BRIAN ENO

DAILY NOTE
BRIAN ENO
THE NYC YEARS
FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013
1OF
22

THE DAILY NOTE
Right about now you might be thinking, “Hey,
the trusty afternoon tabloid I pick up on my way
home has… kind of entirely changed its editorial
bent?!?” Where’s the news, the politics, the heated
civic debates, and the crime blotter? What
about the details of our honorable mayor’s latest
plan to stock fewer cigarettes in bodegas, improve
our diets, and generally live more socially
responsible and healthier lives? (You know, without
asking anyone if we want to or not.)
No, the complimentary newsprint dirtying up your ngertips
is not your familiar news title. Nor is it this week’s C-Town
circular. This is the Daily Note, the ofcial newspaper of Red
Bull Music Academy. Before you toss it in the garbage or
abandon it on a subway seat, give it a glance. If you possess
any appreciation for music and in particular the enormously
inuential musical history and culture of this city (whether it
be Bronx-born hip-hop or downtown-nurtured disco, dance
music, Bowery-bred punk or contemporary Brooklyn bass)—
there’s a good chance there’s something in here you’ll want
to peruse.
Which leads us to the elephant in the room: what exactly is
the Red Bull Music Academy? (And how else might it affect
you besides this free newspaper thing?) Simply put, it’s a
globetrotting music school of sorts that in past years has taken
up residence in places like London, Barcelona, Berlin, São
Paolo, Cape Town, Rome, and Melbourne. And it’s extremely
proud to call 212 (and 718, 646, and even 347) its area code
for the next month. But don’t be lulled into drowsiness by the
inherent aridity of the word “Academy.” If Ringling Brothers
didn’t roll into town with lions, re-eaters, and trapeze artists
but rather with 60 uniquely talented DJs, producers, musicians,
MASTHEAD ABOUT RBMA
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
All Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
2
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Mark Chiarello
Adrienne Day
S.H. Fernando Jr.
Merjin Hos
Jeff Mao
Jeremy Pettis
Simon Reynolds
Nick Sylvester
and vocalists from all corners of the world, the circus might
just resemble RBMA New York 2013. For the public, it’s got a
damn impressive program of lm screenings, parties, lectures
from musical legends like Brian Eno and Erykah Badu, and
concerts that range from hip-hop and improvisational jazz to
traditional house and experimental drone music.
Sufce to say you’ll be hearing more from and about Red Bull
Music Academy in the coming days and weeks. In addition to
chronicling the various Academy events happening around
town, Daily Note’s pages are replete with the bylines of
some of the world’s nest cultural journalists and some of
the nest New Yorkers in general. Celebrating the greatness
of this city is something we, its residents, do day in and day
out—even as we bemoan every single thing about this place
or that we’re convinced used to be better. We mostly do this
without fanfare—simply by virtue of the fact that we are
here and choose this to be our home. Now we’ve got a little
company and, as it follows, we’re going to be doing a little
celebrating. Welcome, RBMA. Step lively and stand clear of
the closing doors.
-JEFF ‘CHAIRMAN’ MAO (NEW YORKER SINCE 1987, RBMA TEAM MEMBER SINCE 2003)
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling
series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make a
difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in
the city’s best clubs and music halls.
Imagine a place that’s equal parts science
lab, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a touch
of Haight-Ashbury circa 1967, a sprinkle of
Prince Jammy’s mixing board, and Bob Moog’s
synthesizer collection all in a 22nd-century
remix and you’re halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has been
traversing the globe since, traveling to
Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.

WELCOME
Scuba plays the Red Bull
Music Academy Stage at Neopop
Festival, Portugal, 2012
3

FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
4
FIXED X
TURRBOTAX®
TWO RAD PARTIES GO HEAD TO HEAD.
We asked two of the best parties in New York to
help us open the Academy. Here’s everything you
need to know about...
FIXED TURRBOTAX®
Residents
JDH & Dave P
What’s in a name?
It was loosely based on the Nine
Inch Nails EP of the same name.
We were trying to throw the perfect
party that we would want to attend,
meaning making things run smoothly,
having great guests, good vibes,
no BS… Thus, “fixing” the party.
When did it start?
Officially, the first Fixed was at Tribeca
Grand in October 2004. That
month we had Mylo, Ewan Pearson,
Vitalic, and LCD Soundsystem.
What’s Fixed about?
Our sets are generally pretty
eclectic, but having fun with this
is our number one priority. There’s
nothing worse than taking things
too seriously, so we always try to
spin records we love and have guests
we love.
Favorite record right now?
Bicep “Stash” (Aus Music)
All-time Fixed favorite?
Lifelike & Kris Menace “Discopolis”
(Vulture Music) defines our vibe
perfectly.
Craziest moment so far?
Having the Rapture play live at our
one-year anniversary in the Tribeca
Grand basement was pretty nuts.
Someone tagged up one of the hallways
there though, which was kind
of a bummer.
Fixed x TURRBOTAX®
Kick off RBMA 2013 this Sunday,
April 28, with a party
at the Ace Hotel,
20 W. 29th St., Manhattan.
See redbullmusicacademy.com
for more info.
