country town. And then I made the loudest music I'd
ever made in my life. Again, I think I needed
(12:05):
a bit of city, I needed some grit, some noise.
So yes, I think I think that's kind of what
artists do. They're always making worlds, and sometimes worlds that
they would just like to visit and look at. Sometimes
worlds they would like to spend time in earlier, you
said we're born with a particular taste. Do you feel
(12:27):
like your current taste is the taste you were born
with and or has it evolved and changed over the
course of your life. That's a very good question. I
remember when I first started painting, because painting was the
first artistic thing I did. I never learned to play
an instrument, so I was a painter as a kid.
(12:49):
And I remember I loved combinations of red and blue
that produced the mo violet range of the spectrum, and
I did loads of paintings just exploring that sort of
what I felt was a melancholy, deep area of color,
and certainly the melancholy of it was a big part
(13:11):
of what attracted me, and I don't think that's ever gone.
I still have that feeling for It's sort of a
nostalgia for other futures that could have happened but didn't.
If you see what I mean. How old were you
at this time that you were painting. Oh, I started
when I was about nine or ten, but I got
(13:33):
into the purple area when I was about thirteen or fourteen.
I was very, very impressed by Mondrea, and from early
on I used him as an example earlier, but I
loved the simplicity of his pictures because I kept thinking,
how can something that is so simple objectively, you know,
how can that have such an effect on me? It
(13:55):
was the closest thing to magic that I had ever seen,
And at the same time I was I loved duop music.
Now you're probably probably a bit too young for duap,
aren't you, But I'm a fan of duo up. I
am too young for it, But there was a growing
up in New York there was a radio show on
the oldie station on Sundays. They played two or three
(14:19):
hours of duop every weekend, dan Quae Reid and I
listened to it religiously, and I absolutely love dua Yeah,
well this that had the same sort of effect on me,
because duop is a very simple music in many senses,
you know, it's mainly about voices, not not about lots
of instruments and lots of playing. And in fact, the
(14:40):
closer it was to a cappella, the more I liked it.
And I just loved the fact that four voices could
produce such a range of colors and feelings that seemed
to me like on a par with Mandrea and you
know how. And I was always very drawn to this
idea of doing as much as possible with as little
(15:01):
as possible. I was never impressed by the kind of
music that used you know, complicated time signatures and amazingly
brilliant playing and so on. It's sort of impressive, but
for me, there was not the same magic in that
you could see the trick being done, you know, So
that part of my taste hasn't changed. I really am
(15:24):
always drawn to things that look like anybody could do them,
where you think I could have made that, but I
fucking didn't. Why didn't I part I don't know if
you have this feeling that part of the feeling of
one of the feelings I always have that tells me
(15:44):
something is great is kind of anger that I didn't
do it. I don't have that, but I understand it.
I do. I'm so thankful when there's something that I
like that I didn't make, because it's so exciting, it's
like Wow. Often I make things more out of the
(16:08):
need for them to exist. Yes, that's exactly right. I
want this music to exist. Yeah. The only reason I
make music, The reason I got into this line of
work was because I was experiencing hip hop music and
the records that were being made didn't reflect what it
actually was. So my earliest work was really just documenting
(16:31):
something that I was already a fan of and it
just didn't exist in the world, so I didn't really
have a choice. So when I do hear something that
I like, I get very excited because I'm always looking
for something that feels like a new way in Yes,
what you said there is something that I've often thought
(16:52):
that the things that influenced me most in terms of
actually making things are the things that I hear that
don't quite succeed where I listened to them. I think
that's a brilliant idea, And do you know what if
they had done this and that and this other thing
(17:12):
and left that bit out, that would be even better.
