TWiS Listening Post 0008
This went out today as a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It’s a supplement to the free Tuesday and Friday issues: an annotated playlist of recommended music. I wrote about (1) a cover of Brian Eno (more on which below), (2) a soundscape by Irene Buckley (working in collaboration with the dance company Junk Ensemble), and (3) and Aphex Twin cover by classical guitarist Simon Farintosh.
While the weekly Wednesday issues are intended for paid subscribers, I did want to share one of the items here. This is on the Eno covers album:
SPACE MUSIC: It’s an irony of artistic achievement that great success eventually engenders tributes that fall well short of the subject at hand. It’s an additional irony in the case of Brian Eno that this musician who helped truly usher in the concept of the studio as a musical instrument might find his work reproduced in a manner — that is, with live instrumentation — that his own techniques served to supplant, even to upend. It’s not that the connection between Eno’s ambient music and classical chamber music is unfounded. Quite the contrary, the story goes that his composition of the album Discreet Music was informed by harp music playing all too quietly in the background. Likewise, the full second side of that ur-ambient album consists of variations on one of the great warhorses of classical music, Pachelbel’s Canon. Still, it’s with some deserved trepidation that the admiring listener approaches the classical world’s occasional take on Eno’s music, because so much of what distinguishes it is the very thing that classical music often can’t abide, which is the texture of the sound itself.
All of which is why Performing Brian Eno: Discreet Music/Music for Airports/Thursday Afternoon, on the great Sub Rosa record label, by the Dedalus Ensemble, is such a treat. It opens with a segment of Thursday Afternoon, at 15 minutes long barely a quarter of the original. What makes it work so well is how much it gestures toward texture, the way the strings achieve the droning room tone of the source material. The liner notes by Didier Arschour expertly pinpoint how “natural acoustics and spatialization replace the studio effects that characterized the original recordings, strikingly enriching the acoustic space and reinforcing the hypnotic and immersive aspects of these works.” In other words, what began in the studio still is music of an interior physical space. Also on the record, renditions of Discreet Music and Music for Airports. The ensemble is Aschour, guitar, arrangements and artistic direction; Denis Chouillet, piano ; Amélie Berson, flute; Fabrice Villard, clarinet; Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, saxophone; Christian Pruvost, trumpet; Thierry Madiot, trombone; Silvia Tarozzi, violin; Cyprien Busolini, viola; Deborah Walker, cello; Eric Chalan, double bass & vibraphone. (Album found via Warren Ellis’ newsletter.)