Past guests
Simian Mobile Disco, Tensnake,
Aeroplane, Optimo, Holy Ghost,
Rory Phillips
fixednyc.com
Residents
Rem Koolhaus, Contakt,
Space Jam, Mayster, and C-Sick
What’s in a name?
When we started back in 2009, all
the parties had really serious, dark
titles… and what’s more serious and
dark than taxes?
When did it start?
Our first party was at the end of July
2009 with a scrappy up-and-coming
artist named FaltyDL.
What’s TURRBOTAX® about?
Grooving, slamming, jacking, sometimes
experimental, clean, dirty,
always dynamic, never a bummer.
Favorite record right now?
Mr. G “One Year Later” (Rekids)
All-time TURRBOTAX®
favorite?
Galaxy 2 Galaxy
“Transition” (Submerge)
Craziest moment so far?
For our two-year anniversary party
in 2011, Hurricane Irene blew in and
thwarted our original plan of having
Robert Hood headline. But we ended
up with a serendipitous lineup
of Blawan’s lone appearance in the
US; Todd Edwards (who showed up
with a homemade TURRBOTAX®
shirt within three hours of our
phone call); LV, who was in town on
vacation; and a live performance by
Pursuit Grooves. Even though they
shut the subways down for the first
time since 9/11 and told everyone to
stay home, the party was packed and
the vibe was “Last Party Before the
End of the World!” That, and when a
courtroom sketch artist showed up
to our Kode9 & MikeQ party after
we banned photography.
Past guests
Terrance Parker, Todd Terry, Mosca,
MikeQ, Laurel Halo, Kyle Hall,
Oneman
turrbotax.wordpress.com
“Tom Moulton was the first remix
guy. He’s done the most.”
RATHER
RIPPED
M INI M I X :
TOM
MOULTON
few new yorkers have left their fingerprints
on popular music as definitively as Tom
Moulton. A music nerd straight out the womb,
Moulton entered the biz at a young age; by
his late 20s, he was a full-blown studio rat. In
the early ’70s, he helped create the modern DJ
mix and the 12-inch dance single; most importantly,
he has massive claims on the invention
of the remix, perfecting the extended disco
edit played by nightclub DJs. To celebrate
Moulton’s inaugural lecture at the 2013 Red
Bull Music Academy this weekend, we collect
five of his finest remixes.
Thanks to Dave Tompkins & Peter Shapiro
—Arthur “Planet Rock” Baker,
RBMA Toronto 2007
Watch the project
unfold in
real time at
hypercurrentliving.com
Past projects
can be seen at
ryder-ripps.com
EDDIE
KENDRICKS
“KEEP ON
TRUCKIN’”
(1973/2006)
Showcasing
his funk and
soul roots
(Moulton’s
career began at
King Records,
the home of
James Brown),
this greasy
workout of the
ex-Temptations
singer’s hit
did not see
light of day
’til the issue
of the Soul
Jazz comp A Tom
Moulton Mix.
SOUTH
SHORE
COMMISSION
“FREE MAN
(A DISCO
MIX BY TOM
MOULTON)”
(1975)
The man who
devised the
concept of the
DJ mix for a
club on Fire
Island is bound
to know his
way around a
gay anthem;
so here’s
a brassy,
hands-in-theairdiscoliberation
torcher
complete with
vocal and
xylophone
breakdowns.
At Red Bull Music Academy this year, in addition to
the sounds filling the recording studios and lecture
halls, are installations by 27 local artists.
One such piece is “Hyper-Current Living,” a
project in which Internet artist Ryder Ripps will
live and work in the Academy for one week, fueled by a steady
flow of energy drinks. He’ll inhabit a space constructed by design
duo Chen Chen and Kai Williams, drinking unlimited Red
Bull and generating digital content at “hyper speed.” Potential
ideas range from “a real-time Twitter feed of ‘Your Momma’
jokes” to “using bagels as paintbrushes.”
An online stream will track Ripps’ sugar-free output—underscoring
the short and fast interactions native to social media—and
Ripps will use an interface that tallies the number of
cans ingested alongside the amount of ideas dreamt up. “I have
a keyboard where every key has been removed except for the
R and the I key,” Ripps explains. “When I drink a Red Bull I’ll
hit the R key; when I post an idea to Twitter or through the
dump.fm image interface I’ll hit the I key.” (Dump.fm is one of
Ripps’ earlier ventures, a sort of hybrid of early-Internet chatrooms
and imageboards like 4chan that allows for real-time
communication through images.)
The hope is that the corollary of a week-long caffeine binge
will be a fast-expanding pile of ideas, valued by Facebook
likes and Twitter favorites. “My goal is to create ideas that get
retweeted and talked about—I believe this is the criteria for
most creative productions these days.”
Ripps is fixated on the concept of instant output and its proliferation,
those nebulous interactions that exist almost entirely
in the present moment—quick, fleeting, ever-changing, hyper-current.
