Extended Cut: Brian Eno and Rick Rubin

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond here. The Broken Record team has been revisiting some of our favorite episodes and releasing new extended cuts via pushnik, our Apple podcast subscription program. To hear more extended cut episodes like this one, visit our show page and Apple Podcasts and start your free trial today. We're giving you a taste of what these extended cuts sound like with this version of Rick's conversation with Brian Eno. This episode was recorded just before the debut of Enos Sonos radio station The Lighthouse, where ENO's programmed day's worth of unreleased tracks from various errors in his career. In this episode, we get to hear Rick and you Know, discuss the works that changed ENO's conception of art, the way lyrics generally hold very little water for the both of them, and more on the way Eno incorporates randomness into his music. To hear more extended cuts of our conversations with artists like The Beastie Boys, Quests, Love, Brandy Carlyle, Tanya Tucker, and Moby, subscribe to Pushnick on Apple Podcasts for four ninety nine a month. You'll get exclusive content like the Broken Record Extended Cuts and uninterrupted ad free listening across fourteen shows in the Pushkin Industry's catalog, including Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. Search for Broken Record and Apple podcasts. Visit our show page and sign up there. You can try it for free for seven days. This is Broken Record liner Notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. I'm going to start in a funny place because just now before we start, 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 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, you have a stream of information going into the MIDI and you say leave out thirteen percent of that or twenty two percent or whatever you choose. 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 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 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 ever feel like going the other way? Do you ever start with something that synthetical programmed and decide to recreate 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 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. 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 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 pick a number like, let's try eighteen, let's try twenty two, Let's and listen to all the results and then pick the one that's best. Is that typically how it works well. I can change the parameters as as the thing is running. So if if I'm running a drum loop, for example, a MIDI drum loop, I can sort of think, Okay, what happens if I give it seven percent of mutation of or what happens if I leave out fifty? You know what happens actually is that you get Elvin Jones. If you leave at a very big percentage, it sounds like Alvin Jones. It's very interesting. You still have the sort of fragmentary skeleton of the original drum part, but it accents in the strangest places. So what I can do, So what I have been doing quite a lot is tuning the system so that it starts to get into that interesting area of quasi human and then I run it several times and I can record the MIDI that comes out. So sometimes there will be a particularly interesting section where the drummer does something really quite extraordinary and does something that you think, wow, I've never heard of drummer do that, and I love it. So then since I've recorded the MIDI, I can use that as my basic loop, that section that I thought was amazing, that can be the basic loop, and then I can again do some variations and mutations on that. So sometimes the process is sort of iterated two or three times to get somewhere I like. Now. I should say that very little of this stuff have I actually released. It's still in the stage of where I'm just playing with it and fascinated by it. But I've also been using it in a way that I have released it with them ambient music. So since a lot of the work that I've done that I call ambient involves long looped melodies, often several of them playing asynchronously, the loops collide with each other in different ways all the time, so there's always new combinations. I've been using the scriptures, this is what we call them, the scriptures in those as well, so that for instance, a melody might have say fifteen notes in it, or eleven notes or something like that, and three or four of them can manifest differently, so they are two or three choices for what those particular notes can become. There's always a sort of it's a very organic sounding variation going on. It's it's very interesting and the results don't sound at all computerish. That's what's nice that people listen to them and think, oh, that's nice. How did you do that? When you tell them, they're inevitably disappointed because they thought it was a moment of artistic inspiration, And I say it was. It just happened somewhere else. Further back along the line, would you say that the random aspect of the process is always at work free 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 affect your work. It's a nice idea, and I like it and I respect 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. We all develop a set of preferences and habits about where we go. The interesting thing about randomness is that sometimes 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 didn't know you were looking for. Essentially, that's exactly right. Yes, something happens, and you kind of recognize that, you think, yes, makes sense, even though it's a little bit like neural networks. You know, if you if you work with neural networks, they come to decisions or propositions that you don't really you didn't know before. They're unfamiliar, but you also don't actually know how it got there. So 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 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 by the seat of your pants and you have to ootiate it somehow. 