Environmental music
“Well I guess in my mind I’ve always wanted music to do something to me and maybe I’ve always wanted it do almost the same thing. But to make music do the same thing you have to keep making different music. Now, when I first started making music, I was interested in the personalities I could play; the different figures I could be. I lost interest in that. I didn’t want myself to be in the center of the music anymore and so I begun experimenting with trying to remove the personality in some ways. For example by making more than one voice so that it stops being a single figure in the middle of the picture. And I’ve tried singing using nonsensical words. Using words backwards. Putting strange sounds on my voice. Different ways of reducing the importance of the figure in the picture. Because what I started to get interested in was not the figure, but the landscape behind the figure.
I found the figure more and more of a problem. It’s like with a painting, if you have a picture of a landscape you look at that and your eye moves freely over the landscape. If you put a human figure, even if it’s tiny little one, it becomes the center of your attention. It’s very difficult to ignore that. You know, humans relate to other humans and with music that became a problem because I felt that as long as I was in the center of the picture it made you as the listener outside the picture. Now if I took myself out of that picture, left an open, like an open field, a sand field of some kind, which invited you in and I felt by removing my own personality as represented by my voice, by removing that personality, I opened up the music in a new way. I made a space that people could come in to. So it made the music much more environmental. Just that single act.
In a strange way electronics have reopened that area because of two reasons. One is that recording techniques are so much better now, acoustic instruments suddenly start to become interesting again. For a long time acoustic instruments were compromised by the recordings. Electronic instruments were developed for recording. They worked better for a long time. But now recording has started to catch up with it. So suddenly I think acoustic instruments sound interesting again. The other thing of course is that sampling, the whole thing of sampling just suddenly re interested people in acoustic sources and they start to realize that there’s something very moving about the kind of humanity, the material quality of a real instrument.
I was thinking about this a lot the last few years because I worked with synthesizers a lot and I always noticed that when I worked with synthesizers I just don’t work with them: I make loudspeakers, strange constructions to make the sound more complicated and it occurred to me that the problem with synthesizers is that what you’re hearing in the end is the movement of a few atoms amplified. Really just a few atoms. When you listen to a grand piano you’re hearing the movement of billions of molecules. Everything is acting: the wood, the strings, the metal, the temperature in the room. They all change the way that thing sounds. So for that reason those instruments remain interesting because they’re never the same twice. If you play this piano today it isn’t the same piano that you play tomorrow.
So I think actually that the sort of novelty of electronics has slightly worn off and people are starting to look to those types of instruments again. It’s the same way with something that happened, the same movement happened in painting. There was a period when everybody wanted their colours to be totally flat and with very hard edges and just so. Towards the middle of the seventies people started getting messy again. You started to see brush strokes, you started to see evidence of the human hand and of the materials. I think the same is happening in music. Once again it’s exciting to realize that this thing has a history. It’s not just something that was invented in a factory in Japan last year. That there’s a whole history and tradition which becomes part of the performance. You can’t listen to a piano without listening to the whole history of piano music as well.”
~ Brian Eno.