“Today there is much less incentive to fully execute
products when living in a social ecosystem,” he explains. He’s at
the Academy to create “stuff that will have no humor left in 30
years, but today will be fun and enjoyable. A lot of art starts as
a joke and then becomes dry because of stuck-up people down
the road.”
MFSB
“LOVE
IS THE
MESSAGE”
(1977)
A jazzy,
11-minute-plus
exploration of
the Philly soul
standard, with
spectacular
saxophone
and xylophone
asides and a
horn-and-string
section calland-response
that builds to
an epic closing
crescendo.
CLAUDJA
BARRY
“LOVE FOR
THE SAKE OF
LOVE”
(1977)
Jamaica-born
Barry was
following
Donna Summer’s
path (living
in Germany,
recording with
Boney M) when
Moulton remixed
her entire
debut album
for US release,
including this
incredibly sexy
spoken-word
groove.
-OLIVIA GRAHAM
ROCKETS
“ON THE
ROAD AGAIN
(A TOM
MOULTON
MIX, IN
AMERICA)”
(1978)
Before there
was Daft
Punk, there
was Rockets,
Parisians
with a vocoder
and Moroder’s
playbook. This
Canned Heat
cover is one of
their shining
moments, and
Moulton extends
the sci-fi
fantasy feel.
UPCOMING
SHOWS
INVITE ONLY
FIXED VS.
TURRBOTAX®
SUNSHINE CINEMA
AN EVENING OF
RARE HIP HOP
DOCUMENTARIES
WITH AFRIKA
BAMBAATAA,
SCHOOLLY D & MORE
BROOKLYN MUSEUM
A TALK
WITH
ERYKAH
BADU
BRAINFEEDER
SESSION NYC
SPECIAL GUEST:
DJ LO DOWN
LORETTA BROWN
A NIGHT OF
IMPROVISED
ROUND ROBIN
DUETS
20+ ARTISTS FROM
JAZZ TO ELECTRONIC
BRIAN
ENO: 77
MILLION
PAINTINGS
SMORGASBURG
BROOKLYN
FLEA RECORD
FAIR
SPECIAL
APR
28
APR
29
APR
30
MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG
APR
30
BROOKLYN MASONIC TEMPLE
KNOCKDOWN CENTER
DRONE
ACTIVITY IN
PROGRESS
STEPHEN O’MALLEY
BODY/HEAD
(KIM GORDON & BILL NACE)
PRURIENT + 13 MORE
145 W 32ND ST
LE BAIN
MASTERS
AT WORK
& SPECIAL
GUESTS
MAY
01
MAY
02
MAY
03
MAY
03
MAY
04
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5

TERM ONE PARTICIPANTS TERM ONE PARTICIPANTS
6
TERM ONE
Meet the 29 producers, DJs, vocalists, and instrumentalists
heating up the first session of RBMA 2013.
YODASHE
GREECE
Avant-Pop Meets
Modern Classic
soundcloud.com/yodashe
@yodashe
ADA KALEH
ROMANIA
Dramatic Electro-Pop
with an Epic Scope
soundcloud.com/ama-diver
:PAPERCUTZ
PORTUGAL
Otherworldly
Electro-Pop
soundcloud.com/papercutz
@papercutzed
DISTAL
USA
Dubstep, Juke,
Techno & Beyond
soundcloud.com/distal
@distaldub
RAFIK
GERMANY
Bassy Club Hits
with Hip-Hop Edge
soundcloud.com/dj-rafik
@djrafik
JIMI NXIR
USA
Sensuous Future R&B
soundcloud.com/jiminxir
@JimiNxir
MUNGO PARK
FRANCE
Shoegazing
Electronic Pop
soundcloud.com/
mungoparkunited
@adriadriadrien
SERETAN
TURKEY
Lush, Aquatic
House-Inspired Grooves
soundcloud.com/ozcanertek
HIRAM
MARTINEZ
MEXICO
Drone Pop &
Post-Dubstep
@cnzontle
ALE HOP
PERU
Enigmatic Psych
& Post-Rock
soundcloud.com/alehophop2
EN2AK
POLAND
Future Beats &
Cut-Up House
soundcloud.com/en2ak
@en2ak
THROWING
SNOW
UK
Moody, Melancholy
Sides of UK Bass
soundcloud.com/throwingsnow
@throwingsnow
THE
PERONISTS
ARGENTINA
Reggaeton & Cumbia
Meet the Rave
soundcloud.com/theperonists
@theperonists
ASTROBOYZ
SPAIN
Percussive, Bassy
Explorations from
All Corners of House
soundcloud.com/astroboyz
@astroboyzmusic
KNOX
USA
Electro-Acoustic
Lullabies
soundcloud.com/knoxtheband
@knoxmusic
KLOKE
AUSTRALIA
A Deep Prism of UK
Bass & Garage Flavors
soundcloud.com/kloke
@klokesounds
JOLLY MARE
ITALY
Space Disco
& Sparkly Boogie
soundcloud.com/jolly-mare
@jollymare
SUZANNE
KRAFT
USA
Lush Disco &
Tropical House
soundcloud.com/suzannekraft
@suzannekraft
CRAZY BITCH
IN A CAVE
AUSTRIA
Glam Electro-Pop
& Disco Nouveau
cbiac.tumblr.com
SMAX
PAKISTAN
Silky Sunset Grooves
soundcloud.com/monogon
@monogonsun
OBJEKT
GERMANY
Techno Drunk on UK Subs
soundcloud.com/keinobjekt
@keinobjekt
GRASSMASS
BRAZIL
Groovy Soundtracks &
Classy Dance Dimensions
soundcloud.com/coelho
QUIETDUST
IRELAND
Campfire Guitars
& Sweet Folk Vocals
soundcloud.com/quietdust
OCTO OCTA
USA
Silky, Summery
House Epics
soundcloud.com/octoocta
@octo_octa
CABAAL
CANADA
Multilayered
Mysteryscapes
soundcloud.com/cabaal
@cabaalcabaal
KORELESS
UK
Yearning & Romantic UK
Bass Landscapes
soundcloud.com/koreless
@koreless
ALITREC
UK
A Gorgeous Puzzle of
Organic & Processed
soundcloud.com/alitrec
AUGUST
ROSENBAUM
DENMARK
Jazz Pianist with a