So quite often when I'm thinking like that about something,
I realize that I'm I'm inventing something new which isn't
that thing, but isn't something that I really had thought
about before either. So it's it's quite often hearing something
just missing the mark that makes me think that could
(17:35):
be better. That's been an important thread for me. Do
you find that if you look back, the most interesting
things have hit you that way, like when you first
hear something or see something, you don't know whether you
like it or not, or maybe it makes you laugh,
or it seems ridiculous or yes, but then you come
around to loving it or maybe loving it the most. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
(18:01):
I really admired the who I'd loved that, my generation
and things like that, And then they released a song
called Happy Jack. I thought they shouldn't release lightweight material
like this. They are a serious, revolutionary, radical band. What
are they doing releasing this kind of material? And I
(18:24):
even wrote to Pete Townsend saying saying, you shouldn't be
releasing stuff like this, You're much too important, or something
to that effect. And it was about three or four
months later that I suddenly got it that this was
(18:44):
a kind of pop art. So that's one example of
something where I had a real change of mind. And
I've had more of those in painting than in music.
In music, I kind of very often have a pretty
good feeling of what is about to happen. I don't
mean that I could make it, but I'm not incredibly
(19:09):
prized by it. For instance, I remember saying to David Byrne,
we were in a car in Los Angeles in nineteen
eighty and I said, I think there is going to
be a kind of music where people kind of shout
poetry over beats. And indeed there was. It wasn't entirely
(19:32):
an unscripted idea. I'd heard something on MPR. It was
a poet, a black poet from somewhere in America, reading
this poem called Cadillac. I spent years trying to find
this thing. I never found it. I wrote to MPR
(19:54):
and I phoned them up and everything. It was called
Pink Cadillac. And he just did this amazing, very rhythmic
poem about how he wanted a pink Cadillac and how
cool it was and how it turned rounded the corner
and things like that. And I thought, this is a
new kind of music. I mean, I had I knew
(20:15):
about the last poets. They they were sort of in
the back of my mind as well. But I just
suddenly had this vision of a popular music, not a
music that would only be on NPR, but a popular
music that people would want to hear, that had heavy
beats and speech, not songs. Was the pink Cadillac piece
(20:39):
that you heard, did it have a beat or was
it a cappella? I think it was a cappella or
just had a very I can't remember it very well now.
In fact, I only heard it that once. It just
stuck in my mind, and I can still remember the
cadence of some of it. And there may have just
been a you know, that pink callac that kind of
(21:06):
feeling to it, you know, and I thought, yeah, that
is definitely new. We'll be right back after a quick
break with more from Brian Enow. We're back with more
from Rick Rubin and Brian Eno. Can you remember any
other forms of music that either do or don't yet
(21:26):
exist that you've imagined. Yes, there's one that has just
come into existence, I think, and it's something that I
have been sort of playing around with. Do you know
this listening practice? I don't really know what to call
it exactly. I could call it music, but I'm not
sure this is the right word for it. It's called
(21:48):
as mr H. This is where people are listening very
close up. Noisest like this, and there's lots of smacking
lips and that kind of thing. And basically people tell
quite long stories, but they're hardly stories. It's about that sound,
(22:09):
and they often use stereo microphones so they can move
their voices from one from one of your ears to
the other and back and forth. It's very, very interesting
because these are quite long pieces, and just go on
YouTube and have a look. They've got millions and millions
of listeners, so there's a lot of people doing this.
(22:30):
So I heard these first of all, I think three
or four years ago. I heard the first ones and thought,
this is really interesting. This is like having somebody wandering
around inside your head whispering to you. And I thought,
this is kind of a night. It's like ambient music. Actually,
(22:50):
there's a sort of diminution of content in favor of sound.
So it's a kind of live of the moment sound
experience that doesn't really have a past or a future.
You know. It's not what philosophers called teleological. It doesn't
doesn't go somewhere, it doesn't have a goal. It's a
(23:13):
steady state experience. And this, of course is what I
always wanted ambient music to be. Like a like a
picture on the wall. You don't expect it to change
all the time. What changes is you, the listener. The
art stays relatively still. So I heard this as mr
Stuff and thought, this is a kind of ambient music,
(23:34):
And I thought, what about making music that is vocal music?
But like that, I had never really thought about ambient
music being vocal before then. In fact, it was for
me specifically not vocal. It was a sort of deliberately
personality free music. And putting a voice in there to
(23:58):
me was to say to draw all the attention to
the voice and say, oh, here's somebody with something to
tell you, And I really didn't want that. But then
when I heard this ASMR, I thought, this person clearly
has nothing to tell me at all. They're talking about
how they comb their hair and doing it for twenty
(24:20):
five minutes. Clearly the message is not about combing hair.