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 the difference between life and death in a piece of work, I think, as opposed to a person who's just playing a thing they've done a thousand times before and they don't sound like they're particularly interested in it. They're just doing it right. They're not doing it well in particular. So I suppose all of the strategies and techniques that I use, and there are quite a lot of them, besides randomness, are really ways of trying to find myself in a new place, because I get 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 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 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 art? Are you an explorer? Have you lived all over the world? Do you continue to put yourself off 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 now it's not that bad. But the only reason I ever go anywhere really is because I don't have a choice. For instance, I had to go to New York in nineteen seventy eight to 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 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, 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, I think we have that incoming. And it's funny. I'm wondering if the urge to adventure creatively is the balance for the fact that we lived such her metic lives. I think that's a very good theory. Yes, I know that whatever I'm doing in my work always seems to 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. 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 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 a bit of city. I needed, you know, some grits, some noise. So yes, I think I think that's kind of what artists do. They're all is 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 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'd love to make one of those sort of graphs over time of the things that have changed in my taste. 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. 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 color, and certainly the melancholy of it was a big part 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 into the purple area when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was very, very impressed by Mandreal from early on. I used him as an example earlier, but it was probably because of Mandreal that I thought I really want to be a painter more than anything else. 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 was the closest thing to magic that I had ever scene. And at the same time I was I love duop music. Now you're probably a probably a bit too young for duap, aren't you, But I'm a fan of duop. 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 that played two or three hours of duop every weekend don Que 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 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 Mondrea and you know how. And I was always very drawn to this idea of doing as much as possible with as little 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, with Mandre and you just you didn't really know where the art was being made. Was it in the picture or was it? Was it in you? It was it a factor of recognition on your part. So that part of my taste hasn't changed. I really am 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, but part of the feeling of one of the feelings I always have that tells me something is great is kind of anger. 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 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 something that I was already a fan of and did. 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 get I get very excited because I'm always looking for something that feels like a new way In what you said, there is something that I've often thought 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 listen 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, 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 inventing something new which isn't that thing, but isn't something that I really had thought about before either. So it's quite often hearing something just missing the mark that makes me think that could be better. That's been an important thread for me. So the other thing about taste. One aspect of my taste that has changed over the year is that I've become much more fond of messiness or incoherence or untidiness in music. Now. Partly this is because it is now eminently possible to make things absolutely flawless in every respect, And of course when something becomes very possible, it becomes quite boring as well. You just you quickly tire of it. And so I noticed at first my taste in painting started changing when I saw the work of the paint of Philip Guston for the first time. Philip Guston's work is almost ugly. It's very very clumsy and awkwardly painted, but somehow very gripping, and I remember thinking do I hate this or do I love it? And I really didn't know for quite a long time. I was drawn to keep looking at those things. So that's something that's changed that that was not a taste that I had as a younger person. 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. 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 even wrote to Pete Townsend saying saying, you shouldn't be releasing stuff like this, you were 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 a kind of pop art in the sense that you know, there was pop art in painting, but there wasn't really pop art in pop music. There hadn't been that ironic approach to music that the who were using them and it didn't really happen again. Well, I think Frank Zappa picked it up as well. He was one of the great music or ironists in that he sort of stood outside of what he was doing and he watched it from the outside and fashioned it from the outside. Whereas the traditional image of the artist is someone lost in their own passions, completely inside the work and kind of crying out to the world. Whereas what happened from about the mid sixties in pop music, first of all in England, I think, was this notion that actually, you know what, we've got the history of pop music behind us. We can pick and choose and put things together in new ways. So it was a much more sort of detached process than people had considered pop music to be until that time. 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 surprised by it. For instance, I remember saying to David Byrne we were in a car in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty and 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 an unscripted idea. I'd heard something on NPR. 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 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, had I knew about the last poets. 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 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 thought that kind of feeling to it, you know, and I thought, yeah, that is definitely new. Can you remember any other forms of music that either do or don't yet exist that you 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 it is the right word for it. It's called ASMR. 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. 