Cinematic Reach
soundcloud.com/
augustrosenbaum
@augustrosenbaum
HARALD
BJöRK
SWEDEN
Melodic Minimal
Techno with a
Scandinavian Touch
soundcloud.com/harald-bjork
@haraldbjork
FOR MORE INFO, GO TO
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
7

FEATURE
8
TAKING
MANHATTAN
(BY STRATEGY)
From 1978 to 1984, Brian Eno lived and worked in NYC. The
music he helped create has influenced generations.
WORDS SIMON REYNOLDS
it could be argued that Brian Eno is the most consistently
creative figure in rock history, someone whose innovation rate over
the decades eclipses even that of his shape-shifting collaborators
David Bowie and David Byrne. From his disruptive presence in
Roxy Music to his alternately quirky and contemplative solo
albums, from inventing ambient music to his recent explorations
in “generative music,” it’s a career that has, well, careered,
zigzagging from extreme to extreme between pop and antipop,
between febrile rhythm and near-immobile tranquility. »
Brian Eno on a
NYC rooftop,
1982. Photo by
Ebet Roberts/
Redferns

FEATURE FEATURE
then consider his panoply of partnerships with other
artists—Devo, Talking Heads, U2, and John Cale, to name just
a few—as producer or collaborator/catalyst. Eno is also a musical
philosopher, someone whose interviews, critical writings,
and sundry musings about sound, art, and culture deserve to be
compiled into a book. (His published diary, A Year With Swollen
Appendices, was hugely entertaining but didn’t capture the full
scope and provocative richness of his thoughts.)
If there’s a golden period for Eno, though, it would have to
be between 1978 and 1984, a period when he lived in New York.
Those years represented a surge of music-making, collaboration,
and conceptualizing, with Eno burning through ideas at staggering
speed. All through the late ’70s and early ’80s, New York’s art
scene and music culture were the climate that stoked his ferment.
“I’ve got this feeling that I really know New York very well
and will be at home there,” he told Disc magazine in October
1972, on the eve of his first visit to the city. “I feel there are two
10
places I’m emotionally based in... One is the English countryside,
where I was born and bred, and the other is the heart of
New York City.”
There are perfectly logical reasons why Eno would feel a
profound attraction to New York. After all, the two biggest influences
on his approach to music, the Velvet Underground and
Steve Reich, came from here. Eno also intuited that London,
pop culture’s energy center during the ’60s, had ceded that power-spot
status to New York by the ’70s. Within a few years of
the Disc interview, he was spending extended periods of time
in Manhattan. Then he moved wholesale and made New York
his base for over half a decade. The ensuing period is without
doubt the most fertile and impressive stretch of his life’s work,
which included not just music but video art as well. Eno fed off
New York’s border-crossing artistic energy, while catalyzing and
contributing to it. There were also more playful “lifestyle” reasons
why Eno settled in Manhattan. “I moved to New York City
because there are so many beautiful girls here,” he told Lester
Bangs in 1979. “More than anywhere else in the world.”
His first visit in late ’72 was with Roxy Music on their debut
US tour. The next couple of trips he came as a solo artist; the
second of these, in 1975, was to promote his second solo album,
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Eno was accompanied by
Richard Williams, a former Melody Maker writer (and the first
journalist to rave about Roxy) who had become an A&R man at
Island Records. Williams had heard the buzz about Television,
so the two Britons headed down to CBGB to see them perform.
Although Eno at this point had zero pedigree as a producer,
he and Williams ended up working with Television on demo
recordings that could easily have turned into a debut album
for Island. But the results failed to capture the fierce majesty
of Television’s live shows. “I didn’t care for the sound he got
on tape or the performance much either,” Tom Verlaine once
recalled. “The rest of the band felt the same way. So we didn’t
ABOVE: Eno in Steve Maas’ apartment on W. 8th Street, 1978.