The message is about being inside a voice for a
decent length of time. So I started to think, what
would you do to existing music to make it occupy
that same space, And then I started experimenting with my
(24:45):
favorite tool of all in the studio, which is the
low pass filter. Just taking off all the high frequency
of things has an amazing psychological effect to me. It
creates scale, distance, warmth, and a weird sort of intimacy,
(25:05):
which is quite strange, I think because you know, missing
a lot of detail. Your brain very actively engages with
those kinds of sounds. That's my theory about why it's
interesting anyway, So I started thinking, perhaps there could be
a kind of music like that where we take existing songs,
(25:27):
you know, a Rihannah record, or and we just put
it through a low pass filter, but really a really
radical low pass filter. So nothing above say two hundred
and fifty hurts is audible. If you listen to a
Beyonce record through a wall, it's not exhausting, it's warm.
(25:49):
So about a week ago somebody said to me, oh,
have you heard this new as Mr Music thing, and
described exactly that same experiment. So it's like you're listening
to records that are being played in another room. So
you just have that sort of comforting. You can't really
(26:15):
figure out what it is, but it's sociable somehow, it's friendly.
It's like having other people around. It's like a daydream almost. Yes, yes, yes,
that's a good way of saying it. Yeah, sounds fantastic.
On the other side of that, are lyrics ever important
to you? They're very rarely the thing I'm most listening
(26:38):
to in music. I think the base requirement for me
in lyrics is that they don't make the music stupid,
which turns out to be quite a high bar in
many cats Now people say do up lyrics are stupid,
but I don't think they are at all. They serve
(26:59):
the music absolutely. Do up lyrics are the way of
making a voice become musical. What is always awkward to
me is when somebody feels they have something to say
and it's important and you get these clumsy pieces of
scanning and the rhymes don't sound stupid, and so I
(27:21):
can't bear that. I'd rather just leave out the voice
completely than have that. But I mean, there are lyricists
who I absolutely adore, like I always say Joni Mitchell,
who's for me, one of the greatest songwriters of all time,
and her lyrics are so clever and intricate and always
(27:43):
worth returning to that I'm always hearing new things in
her singing and new interpretations of what she's saying. And
there are a few people like that, very very few
whose work I actually do really want to know. The
lyrics of where do you think the line is between
sounds and music? It's where that line is is actually
(28:07):
one of the things I've thought about most in thinking
about music, I had an accident years and years ago
where I was confined to bed for a while and
one afternoon, a rainy afternoon, a friend of mine came
over and I said, as she left, I said, can
you just put a record on for me? This is
(28:28):
I had a record player, but it wasn't close to
the bed, so she put this record on. It was
a record of Welsh harp music, and she just put
the needle on. She left, and it was actually very quiet,
but I couldn't get up to change the volume, and
the rain was beating down outside, and I suddenly had
this realization that I loved the fact that the music
(28:54):
seemed to be arising out of the rain. It wasn't
on top of the rain. Sometimes it was submerged by
the rain. But these notes, the loudest notes, were appearing
out of the rain, and I thought, how lovely to
co opt the surroundings to become part of the music.
So this was in nineteen seventy four, I think or five.
(29:16):
So I started thinking, what about if you made a
kind of music that didn't have a hard edge to it,
that didn't have a hard boundary, that wasn't done so
that you knew that that was a musical sound and
that everything else was just random everyday noise. I thought,
what about softening the edges of the music so that
(29:37):
you include some things that could be noise outside of
the music. That could be the street, or the rain,
or the wind or something like that. So I started
building in this sort of where ambient music started coming from,
was this idea of making music that had a soft
edge that blended into the rest of the world. So
(29:58):
this idea of saying, let's make the edge soft so
that the music can invite in more of the rest
of the world. It draws it in and that becomes
part of the composition as well. And I think this
was at the time I was starting to think about
messiness as well, that I didn't want the work to
(30:22):
be sort of in a little capsule, tidily closed off
from the rest of the world. I wanted it to
feel like it was somehow connected to it that it
bled into the rest of the world. What did you
look like at the time at that point in time,
how were you dressing. I think I still had long hair,
(30:42):
I was still wearing makeup. I think then, yeah, mid seventies.