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. So I heard these first of all, I think three or four years ago. I heard the first one 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, which is quite strange. I think, because you know you're 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, you know, Hannah 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. So about a week ago somebody said to me, oh, have you heard this new ASMR 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 figure out what it is, but it's sociable somehow, it's friendly. It's like having other people around. It's like a day dreamer must 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 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 now people say, do up lyrics are stupid, but I don't think they are at all. They serve 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 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 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. For instance, I very rarely read people's lyrics. You know, they're often printed on the sleeves of things I just don't want to know. I'm happier not knowing, generally, unless it's Joni Mitchell or one of a couple of dozen great writers. Do you like poetry, Yes, yes I do. And one of the interesting things I don't know if you've found this. Have you ever tried turning poems into songs. It's really hard. I worked. I work with a poet who also is a rapper, and we did a lot of work to make the poetry with music not sound like rapping, and it was difficult. It took years to break out of the way the rhythm of the vocals attaches to the music. And it's another thing that I found very interesting is lyrics without rhythm. If you heard a rap piece like Pink Cadillac without a beat, the lyrics have a much more profound effect when there's no beat playing. Yes, always, always, it's there's something that happens when the beat is playing that takes up too much of our attention to where the lyrics become secondary. Always for me, when there's a beat, the lyrics are always secondary. Yes, yes, I agree with you. And I think the other thing is that poetry by definition, puts a lot of freight in those words, and in the sense the words are nearly always too heavy to make songs out of. They sound awkward, they sound contrived, they don't sound like what somebody would naturally sing, and there are very few exceptions to that. One of the only things I can think of is that Fug's song. It's the poem is called bury me in an Apple Orchard, that I may taste your lips again. It's a lovely poem, and they do it in waltz time. Interestingly, whenever I've tried to do anything with poetry, I've found that waltz time is a much much better time to use. And I've got this theory that we actually talk in three four, not in four four. We talk in groups of three syllables. And I mean, I've never not really had very much success in turning poetry into songs or any at all. Actually, why not, be frank, I think it's a very hard thing to do because in a sense, you want the words to be as though they are kind of exclamations that come out of somebody spontaneously. You want that feeling in them somehow, and poetry doesn't often have that feeling. It's one of the things that makes opera, I think, listenable, is the fact that in I think we translated the opera into English, it wouldn't work. And there's something about the fact that at least I don't know what they're saying. That allows that allows that to work absolutely true. I mean it turns it into duop. You know. In duop people are saying shut up and shoot and things like that, which don't really mean anything. But that's what the Italian sounds left to us. It's old on who knows what that means? Yeah, do you think the line is between sounds and music? It's where that line is. Is actually 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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? What was your I think I still had long hair, I was still wearing makeup. I think then yeah, mid seventies, I was, yes, and I wore a lot of unusual clothes. And 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 pay attention to. It's just really interesting. Really, you're absolutely right. It's 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, no big deal, carry on with your life. And maybe that was again looking for the balance. Yes, yes, you know that 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 that was because I thought it was miss leading 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, you saw larger issues, yes, exactly, like what is the edge? What is the edge of art? That 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 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 to a martian who just landed on earth. You played them four string quartets. You know, there's Shostakovich, there's a Brahms 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 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 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. Music isn't one of them, Painting isn't one of them, Sculpture, None of those things that we call arts are things 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 the case. Yes, yes, I mean it's not functional in terms of survival. It doesn't seem we have never tried the experiment. Yeah, 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 happening to us. I think it's easier to see why we like novels and art forms that involve language in that way, because it must be an important thing for humans to be able to imagine other worlds. That's how we work. You know, we're good at visualizing worlds that don't exist. We can imagine a bridge across that river. We can imagine a city where this and that happens. We can imagine all sorts of things because we have a lot of experience in imagining. So you can see with novels where somebody sets out, here's a world where these people do this kind of thing, and this person does that to that, and all of this stuff happens, and what do you think about it? We're constantly revising our thoughts about what we think about things on the basis of fiction. Essentially, fiction is an experiment in what could happen, what if we did this? But whereas it's easy to see that with things that have words, like novels, it's much harder to see it with things that have no narrative content, like music, or earrings or or cake decorations. All of those things seem to be very arbitrary by comparison to the stuff that happens in novels. But my argument is that actually they're not arbitrary at all. Style what's called style is content, and we're very alert to stylistic changes. We know that we feel the difference. No is not the right word. We feel the difference between something that's painted very carefully with quiet, slow strokes and something that's