Photo by Marcia Resnick
finish the ‘album’ they wanted those demos to be.”
It was an inauspicious start to Eno’s New York period. Ultimately,
it would be not Television but a different CBGB band
(also with a TV-oriented name) who cemented Eno’s connection
to the city. Talking Heads first met up with Eno in London in
May 1977. During this hangout session they discovered many
common interests, both musically and intellectually. Eno played
them an album by Fela Kuti and declared that afrobeat was the
future of music. He suggested that this was a direction he and
Talking Heads could jointly pursue.
Later that month, Eno was back in New York, where he accompanied
his friends and intermittent collaborators David
Bowie and Robert Fripp to a Max’s Kansas City gig by Devo, the
hot hype of the season. So captivated was Bowie by their robotic
theatrics and angular sound, he took to the stage to announce
Devo’s second set of the night. Hailing the Akron, Ohio, band as
rock’s future, Bowie vowed to produce their debut album in To-
kyo later that summer. (Ultimately it was Eno, not Bowie, who
would produce Are We Not Men? in Cologne the following year.)
As for Talking Heads, the first album Eno made with the
group, More Songs About Buildings and Food, was recorded in
Nassau, Bahamas. But the mastering was done in New York and
Eno flew in on April 23, 1978 to oversee the process. He planned
to stay a few weeks, taking care of some other pending projects
away from UK distractions before heading home in time for his
30th birthday. But New York provided plenty of distractions of
its own, and it would be seven months before he returned to
Britain. Recalling his first substantial sojourn in New York, Eno
admitted to enjoying the attention he received as a cult figure
operating on the cutting edge of rock. “Everywhere I go, people
are running up with cassettes,” he told Melody Maker in 1980.
“The first five weeks I was in New York this time I had 180 cassettes
given to me.” But he spoke also of the stimulating conversations
he was enjoying thanks to the crosstown traffic between
different fields of art—music, painting, theater, modern dance.
A common syndrome experienced by first-time UK visitors
to New York is that they’re electrified by the city’s kinetic (and
cinematic) energy, then immediately crash into a depressive
slump upon arrival back in humdrum England. Eno refused
to unplug. By the middle of May 1978, he was ensconced in
an apartment in Greenwich Village subletted from Steve Maas
who owned and lived in the apartment upstairs and was in
the process of launching the soon-to-be-legendary Mudd
Club. “The first time I heard of the Mudd Club somebody said,
‘Eno’s got a new bar below Canal
Street, let’s go,’” recalls Glenn
O’Brien, once the music columnist
for Interview magazine and
host of the New York cable music
show TV Party. “Actually Eno
had nothing to do with it, except
I think he consulted with Maas
on the sound system.”
Through Maas, Eno met Anya
Phillips, who was involved in the
initial conception of the Mudd
Club. She hipped him to “no
wave”: a cluster of harsh, dissonant,
uncompromisingly experimental
groups (among them the
Contortions, whom Phillips managed,
and with whose frontman
James Chance she would later become
romantically involved). No
wave had emerged with the express
intent of making the firstwave
CBGB punk bands seem
passé and mired in rock ’n’ roll
tradition. “I happened to be in
New York during one of the most
exciting months of the decade...
in terms of music,” Eno recalled. “It seemed like there were
500 new bands who all started that month.” In the first week of
May, Eno attended a five-day festival of no wave bands at Artists
Space, a gallery in Tribeca. Impressed by the music’s extremism,
he proposed the idea of a compilation to Island Records focused
on the four key groups in the scene: Mars, DNA, the Contortions,
and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Intuitively he grasped
that no wave was destined to be a brief spasm of unsustainable
intensity that needed to be documented before it passed.
Eno had plenty in common with the no wavers. Most came
from art-school backgrounds similar to his own. Like him, they
approached music-making with a conceptual mindset and a
dilettante’s disregard for craft. “The New York bands proceed
from a ‘what would happen if’ orientation,” Eno informed New
York Times critic John Rockwell in July 1978, contrasting their
approach with that of expressionistic, emotion-driven new wave
songsmiths like Elvis Costello. In another 1978 interview with
Creem, he praised no wave using terms and concepts that he
clearly would like to have seen applied to himself. These “research
bands” take “deliberately extreme stances that are very
interesting because they define the edges of a piece of territory,”
he said. “They say, ‘This is as far as you can go in this direction.’”
No wave pioneers (and even earlier, the Velvet Underground)
generated “a vocabulary” of ideas that later artists could use in
more palatable ways and that could ultimately become the basis
of mainstream pop in the future. “Having that territory staked
out is very important,” Eno said. “You achieve a synthesis by
determining your stance in relation to these signposts.”
But although there was a mutual admiration pact between
Eno and the no wavers (who revered their patron for his work
in Roxy Music and his solo output), there were big differences
too. No wave was based around an aesthetic of assault and
confrontation. Lyrically, it stretched from deadpan nihilism
“I HAPPENED
TO BE IN NEW
YORK DURING
ONE OF THE
MOST EXCITING
MONTHS OF
THE DECADE...
IN TERMS OF
MUSIC.”
