Discreet Music.
Eno found Discreet Music in amongst some fragments of time that connected Kant, Satie, Cage, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass . . . on a beach where the tide had gone out . . . Kant’s beauty, Satie’s brilliance, Cage’s thinking, Young’s infinity, Reich’s tape recorder, Glass’s reflection.
(Kant thought of Tafel music in the 18th Century – he imagined a sublime form of muzak that could open the gates to heaven, or at least encourage guests to talk to each other at banquets. Satie saw a way that music could melt into sound, and his ‘furniture music’ also anticipated a world where music functioned in the background, behind life, under thought, around the back of action. Satie’s instructions, incidentally, as to how to play some of his lovely, lonely piano music have the ring of Eno – “with amazement”, “don’t leave”, “with great kindness”, “more intimately”, “don’t be proud.” It was as if Satie was gently liberating musicians from centuries of layered conventions regarding the transferring of notation into music. Cage clarified structure, either with sounds or silence, and in the 1940s he was making music that sounded as if it had been influenced by Eno.Young drew a straight line and followed it, absolutely as far as he absolutely could. Reich would stretch a single chord out for a matter of minutes. Glass was not so much a minimalist as a late blooming romantic who could match diabolical patience with a remarkable sense of tonality. Eno pieced all these fragments together to create his own fragment, from the point of view of someone who could hear inside the Velvet Underground the way the guitars were down tuned in deference to what Cale’s viola was built to do, something that suited Reeds voice, and which gave everything a squelched, slight squashed sound with plenty of sustain.)
Eno found Discreet Music where it landed.
He lifted it up and it left an impression.
He turned music down and he slowed music down. He turned down the heat, reduced the tension, settled down, sort of stopped music up to the point where it would never appear to stop. The funny thing was, although no one laughed, was that although the music seemed featureless, emptied, almost ruined, and it seemed to some bland and pointless, and it had been produced as drily and as scientifically as process music often is, it was quite beautiful. Actually, it was lovely. This perhaps is why the ambience of Eno, the music where he concentrated on concentrating a lack of concentration into a single musical universe, has travelled a lot further than you might have imagined it would at the time.
At the time he still had Roxy Music feathers stuck to him, he was over in the corner still singing songs that celebrated the sexual revolution, the mincemeat of Dada and the noise of pop. Discreet Music seemed like a kind of Enovelty, and one that if anything came out of the past rather than the future, one that would never really take off. It never occurred to those of us loving this record, the sleeve it came in, the Obscure label Eno had released it on, that this shaped, shapeless music would permeate and saturate the future world. That it could really become the sound of the world around us.
It seemed like a practical joke, or an indulgent doodle, or what Eno did on his holidays.
Look what he found on the beach. Not so much a piece of driftwood as a piece of drift.
A piece of the sentence “art is precisely what one cannot do – it is tireless seeking.”
A piece of material, a piece of materialisation.
A piece of a soundtrack to the thought “what one state of consciousness regards as real could in truth be the dream images of another state of consciousness.”
(A piece of his face.)
Tracklist:
Discreet Music 1 & 2
Fullness Of Wind
French Catalogues
Brutal Ardour
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