painted very quickly with broad, violent strokes. It doesn't matter what it is that's being painted. Even at that level, we start to get feelings for that work. Music affects us the same the same way, or maybe more so than words, in that it's an abstraction and in the abstract that we can I'll say recognize because no, as we say it's not no, it's more like recognize a greater truth or or have more of a awareness or something, or sense something that that's too big for words, yes, or too too hard to find words for. Often, I think when when you feel something in music, what you feel is I think, is you feel, Oh, that's a kind of world that could exist where those kinds of feelings happened and are possible. You might not even be able to say, you know. If I think back, for example, to my experiments with red and blue, mixing red and blue when I started painting, I just got such a strong feeling from those things, and it was a feeling about a kind of world I thought existed, but it was sort of intangible and I couldn't give a name to it. I didn't know the word melancholy. Then I didn't have a way of describing it. But I had a way of touching the feeling of it through these experiments I was doing with colors. And I think that's one of the things that art does for you, that you sort of orientate yourself. You find something that moves you, and something in you says, what world is that telling you about? What are you being drawn towards what is happening inside you? What are the feelings that you have and where do they come from? And how could you if you're attracted to them, how could you find more of them in your life? Where would you find more of them? And if you're repelled by them, how do you avoid them in life? Because of course it's not all about good feelings, you know, if you're reading a book like nineteen eighty four, the point is discovering a world that you don't want to inhabit. So it's it's not only about attractive attraction, it's it's about the sources of repulsion as well. 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 something that is being reflected back that resonates with me. I feel a connection. So 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 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 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 they all ended up millionaires, and it doesn't matter, it's not important. What was important was that they presented these two different pictures 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 fine starting to find the Stones more exciting than the Beatles, and in fact they were starting to find the Beatles a bit sort of wimpy, 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 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 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 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 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 bit a quaint or something that I liked. Gospel music to me, it was just like Doop had been. It was this amazing, exotic foreign music and it really came straight through to me. But the you know, religious music, there are certain stages in one's life when music becomes a religious experience, when suddenly it represents all sorts of things, all sorts of whole host of baggage comes with the musical experience. And you know, as you know in pop music, it always involves not only music, in fact, not mainly music. Often it involves haircuts and ways of dressing, social manners, ways of talking to each other. All of those things come bound up in the same package that they're all part of the same sort of universe of feelings that you've decided to enter into. That's why we call it culture because it's a big mess of all sorts of things. It involves everything, cooking, what you should eat. And there's a brilliant book. Actually, I think you'd really like it. It's about the end of the Soviet Union. I'm always telling people to read this book because I think it's so not well known enough, and it's called Everything Was Forever Until it Was no More, and then the subtitle is the Last Soviet Generation. It's one of the best books about youth culture I've ever read, about how beliefs and feelings and orientations spread through people and suddenly everybody's doing it. And the title Everything was Forever Until it Was no More refers to the fact that the Soviet Union disappeared overnight. It had seemed eternal, you know, nobody could imagine it not being there, and in one night it was gone. Next day there was no Soviet Union anymore, and people carried on with their lives. It turned out that they've been living without the Soviet Union for a long time. In their heads. This is what will happen. I hope to capitalism eventually that it will have looked like it was forever, but suddenly it will disappear. I wonder what it was like on the day of the change. I guess that's what the book's about. It's really worth reading because it talks about the youth culture leading up in the twenty years before the end of the Soviet Union, and because because it involved Russians. Russians are incredibly articulate and very much to do with manifestos and writing down positions and articulating positions. So there's a lot of documentation of what people were doing and what they thought they were doing, which is what makes this book so great. You think, wow, young people are so brilliant, They're so fruitful coming up with ideas. It's quite humbling to read, actually beautiful. I've heard the story before of how the moment of recognition or the need for what became ambient music based on the Cologne airport. Sitting in the Cologne airport. How might it have been different if it would have happened in a natural space as opposed to a man made space. Well, the question really is would it have even occurred to me if 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, 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 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, bathed 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 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 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. 