- BRIAN ENO
(James Chance) and tortured expressionism (Lydia Lunch
of Teenage Jesus) to explorations of psychotic states (Mars).
There was a huge gulf between no wave and Eno’s alternately
quirky and placid music, especially the proto-ambient directions
he pursued on Another Green World and Discreet Music.
Lunch speaks warmly of Eno today but at the time she made a
number of public jibes, describing Eno’s music as “something
that flows and weaves... It’s kind of nauseating,” she said. “It’s
like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very
smooth going down.”
Yet Eno-fication is strikingly absent from the compilation
No New York. There’s nothing of the blurry, aqueous sound applied
to certain songs on Are We Not Men or More Songs About
Buildings and Food, which clearly bore Eno’s production fingerprints.
“[No New York] was done totally live in the studio,
just like a document,” says Chance. Mars, the most forbiddingly
abstract of the no wave outfits, benefited from a smidgeon of
Eno’s studio sorcery: for “Helen Forsdale,” Eno recalled that he
put an echo “on the guitar part’s click and used that to trigger
the compression on the whole track, so it sounds like helicopter
blades.” DNA’s Arto Lindsay was actually infuriated by Eno’s
hands-off approach: “He was reading some studio instrument
magazine while we were recording and I wanted to throttle
him!” Lindsay hastens to add that “Eno is a fabulous man. He
was generous. I was dead broke, and he was such a gentleman
he would call me up and say ‘I’ll buy you lunch.’” As a relative
veteran of the music industry, Eno also dispensed advice: Lindsay
recalls Chance showing Eno
a contract that he’d been offered
by Michael Zilkha of ZE Records.
“Brian said, ‘Nobody would sign
that but a desperate man.’ James
immediately signed it!”
At the end of 1978, No New
York slipped out into the world
via Island’s jazz subsidiary Antilles
to meager fanfare. No wave
had already splintered, with
most of the groups heading toward
more accessible music.
But the record would gradually
accrue cult status, as much for
the challenge of getting hold of a
copy as for the challenging music
on it. The legend of no wave
has swollen over the decades, in
part because of intermediaries
like Sonic Youth (as Eno predicted,
sort of) applying its innovations
to pop and rock music;
the movement has also come
to represent a musical moment
of uncompromising purity. No
wave—which lasted barely two
years and whose bands didn’t make many records or find
many listeners in their own time—has been the subject of no
less than three lavishly illustrated books in recent years.
In the winter of 1978–79, Eno went peripatetic, spending
time in San Francisco, London, Montreux, and Bangkok. When
he returned to New York in the spring to work on Talking
Heads’ Fear of Music, he had the germ of a new approach in his
head: the merger of hypnotic dance rhythms and found voices.
Through immersion in Fela and P-Funk, he had turned on to the
idea of densely layered, ethnofunkadelic polyrhythms. On his
Thailand vacation, he had taken with him a recording of British
dialects and become fascinated by the “redundant” information
in these heavily accented utterances. Regional cadences meant
that the speech contained its own musicality, something that he
thought could be combined excitingly with dance grooves. This
merger of found voices and trance rhythms would become the
governing concept for much of the music he made in the next
few years, both solo and in his increasingly collaborative partnership
with Talking Heads.
The first manifestation of his new obsession was “I Zimbra,”
the opening track on Fear of Music. It bore Eno’s clear imprint,
from the afrobeat-style percussion to the use of sound poetry
(originally written by the Dadaist Hugo Ball but here incanted
by David Byrne). “I Zimbra” was pretty much the reprise of
what Eno had done on “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from his 1977 solo
album Before and After Science, albeit using a different Dadaist
(Kurt Schwitters). But it was Fear’s closing track, “Drugs,” that
proved to be most prophetic. Talking Heads tried recording the
song, originally titled “Electricity,” in the conventional way but
couldn’t get it to work. So Eno and Byrne took the accumulated
takes and effectively remixed the song into existence. “We kind
of deconstructed it, tore it down to its basic elements, then built
it up again with new stuff,” recalls Byrne. “We took instruments
(cont'd on pg. 14)
11

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FEATURE FEATURE
out, replayed bits, added other sounds. It became a mixture of
a live band and sound collage, which was what ended up happening
with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light.”
But there was a problem with the “studio as compositional
tool” concept, at least when applied to a rock band: it empowered
the composer (the producer/arranger) at the expense of the
musicians. Eno and Byrne’s expanded authorial role on “Drugs”
effectively relegated the other members of Talking Heads to session-musician
status, something that caused enormous friction
on the next album, Remain in Light. The burgeoning friendship
between Eno and Byrne didn’t just unsettle the balance of creative
power within the band, it frayed emotional ties. Bassist
Tina Weymouth acidly claimed the pair had merged into a symbiotic
unit, even wearing similar clothes like some post-punk
Gilbert and George. Byrne himself talks about the relationship
as “mutually beneficial and codependent in a way. We had musical
things to gain from one another—each one could offer something
slightly different to the other.”