I was, yes, and I wore a lot of unusual clothes.
I'm just wondering, like, how the just the justa positions,
you know, it's like the person who's dressed like that
making the music that you don't look at or don't
(31:04):
pay attention to. It's it's really interesting. Now, you're absolutely right,
it's sort of inconsistent. And it became clearer to me
that they were inconsistent that my physical appearance was saying
look at me, but my musical output was saying it's nothing.
It's just a tint. It's just an atmosphere, you know,
(31:26):
no big deal, carry on with your life. And maybe
that was again looking for the balance. Yes, yes, you
know the art was looking for the balance, and yep,
I never thought of that. That's very very likely true.
From about the late seventies on, I started to not
want to be a pop star, and really that was
(31:49):
that was because I thought it was misleading people. You know,
if if the whole thing is about me, that's actually
not a very interesting subject. To be honest, I'm not
a boring person or anything like that, but I didn't
think that my personality was the thing that I had
to offer the world. Yeah, that you saw larger issues, yes, exactly,
(32:15):
like what is the edge? What is the edge of art?
That was the issue that really interested me. I think,
what do we call art? And why where do we
draw the boundary? And what do we what do we
mean by art anyway? You know, for me, the most
interesting question for a long long time has been why
(32:36):
do we want to make art at all? And why
do we want to listen to it? I mean, it's
an incredibly deep question. Why do we like music? Why?
You know, if you think about it, what is music?
It's a kind of arrangement of noises. But you know,
we have incredibly strong feelings about them. If you said
(32:58):
to a Martian who just landed on Earth, you played
them four string quartets. You know, there's Shostakovich, there's a Brahms,
there's whatever else, and then there's one done by a computer,
and there's one played by a group of talentless fourteen
year olds who've just got those instruments. And you said,
what's the difference between those? They probably say, well, there's
(33:20):
no difference. They all sound exactly the same. But we
are hearing very very very fine distinctions between these things.
We obviously care about and value these experiences in quite
intense ways. And since I was about seventeen, I've been
(33:40):
thinking about this question, what are we doing it for?
What are we hearing? Why does it matter? We clearly
can live without music, It's not like food. We can't
live without food, and we can't live without clothes, and
we can't live without communicating with other human beings. And
there are all sorts of things we have to do.
(34:02):
Music isn't one of them, Painting isn't one of them, Sculpture,
none of those things that we call arts a thing
that we have to do. So why are we doing them?
And why is it so universal? We don't know of
a culture that doesn't have music, Well, then then I'm
not sure that we don't have to do it. If
that's well, yes, yes, of course, I mean it's it's
(34:25):
it's not functional in terms of survival. It doesn't seem
we have never tried the experiment to take it away,
but it seems to have some ability to allow us
to feel or understand ourselves. The music isn't what's important.
It's the reaction that's important. Yes, exactly, it's what is
(34:49):
happening to us. Yeah, I imagine it when we tap
into that in art, it makes us also feel less alone,
not even that someone made it. But there's something out
there that resonates with me, even if it's the paint. Yes,
I'm not this this thing that doesn't understand itself. Here's
(35:12):
something that is being reflected back that resonates with me.
I feel a connections that it's maybe it's like love,
might be like love. Now, I think this is such
an important point that the thing that binds communities together
is shared culture, and it's for exactly that reason. I
think it's the knowledge that there are a group of
(35:35):
other people who have these same feelings. You might not
even be able to articulate them. But you know, I
can remember this so strongly from when I was young,
that you defined yourself almost by the set of feelings
that you responded to. So, for instance, I remember it
there was a time when you were either a Beatles
(35:57):
fan or a Rolling Stones fan, and they were fundamentally different.