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 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 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 workings. It's working functionally, And so I thought, so what about when you want to 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 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 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 computers, and it was possible to make the kinds of programs I make nowhere where the music effectively never repeats. And my ambition always then was to 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, 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 subtle variations, subtle variations, yes, and variations that stay within 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 of second it. Dear Harold. He died about two months ago from COVID very sad, so I dedicate this thought to Harold. So yes. So, when 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 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 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 let something happen to me. I don't have to defend against everything. I can get out of that posture of self defense and let something happen. And I started then thinking a lot about the idea of surrender. And I realized that since we come from a technological culture, and since we're incredibly good at technology, we tend to think that control is the solution to every problem. And sure, if you can do it, it is a good solution. If you can control when crops come up and how they grow, and how to get rid of weeds and what have you, why not. But there are lots of situations we can't control because we don't know the rules for them, we don't have the technology to deal with them. So if you can't control, what is the best thing to do? The best thing to do is to surrender gracefully and to somehow allow that situation to carry you along and not be damaged by it. So surrendering I think of as an active verb, not a passive verb. I think of it as a way of dealing with things. You know, in our repertoire of responses to things, we have at one end, extreme end control at the other surrender. We can very rarely, except in scientific experiments, be completely at the control end. There are always random factors and unpredictable things, and equally it's quite difficult to be completely at the surrender end. We're gradually generally in our lives, we're moving along the access to find the right blend for the occasion. But what we find ecstatic is nearly always an experience of surrender. If you think of the things that where we achieve transcendence if you like or ecstasy, it's sex, drugs, art, 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 constantly trying to control, our biggest thrills come from letting go of control. And so what 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 with the world. And it's one of the things I think we learned from from the experience of art and the experience of love and sex and religion and drugs. As I said, they're always where we pitch ourselves into a situation that we know we will be out of control. And that's one of the other reasons I think that we are so attracted by art because we know that can happen. And of course art is harmless essentially, so we can have the experience of being out of control and not be flat and by it, not be killed by it. We can switch the film off, or we can leave the gallery or whatever. 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, so that in real life, in the rest of life, I should say, we are still able to do that. We can remember that feeling and we can know when to use it. How strongly would you say, our kids? You for me, there are certain I can see a film that has an energy in it that could affect me for months, 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, I don't choose that, And 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 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 it that many times because I really wanted it to retain that power. I didn't want it to become commonplace. Yes. Another piece like that is the Steve Wright piece It's Going to Rain, that tape piece from I think nineteen sixty four that absolutely devastated me. The first time I 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, I didn't have to keep turning it again, you know, it stayed turned. Can you think of other works of art that impacted you in a profound way, maybe changed you over the course of your life, from from your earliest days to the first one that I really can remember very strongly. Sounds trivial to say it, but it was a Walt Disney film. We didn't have a television when I was young. Nobody did when I was young. My uncle had an eight millimeter projector and he he got a Walt Disney film and he set the projector up next to the kitchen wall. It was only about that far away from the wall, so the image was tiny like that, but it was intensely bright. We didn't have very bright light, bulb stain or anything. And on this wall I can remember even to this day that sensation of pure color because it was Donald Duck or something like that, so it was just flat panels of pure color. You never saw anything like that in life, and I can remember just being completely dazzled by this experience. Of that color and those saturated pigments. And I talked to my parents about this about thirty years ago and they said, oh, yeah, you were talking about that for weeks. I really was. I just thought, that is the most amazing thing I everseen. I want to see more of that. I wasn't at all interested in the story. I can't even remember what it was, but I just loved this sensation of intense color. So that was an important one. Do you remember the first musical one? There was one that I think was very important for me, but it's not obvious how that translated into anything that I did in after that. So I was eleven and another uncle was moving and left us. He wants somewhere to park his record collection, so my dad said he would take it. So suddenly we had this huge record collection and it was all big band jazz and Ray Conniff singers. So every morning as I got up to go to school, I put one of these records on and the Ray Coniff, Wow, I just thought, what a beautiful sound. Again, the music wasn't really that interesting to me, but it was this this incredible texture that I don't know how they got it. They had singers and strings and all the things. You know. I don't know if you know that any of those Ray Coniff records. I've had similar experiences with Henry Mensini recordings where it's just transcendent, not because of the material, but just the the sound of it. It feels like it's coming from another another planet. Yeah, well, those those recordings I realized later on as I started to recording myself, I would often think about those recordings, and I realized that they really came from the certain technical peak that happened in recording about that time, where people really knew their equipment really, really well. I subsequently worked with an engineer in London who was John Would. His name was. He was an old school engineer who he specialized in recording