Obscurities

Obscure Records was set up in 1975 by Brian Eno. Effectively it was a subdivision of Island and later Polydor Records. It lasted three years and put out ten records, one of which was by Eno. Nine of them were produced by him (the other one had him down as 'executive producer'). Even given that this was the Seventies, Obscure was a brave venture. After all, Eno had only been in the public consciousness for three years or so, and that was mostly as a glam icon making funny noises on synth and churning out futurist avant pop gems.

Yet here he was, allowed to put out whatever he liked, on his own label. And the stuff he did put out sounded like it belonged on labels like Deutsche Grammofon or Incus or FMP or ESP or on Audio Arts cassettes. There wasn't much in the way of electronics or interesting haircuts or feather boas.

For the most part Obscure acted as a home to a hub of English 'experimental' composers. It was the first time the work of Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, David Toop and Christopher Hobbs could be heard outside of their usual small run cassettes or vinyl. This was a nod to some of Eno's immediate influences, many of whom he played with in the Scratch Orchestra.

The records were made quickly and cheaply and not all of those involved were happy with the results (Tom Phillips' Irma seems a case in point, and it is pretty awful), but at its best Obscure showcased a range of peculiarly English experimentalism that fed on Cage, free improvisation, 'world' music and jazz. With the exception of Eno's Discreet Music and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra album, most of the Obscure releases have been sporadically available, with many not making it to CD. This mix highlights a few of my favourite party starters from the label.

Obscurities by Astrogarage on Mixcloud

brian in brighton 2

so off to 'be right on' again to see brian and chums do pure scenius. three sets of structured improvisations and rough compositions presented in the form of a lecture by brian and chums. these chums included the necks, so why chris had to persuade me to go is a bit beyond me. but i guess i thought that such a pairing could only be disappointing, such was its promise. anyway...

we watched two of the three sets. this review pretty much chimes with everything i thought, so no need for me to write more, other than that i'd love to have seen what messages eno was sending to each musician's screen. i don't think anyone else has ever done this (i may be wrong) - the idea of 'conducton' has been around a while but relies on gesture rather than words and anyway such ventures seem limited to 'free' improv. it's something eno's been interested in for a while; to take musicians out of their comfort zone and to avoid the plod of 'a jam'. and for the most part it worked; some beautiful moments, and nothing much outstayed its welcome. chris heard someone remark that it 'was very avant-garde'. i was surprised at the comparatively small size of the audience compared to the previous week's gig. maybe brghton isn't as hip as we all think...

brian in brighton

off to brighton last saturday for a top quality day with some friends doing the kind of things londoners do in brighton - fish and chips, arsing around on the pier etc, then to see icebreaker and bj cole perform brian eno's apollo at the brighton dome. brian hisself (in his sixties and still sexy) came on and introduced the music, which was played to a special cut of the film it was written for (al reinert's for all mankind).



the film interested me much less than seeing/hearing just how icebreaker were going to tackle the music, mainly because i've seen it a silly number of times. jun lee's orchestrations were subtle and inventive, and this has to go down as the first gig i've been at that featured both panpipes and accordion that i didn't want to run away from screaming. an ending (ascent) was particularly transcendent, particularly in the final reprise where mr cole joined in with some delish pedal steel.

after that, brian returned to the atage and announced 'an unadvertised adition to the published programme - some things which have never been played live before'. the ensemble than played four songs - two from 'another day on earth' and to my shock/delight/amazement etc, two from 'before and after science' - 'julie with...' and 'by this river'. i blubbed a little bit. that's not something i ever thought i'd hear (bri famously does not do this kind of thing), and though the buzz was nostalgia-driven as much as anything, these were rather lovely versions. the closing 'and then so clear' with bri's vocoded sexchange vocal, was absolutely fucking swoonsome.

years ago, in germany....

bbc four's rather super krautrock documentary was (at an hour) necessarily a bit sketchy. a six part series would have been more like it but hey....what was particularly great was seeing these beautiful, mad old geezers still at it some 40 years later. it was especially lovely to see danny fichelscher (guitarist with popul vuh and drummer with amon duul 2 and one of my particular heroes) still around, and confirm once more that michael rother is probably the nicest and best looking 59 year old bloke on the planet. even faust came across as rather likeable. and renate knaup is clearly the thinking man's nico.