They talked about a different kind of person. You know,
doesn't matter that in the end day all in it
up millionaires and it doesn't matter, it's not important. What
was important was that they presented these two different pictures
(36:18):
of the kinds of feelings that were appropriate to have
about the world, and crossing over from one to the
other was a big decision. I can remember people having
real sort of identity crises about they were finding starting
to find the Stones more exciting than the Beatles, and
(36:39):
in fact they were starting to find the Beatles a
bit sort of whimpy, or vice versa. Actually as well,
it happened both ways. So I think you're right that
you you tap into a sort of community of feelings
and the sense that there are other people who value
the same feelings that I value. That's sort of what
(37:00):
it's about. Really, It's about saying these feelings have value
for me, and there's a lot of others that don't. Yeah,
there's also a great feeling in finding a new piece
of art and sharing it with someone and enjoying it
together is different than enjoying it yourself. There's a real
(37:21):
sense of community in enjoying something that you know, we
enjoy this, but maybe maybe many people don't, and that's fine. Yes,
it's a great feeling of connection, and maybe that's maybe
that's the greatest feeling of connection, is the feeling of
these shared responses to stimuli. Yes, and incidentally, I think
(37:45):
that's the that's the power of religion as well. The
power of religion is not the connection with God, but
the connection with the rest of the congregation. I think
the connection with all of the people who also believe
in that particular story. I'm not really religious myself, but
(38:07):
I really respond to that idea. You know, I got
into gospel music very young. In fact, when I came
to America, I was by then a big gospel fan.
And what surprised me was that all my hip friends
thought it was quite embarrassing if they found a little
(38:30):
bit a quaint or something that I liked gospel music.
To me, it was just like Dooop had been. It
was this amazing, exotic foreign music, and it really came
straight through to me. We're going to take a quick
break and then we'll be back with more from Briany.
Now we're back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation
(38:56):
with Briany. Now, I've heard the story before of the
moment of recognition or the need for what became ambient
music based on the Cologne airport. Sitting in the Colone airport,
how might it have been different if it would have
happened in a natural space as opposed to a man
(39:16):
made space. Well, the question really is would it have
even occurred to me if I was in a natural space.
I'm not sure that it would have done. It was
because I was in an incredibly carefully manufactured space, beautiful
airport where the architects had really looked at every detail,
(39:38):
and the light was beautiful and the lines of the
place were beautiful, and somebody in the cafe had put
on a cassette of German disco music which was ringing
through the airport. I mean, I wasn't postmodern enough at
the time to accept that. I just thought, that's not right.
That part hasn't been thought about. Everything else has been
(40:01):
thought about, but nobody's thought about that. Now. It was
a beautiful day and the airport was nearly empty, and
I was sitting there bathe in light, and it was
one of those cases like we were talking about earlier,
where you think I wish there was another kind of
music for this situation, and I started thinking, so what
would that be? Like? You know, it's an airport, so
(40:23):
you can't be too loud. Obviously, people have to hear announcements.
It has to be interruptible for the same reason it
shouldn't dominate the vocal register, because people need to communicate.
So I just was sort of thinking this out, and
quite soon I thought, right, I think I know what
I could make that music. I know how I could
(40:45):
do that. And that's how that first ambient record came about.
I mean, it wasn't unprecedented. I had been working on
music a little bit like that before, but I suddenly
realized what its role in life could be. If you like,
what the place of this music could be. I knew
it wasn't dance music. I knew it wasn't radio music.
(41:08):
It was functional, but I hadn't yet discovered the function.
It was then that I thought, I know what this
music could be for. Might there be other forms of
ambient music for different use cases? Yes, I did a
record called Narrowly. The subtitle was Music for Thinking. That
(41:29):
really came out of a response. Well, first of all,
hearing from a lot of particularly artists and graphic designers
that they liked having my music playing when they were working.
They didn't want conventional records which kept stopping and starting
and the mood changing, and they were there was lyrics
(41:50):
and they were kind of annoying. They didn't want classical
music because it sort of felt too old. They liked
this music that had this sort of directionless, atmospheric quality.
So I thought, oh, good, so it's working. It's working functionally.
So I thought, so what about when you want to
(42:11):
sit and concentrate on something, You want to have something
that kind of calms the world down a little bit
around you, that softens, as Eric Sati said, softens the
clink of fork against dinner plate or something like that.