folk music, particularly the British folk rock like Fairport Conventionance on. And I watched him at work and he had a very simple studio. He had, you know, a few mics, a couple of compressors. Nothing, I mean, laughable compared to what we all work with now. But he had such a sensitivity to those things. He would walk out and move a mic an inch and he wasn't doing it to show off. He was quite a lazy man. If he could stay sitting in his chair, he would, but he would get up to change the position of a mic. And I thought, this man absolutely understands the material he's working with. He really knows where you put a microphone in relation to a banjo as opposed to in relation to a guitar or whatever. And that made me think again about that era of recording, when you had people who knew their studio really well. They'd worked in that same room for twenty years. They knew that you put someone in that corner for that sound and over there for this sound. It was a condition of technological expertise that hasn't yet been rivaled in the digital era, because there's just too much to know now, you know, nobody can ever have that kind of rapp or with with all of this equipment that we have. You know, every day more equipment is invented than those engineers experienced in their whole lifetime. So they were just better at that, we have to accept. I remember going to the National Sound Archive in London, which is a fabulous place by the way, and they had a display of I think it was eight different recordings of Tchaikovsky Symphony recorded in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. So it was there not to show you how the different orchestras dealt with it, but to show you how the recordings were different. And without doubt, the best sounding recording was from the nineteen sixties, and it was for exactly that reason. You just felt that these people really understood what they were doing. The later recordings were more accurate in a certain sense in that you could hear all the parts very well because they had spot miked everything, but none of them had the feeling of that nineteen sixties recording. So it's interesting to me that technically we get worse at the same time as we get better. Yes, we lose certain skills as well as gaining new ones 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 got there. 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 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 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 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 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 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 last year next to something from twenty to 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 would say to people, you'll probably only hear it once, so if you don't like it, just wait, something else will come along soon. What's the variation of length between the pieces. The shortest piece on there, I think is about a minute and a half. The longest is I think about eighteen minutes, So it's quite a range. I mean, I do have much longer pieces as well, but I thought it would be a little bit demanding if you switched on and you weren't that fond of the piece, and yet it's going to last for another four and a quarter hours. The longest piece in my archive is eight hours long. And will the way, will the way it gets programmed be random, It'll just be on a random loop. Well, it'll it'll be live random, so it'll be selecting as it goes, you know, yes, just like you know in iTunes you have shuffle mode. Can we talk more about we started talking about the pieces of music or art that along the way we've only got we're still in childhood that struck you as changed either changed your work or just changed you. You know that those new chapters starting based on something you've experienced. Well, still pretty much in my childhood was John Cage and all of the cluster of things that were happening and composing in the mid sixties, which was when I became aware of Cage. And this was really the important idea here for me was that art could be a kind of discipline, a spiritual discipline of some kind. So in that sort of assessment of art, the process is much more important. The process of doing the thing is more important than the result. So my way of explaining that was I used to say process, not product. But I also used to say, think about beginnings rather than endings. So it's a it's a sort of not goal oriented way of making art, where where it's not like I've got a vision of this picture I want to pay and I'm going to realize that vision. It's more like, there's a procedure that I want to do and it will produce something, and I'm not sure what it is. You know, it's I don't yet know what it's going to be. So that became very important to me. The idea of the composer as somebody who started something rather than finished it. So this was very much a thought in the sixties with people like Cage and Steve Ryke and Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, all of those kinds of composers were really initiating procedures of some kind, and those procedures would by the way, produce music, but the compositional attention was on the procedures, and this very much appealed to me, and it certainly became what I subsequently called generative music. Is really that where where what you're really doing is designing a sort of system that makes music, and you tweak the system until it makes the music that you wanted. And so that that was that was important. Then of course all this time I was listening to pop music as well, but there are so many examples there of things that really changed my listening life. I mean, from early on, I would say one of the most important records for me was this song called The Mountains High by Dick and Dede. It's a brilliant example of pinning a record around one very simple, great idea, which is this drum figure that so the music go dun dun dun dundum dun dun dun dum dum du du. This really loud drum figure comes in every bar, and then Dick and Deed this very strange harmony they seeing together. So again this was this was the early experimental days of rock music, when it was obvious to anyone who could think that this was not really about music. It was about space. It was about creating new spaces. And this record, The Mountain's High, had this weird, ringing, strange quality to it. It was another world, you know, suddenly there was this other world, very exotic to me growing up in rural Suffolk. I had no idea what that world was, but it was. It was the same effect as reading sci fi. You know, Wow, what a world that could exist? Could it exist? Do