my first exposure to, er, german indigenous rock ('krautrock' has always struck me as a dodgy term) was to can as a feckless teen in the late 70s. when my parents were out i would lie on the floor with my head between the speakers of our dodgy old decca 'music centre' and blast 'yoo doo right' at silly volume. can and faust seemed much more radical, dangerous and fun than punk, and obviously for a nascent muso snob they had the required exotica value. wandering around school with a copy of faust's first album (clear vinyl, clear sleeve, clear insert) became a habit.













but it was the much more low key stuff put out by the neu!/rother/cluster axis, early kraftwerk and especially popol vuh that really got me. many of the musicians in the documentary spoke of their determination to avoid sounding english or american - to make it year zero for music. to me it's these bands that managed to do that best. even neu! seemed to have much less to do with 'rock' than can, amon duul or faust, whose music still bore traces of american or british psychedelia (or the velvet underground's dystopian throb).

the music that harmonia, cluster and rother put out in the mid 70s is both distinctively european and seemingly not much to do with anything else that ever went before it. it seemed to be more about marvelling at the world rather than grabbing it by the balls and giving it a good kicking. more organic than kraftwerk, less kosmische than t. dream or ashra or schulze, their music was benevolent without being merely 'pretty'; iggy pop summed neu! up in the doc as 'pastoral psychedelia'. certainly looking at the view from harmonia's (and now rother's) studio in forst puts that music in some kind of context.

what was interesting too was the slightly ambivalent attitude from moebius and co towards their collaborations with mr eno in 1976. brian was at a creative impasse at the time and after a week of improvising, recording and hanging out in forst, eno disappeared with the tapes (even using one track for his next album). as rother said rather ruefully - 'we couldn't afford blank tapes - we were poor'; moebius was less circumspect; 'eno told me we would be rich one day - he was not right'.

on some faraway beach

i've just finished reading david sheppard's biog of bwian eno. it's a good read, and mr sheppard is both knowledgeable and an elegant writer. and though a fan, he maintains enough critical distance from his subject to avoid hagiography.it's certainly better than eric tamm's rather miserable tome. a couple of things stand out - the book's 439 pages long, yet by page 365 we're only at 1984, leaving less than a hundred pages for the last quarter of a century. the other is the sometimes less than favourable opinions of brain given by his sometime associates. gavin bryars is particularly sour, as is john cale on occasion (but then that's probably to be expected). what certainly comes across is eno's ability to be in the right place at the right time, and his ability to soak up high art conceptualism and squeeze it into pop music with varying degrees of success. a certain steely determination that machiavelli may have been proud of seems to mark some of his dealings, while others are marked by a heartwarming generosity of spirit towards his fellow musicians.

as sheppard says in his intro, there's a huge amount of enoid info out there, so any obsessives are probably likely to find little in the book they hadn't known already. and that's largely true, though i did pick up a few nuggets (as well as spotting a couple of errors, sadsack that i am). nowadays eno seems a rather distant figure to me, and some things about him (particularly his somewhat patronising obsession with africa) kind of grate. let's not mention coldplay or u2 or james or robbie williams. so i read the book with a certain detatchment which grew as it went on (the last hundred pages became a bit of an effort). last night i stuck on music for films, followed by another green world. it's no exaggeration to say i know every last note, drone, whirr and hiss of those records. i was relieved to find that despite all the words written by brian or mr shepherd or lester bangs or whoever, there's still an essential opacity, mystery and unabashed beauty to eno's music of that time that those words can't get rid of.

cale is of the opinion that brian's always slightly removed from his music, citing his reluctance to sing as a sign that he likes to hide his real self, his essence. he might have a point, but then again it's the opinion of someone whose music has often been about revealing the dark corners of his own psyche (listen to 'music for a new society', if you can). there's something else at work in what i reckon is brian's most emotionally engaging work; stuff like 'becalmed', 'slow water', 'through hollow lands'. i don't know what it is exactly, but it's way beyond any talk of oblique strategies or systems and in their own quiet way those pieces are as emotionally charged for me as beethoven's late quartets, john coltrane or even mr cale himself. for those pieces to still curl themselves around my core in the same way they did some 30 years ago when i first heard them must count for something.