I forget the quote exactly, but you want something that
(42:33):
is sort of a slight barrier to the noises of
the world, and it becomes a barrier by sucking them
into itself. And so that I came up with this
piece Coordinarily, which is an hour long piece, which at
that time was the longest I could make it. And
I started thinking then about the idea of music that
(42:56):
doesn't have a beginning or end, that just is theoretically infinite. Well,
that didn't become possible until the nineties when I started
working with computer and it was possible to make the
kinds of programs I make now where where the music
effectively never repeats. And my ambition always then was to
(43:21):
try to make an experience a little bit like sitting
by a river. So you're sitting by the river. It's
always the same river, but as you know, it's never
the same river twice, So every time you look up
at the river, it's doing something a little bit different. Now,
(43:41):
it's not like watching a film where suddenly the river
turns blood red or gets much bigger or something like that.
I didn't want drama. I just wanted something like nature,
subtle variations. Subtle variations, yes, and variations that stay within
(44:02):
a kind of range of possibilities and explore that range
rather randomly. I just wanted the thing to be what
Harold Bud used to call eternally pretty. That was his
wif seting it. Dear Harold. He died about two months
ago from COVID, very sad. So I dedicate this thought
(44:24):
to Harold. So. Yes, So when Harold and I met,
we were both pretty much on this groove of thinking,
what about making music that isn't designed to upset anybody? Now,
of course that sounds pretty uncontroversial now, but in the
mid to late seventies that was considered to be the
(44:47):
biggest sell out of all time. You know, music was
supposed to shake the world and create revolutions and upset
your parents and all sorts of things like that. And
we thought, what about making music that is just really comfortable?
Comfortable was probably the most controversial word you could use.
Then what about music that makes you feel warm and
(45:12):
friendly and open and able to surrender? When I realized
that surrender was really the thing that I was interested
in for that kind of music. Obviously, I don't only
make that kind of music, but for that I wanted
to make something that would make you think I can
(45:33):
let something happen to me. I don't have to defend
against everything. I can get out of that posture of
self defense. If you think of the things that where
we achieve transcendence. If you like or ecstasy, it's sex, drugs, art,
(45:54):
and religion. Those are all the places where we say,
I'm going to let go and just let this thing
happen to me. I'm not going to control it. I'm
going to be taken somewhere. Now, it's interesting to me
that although we are constant trying to control, our biggest
thrills come from letting go of control. And so what
(46:16):
becomes obvious that is that it's the combination of those
two that we should really be specializing in. We should
and we should not forget the surrender part. We should
not think that surrendering is passivity or cowardice or incompetence.
We should say it's one of the ways we deal
(46:37):
with the world. So I think art is the place
where we go to have this feeling again, to remember
that feeling of going with the flow, of letting something
happen to us in real life. In the rest of life,
I should say, we are still able to do that,
we can remember that feeling. For me, there are certain
(46:59):
I can see a film that has an energy in
it that could affect me for months. Yes, and I'm
very open to the energies contained in things, So I'm
protective of what I watch for that reasons. I don't
want to have a bad time. A lot of the time,
(47:20):
I don't choose that. I just want to ask how
sensitive you are in that respect. Yes, I think I'm
very sensitive in that respect, and to the extent that
certain experiences I don't want to have them very often
because I don't want them to lose their power. So
just about the single album that probably influenced me more
(47:44):
than almost any other was the third Valve Underground album.
That was a really, really important record in my life
because so many things I had been wondering if they
were possible suddenly appeared on that album, and also a
lot of things I hadn't even conceived of. For that reason,
I've never owned the album. I haven't even listened to
(48:07):
it that many times because I really wanted it to
retain that power. I didn't want it to become commonplace.
Another piece like that is the Steve Ripe piece It's
going to Rain, that tape piece from I think nineteen
sixty four. That absolutely devastated me. The first time I
(48:28):
heard it. I understood so many things about music that
I had not even dreamed of before that piece, and
I still regard it as a key moment in my life.
And I think I've probably listened to it four times.