you remember how you heard it? Yes? Well, you see, I grew up in a part of England, the most easterly part of England, which was where all the Cold War air bases were. So after the Second World War, the deal we had with America was okay, thanks for all the weapons. Now you can have half of the east of England to put your bloody gray air bases on, which is what they did. There were many of them within a few miles from where I grew up. So the little town I grew up in had coffee bars, lots of them because there were so many Gis and English soldiers and airmen as well. And every single coffee bar had a jukebox, and nearly all of the music they were playing was American music because that was their audience. So very early on I was hearing stuff that you just wouldn't ever hear on the radio in England. Nobody was playing that kind of thing. So I was hearing do opened early R and B and so on. Then my sister, who was four years older than me, fell in love with a GI and so she used to go to one of the bases. We had a big base called Bentwaters, which had six or eight thousand American gis on it, and they had a great, big PX store where she used to buy singles, and so I had quite a good collection of quite sort of radical early rock and roll fantastic. So that sort of cumulatively had a big effect on me. It made me like a way of delivering music which was much more impassioned than what was happening in English music at that time. And it took me years to realize that what that way of music, that way of delivering was was called black music. I didn't know that these were black people. I just heard this type of music and I thought, wow, that's amazing. And it reminds me actually of a story. This is a true story. During the war, when lots of gis were coming over to England, somebody interviewed an old farmer from Devon and said, so, how do you feel about the Americans coming over here? And the farmer said, well, they're all right, aren't they, except for the white ones. He obviously thought that Americans were basically black people, but there were a few of these sort of boisterous white people that he wished hadn't turned up with them. Well, yes, So I was listening to this music and not aware for a very long time because there were no music magazines then, no, there was no nothing like on television, and it was a long time before I realized that this was actually a music that came from a particular racial demographic. What was what was the part music in England at that time, just to for so we could picture what everyone else was hearing while you were hearing this, Well it was it was very often really truly pathetic versions of those American songs. So you know, there would be a hit like like watered Down. Well, anything that became a big hit in America would get covered in England by an English artist. So and the covers were just appallingly sad. They were done by sort of groups of sessions musicians reading sheet music. It lacked everything that I wanted from music. All it had was a nice tune, you know, there was nothing in the performance that was convincing at all. So there was there was a man called Craig Douglas who covered every every American number one. It seemed to me there would be the Craig Douglas version of it came out, and you know, when you put the two together. On the one hand, this this sort of raw, quite angry sound that American music had then, even even the even the love songs had a sort of urgency and a grip to them. And then you'd hear the English version. It had all been nicely sort of tidied up and all the rough hedges taken off, and it's very very pleasant. You know. I just thought, oh god, it was one of the most important lessons to me that the content of a piece of art is the delivery. You know. The content isn't what the words say, it isn't what the melody says. It's the bloody delivery. That's the thing you respond to. And of course this was what made the Beatles so amazing, because they knew that delivery. They'd been listening to Chuck Berry and you know, John Lee Hooker and everybody else, Howland Wolf, so they they came with that style. And that was I mean, because They wrote great songs too, but it was that style that made it great. Do you remember the first time you heard the Beatles? Yes, I remember it very well. And how was What was the occasion and what was your reaction. I was in the Flamingo Cafe in Woodbridge Thoroughfare and on the jukebox came the single Love Me Do, and I honestly had never heard anything like that. I thought it was so beautifully awkward in a way, I think is what it was. It just didn't sound smooth, and that was good. I didn't like smooth, and it's very minimalistic. You know. The interesting thing about the Beatles is that they hardly ever did a three part harmony, you know, the thing that everybody does all the bloody time now because it's easy and it's irresistible. So everything has three, four, five part harmonies. But you know a lot of the great bands of that period that the Evely's is another example, did two part harmonies. And I think that's that restraint. That missing out of something is very engaging for a listener because it invites you to fill the whole, to imagine what would fill the gap. It's another lesson of minalism. That if you leave stuff out, you invite listeners in. Yes, you give them something to do, a place to go. They often also often sang unison as opposed to going to automatically going to a harmony, yes, which which you hear in a lot of sort of Central European music, where like Georgian and Balkan music in general, where people move between being harmonists and unison and they go back and forth without this sort of classical assumption that you've always got to be doing something different. 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 from the way I talk too much, I think about this kind of 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 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 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 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. So I think one 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 not knowing the answer, and so they just choose an inappropriate answer just for the want of an answer. 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 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 his artistic philosophy with us. To hear a favorite Brian Eno tracks, head to Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with helpful ly Arose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mila Bell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast that our theme musics by Henny Beats. I'm justin Whitchman.