Eno expounded on his new theories in July 1979 when he
gave a lecture entitled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at
the New Music New York festival. Hosted by The Kitchen, this
ten-day event was a triumphant end-of-decade celebration of a
varied yet cohesive movement of downtown Manhattan composers
defining themselves against the uptown classical music
establishment (where European-style dissonance still held
sway). Reporting on New Music New York, Village Voice’s Tom
Johnson identified two distinct waves of downtown music: the
founding minimalist elders (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley,
Robert Ashley) and a new generation forging connections
between composition and popular music (like Laurie Anderson,
who used elements of performance art, video, and electronics;
or Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, who deployed amplified
electric guitars). Eno fit perfectly smack in the middle of all
this. He was profoundly influenced by Reich’s repetition and
use of tape-delay loops, but also embraced dance rhythms, electric
noise, and the sound-sculpting possibilities of the recording
studio, just like emerging downtown composers Arthur Russell,
Peter Gordon, and David Van Tieghem.
Alongside the polyrhythmic groove music he made with
Talking Heads and David Byrne, the other major strand of Eno’s
musical output during the New York years consisted of idyllic-yet-eerie
ambient soundscapes. The Plateaux of Mirror, his
collaboration with Harold Budd, began with the LA-based pianist
sending his compositions to Eno in New York, but the actual
recording was done in late 1979 in a studio in Daniel Lanois’
studio in Hamilton, Ontario. Around that time Eno also produced
Day of Radiance by Laraaji, a zither player he discovered
in Washington Square Park. A spiritual seeker exploring yoga,
t’ai chi, and Eastern philosophy (he currently holds workshops
in laughter therapy), Laraaji’s quest for “cosmic music” had taken
a decisive turn in the mid-’70s when he traded his guitar for
an autoharp, which he then adapted and electrified. He came to
believe that metallic chimes—bells, gongs, cymbals, gamelan ensembles,
and his beloved zither and hammered dulcimer—put
the listener “in touch with the higher presences.” “In Tibet they
14
“WE WOULD HOLE UP AND
MAKE FAKE ETHNOGRAPHIC
RECORDS, WITH THE SLEEVE
NOTES AND EVERYTHING.
WE'D INVENT A WHOLE
CULTURE TO GO WITH IT.”
- BRIAN ENO
are used to break up concentration, get you outside linear time,
into a trance state,” he explains. Laraaji had been playing in the
same spot in Washington Square Park for a few years, sitting
always in the lotus position with his eyes shut, when one day
he opened them to see that someone had left a message in his
busker’s hat. “It was from Brian Eno and it said ‘Would you like
to meet to consider a recording project?’” he recalls.
In their post-Eno careers Budd and Laraaji would both go
on to make music so tranquil and gently rhapsodic it verged
on New Age. But Plateaux and Radiance—Ambient 2 and Ambient
3 in the series of releases launched by Eno’s Music for
Airports—have a certain uncanny edge. In both cases Eno’s role
largely consisted of creating the ambience in which the compositions
were situated, using reverb, harmonizer, and other
studio techniques to smudge the edges of the sound into oneiric
soft-focus. Both projects prefigure the preoccupations that
would lead to Eno’s other supreme masterpiece of the New York
era: 1982’s On Land. Plateaux’s track titles—“Above Chiangmai,”
“Among Fields of Crystal,” “Wind in Lonely Fences”—speak of
Eno’s mounting interest in creating the musical equivalent of
landscape painting, while “Meditation #2,” the final track on
Radiance, is based on Laraaji’s mental image of New York’s Central
Park Reservoir on a moody winter day.
Another inspirational collaborator Eno hooked up with in
1979 was Jon Hassell, whose post-Miles, raga-influenced music
Eno had encountered when the trumpeter/composer performed
at the Kitchen that summer. Hassell’s knowledge of exotic ethnic
sounds and his concept of “fourth world music” (hi-tech
modernity meets pre-industrial tribalism) would be massively
influential on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Indeed, the album
was conceived as a three-way collaboration. Byrne recalls “all
hanging out together, talking and exchanging records.” At his
Tribeca loft, Hassell played Eno and Byrne field recordings on
ethnomusicological labels like Ocora. The idea emerged that
“we would hole up and make fake ethnographic records, with
the sleeve notes and everything,” says Byrne. “We’d invent a
whole culture to go with it.”
In August 1979, Hassell and Laraaji were both present at
the first sessions for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Also contributing
to the dense mix of sound was Van Tieghem—whom
Eno had seen doing a gizmo-based piece called “A Man and His
Toys” at New Music New York—and two bassists: Tim Wright
from DNA and Bill Laswell, then in playing Zu Band (later to
mutate into Material). “What was so weird was that at first I
thought I’d wasted my money,” Eno would wryly comment of
these early sessions. “I just couldn’t understand it at all.” But
gradually, sculpting down “this barrage of instruments playing
all the time,” an audio concept emerged of a “jungle music”
sound, embedded in a spacious widescreen production he’d never
achieved before. Profiling Eno for Musician toward the end
of 1979, Lester Bangs got advance glimpses of the work-in-progress:
“It sounds like nothing we’ve ever heard from Brian Eno
before; like nothing ever heard before, period. The influence of
the move to New York is unmistakable: a polyglot freneticism, a
sense of real itching rage and desperation... It gives intimations
of a new kind of international multi-idiomatic music that would
cross all commercial lines, uniting different cultures, the past
and the future, European experimentalism and gutbucket funk.”