It turned a switch, and the switch stayed turned. Yes,
(48:49):
I didn't have to keep turning it again, you know,
it stayed turned. In your evolution up to ambient music,
it's fascinating to me that you could ever do anything
different than that. Do you know what I'm saying? It's
like it almost feels like that's the end of the
line in terms of the minimalist approach. You you got there,
(49:15):
so it's interesting that you do other things like you
didn't do the Mandrean staying in the same language only. Yes,
perhaps if I had carried on living in New York,
I would have done because I would have always wanted
more of that kind of music. But I've just had
the very interesting experience of do you know about this
(49:38):
Sonas project that I'm doing. I don't really tell me. Okay, Well,
Sonas asked me to curate a channel for them. Basically
it's like my own radio station, and I like the
idea of that, but I thought, what I'd really like
to do is to curate a station that plays only
(49:59):
my music because I've got so much unreleased stuff. You know.
I work in the studio every day pretty much, and
some of it is just experiments where I try something
out just to see what it would do if you
tried to make a piece of music like that. And
I have thousands of thousands of recordings like that. I
(50:23):
just mix everything, you know. When I finished the day,
I mix whatever I've done that day. Sometimes it can
be five or six different pieces. Even so I have
this vast library of stuff. Some of it is really
quite interesting, and I thought, how nice would it be
to have a radio channel where you just switch it
(50:45):
on and outcome pieces of music that you've never heard before,
will probably never hear again. And they're all quite different
from one another. There's quite a range of stuff. Some
of it is very ambient, some of it is very
hard beat stuff, some of it's really electronic. Some of
it is touchingly human, which is how you describe something
(51:09):
that is rather amateur. So for the first time in
my life, I thought, well, I'll just start listening through
to those things. And so they play on random shuffle
out of my computer, and I have to say, I
so like the collisions, the strange combinations of things. You know,
something from nineteen ninety one next to something I did
(51:32):
last year next to something from twenty five, and no
rationale to the choices that they're randomly selected. And although
some of the music is pretty challenging, a lot of
it is quite easy to listen to. And as I
(51:54):
would say to people, you'll probably only hear at once,
So if you don't like it, just wait, something else
will come along soon. Yeah, I have one last question
to ask, just because I'm really curious, what's your relationship
to spirituality? Well, as you can tell from the way
I talk too much, I think about this kind of
(52:19):
thing quite a lot. What I always want to do
is to cut away as much of the shit as
possible and see what's left. So I don't want to
be a believer. I want to be somebody who, as
far as possible, understands and knows things. Believing things leaves
(52:39):
me a little bit unsatisfied. If I find myself believing something,
I want to test the belief. I want to say,
how do I find out how valid this is? How
true this is? Now? In real belief, in proper faith,
you're not supposed to do that. Faith is supposed to be,
by definition, the acceptance of something that you cannot find
(53:01):
evidence for. If you can find evidence for, it's not
faith anymore. It's called knowledge. Then. So this is a
long way round of saying that I'm not anti spiritual,
I'm not anti religion. Actually, in fact, I can see
how religion really cements some communities together and really helps
(53:23):
people in their lives. But I'm not by nature a believer,
So it's difficult for me to use that kind of cement.
My cement has to come from trying to understand things
and to see how they work, and to share those
ideas with other people. Yeah so, I think one one
(53:44):
of the other things that surrendering prepares you for is
the experience of uncertainty, the experience of not knowing the
answer but still having to do something. You know, the
fact that you don't know the answer can't cripple you.
And of course a lot of people are crippled by
(54:06):
not knowing the answer, and so they just choose an
inappropriate answer just for the want of an answer. Yes, so,
you just have to accept that you don't know the answers,
and you will make mistakes, and you will need to
change your values and your tools, and some of them
(54:30):
might last you a lifetime. But you're lucky if that happens.
I haven't got any that lasted me a lifetime. Thank
you so much for doing this amazing pleasure speaking with you.
Yes you too, I must say I really enjoyed that.
Thanks to Brian Eno for sharing as artistic philosophy for
(54:51):
us to hear a favorite Brian Eno tracks. Head to
Broken Record podcast at part. Be sure to subscribe to
our YouTube channel, a YouTube dot com slash a Broken
Record podcast we can find all of our new episodes.
You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken
Record is produced a help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel,
Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help
(55:16):
from Nick Chaffee. Our executive producer is Mio Labella. Broken
Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you
like the show, please remember to share. Rate interviewers coming
a podcast. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richard.
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