Working in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while before
returning to New York, Byrne and Eno added an extra element
to the mix: alongside field recordings (Muslim devotional singing,
the gospel chants of Sea Islanders off the coast of Georgia),
they found themselves increasingly obsessed with the ranting
and raving of talk-radio hosts and evangelists. This proto-sampling
approach would be hugely influential on later sound-bitebased
genres like hip-hop and jungle. What’s less well known
is that Bush of Ghosts was itself influenced by very early hiphop—more
so breakdancing than early rap records. Ironically,
this connection with hip-hop would be forged not in New York
but when the duo were out in LA. “Brian and I met Toni Basil,
a choreographer who later had a hit single with ‘Mickey,’” recalls
Byrne. “She was working with this street dance group the
Electric Boogaloos and was going to do a whole show based on
popping and locking. Brian and I thought it was the most amazing
dancing we’d ever seen. In a way, some of the music we were
making we thought was slotted for her to use in a television program
with these dancers. But it never happened.” Eno thought
that the future of video, a form with which he had just started
to experiment, would involve either ambient imagery (close to
stationary) or dance (extreme kineticism). Both would be endlessly
rewatchable, because ambient images would become like
décor while the fluid intricacy of experimental dance would be
so sinuously complex you could never get bored with it.
Byrne and Eno’s work on Bush of Ghosts was interrupted
when they joined the rest of Talking Heads during the sweltering
hot New York summer of 1980 to start work on the group’s
fourth album. Initially titled Melody Attack, the album quickly
became a pop version of the ideas being explored on Bush of
Ghosts—ideas like the Fela-meets-Terry-Riley’s-In-C approach
of “having lots of instruments all playing very simple parts
that mesh together to create a complex track,” as Eno explained
to one interviewer. “For example, there were five or
six basses on ‘Born Under Punches’ each doing simple bits.”
Unfortunately this methodology reduced the other Heads—
Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and keyboard player Jerry
Harrison—to raw content generators, producing material to
be assembled into constructions by Eno and Byrne. There was
also a kind of deconstruction of the band itself, with bass parts
being provided by people other than Weymouth. Roles became
fluid and uncertain. Even Byrne himself had to change his
approach: rather than go into the studio with written songs,
he improvised clipped, chanted melodies to suit the roiling
rhythmic density of the new direction. His vocals became increasingly
percussive, verging on rapping in sections of “Born
Under Punches” and “Crosseyed and Painless.” On the shimmering
dreamscape “Seen and Not Seen,” Byrne abandoned
singing altogether, reciting the story of a man who learned to
change his facial appearance by willpower.
Remain in Light was an artistic triumph, but it was also a
disaster: pushing for the new direction and assuming a vastly
Brian Eno
and David
Byrne in NYC,
1981. Photo
by Ebet
Roberts/
Redferns
15

FEATURE FEATURE
expanded degree of creative control, Eno irreparably damaged
what he had earlier described as “the best working relationship
I’ve ever had within rock music.” The members of Talking
Heads—even David Byrne, his symbiotic other half—started to
suspect that he was trying to turn to the group into a new Roxy
Music, except that in this case Eno would be in charge, not Bryan
Ferry. The inverse ratio between the creative fulfillment of
the band and that of the producer had been apparent to Eno as
early as More Songs. “The songs that were least complete going
into the studio came out best for me,” he told Melody Maker of
that album. Fear of Music was better still because “there were
even fewer complete songs” at the start of the recording process,
leading to the formation of a “group mind, a recording
identity” with Eno at the center. Remain was the culmination,
resulting in music so complex that its live performance required
the expansion of Talking Heads into a nine-piece.
Despite his steering role in the project, Eno had his own
misgivings about Remain—he felt the album could have been
taken much further. Those frustrations would take on a bitter
edge when My Life in the Bush of Ghosts came out within a few
months of the extravagantly praised Remain in Light. (Originally
Bush of Ghosts was meant to come out first, but it got delayed due
to sample-clearance issues). Although Bush of Ghosts is now revered
as a groundbreaking classic, at the time it received a mixed
critical response, suffering from a post-Remain backlash and having
its thunder stolen by the innovative Talking Heads LP. Some
critics accused Byrne and Eno of being cold-blooded eggheads
and, worse, neo-imperialistic appropriators of world music.
“One day in early 1981 I arrived at the studio and Eno was on
the couch,” recalls Material keyboard player Michael Beinhorn,
16
ABOVE: Eno and James Chance at Artists Space, just before Chance's fight with rock critic Robert Christgau, 1978. Photo by Julia Gorton
then participating (with his band mates) in an amorphous Eno
project. “He was reading the English music papers and he had
the most downcast expression on his face. The reviews of Bush
of Ghosts were out… My sense is that Brian at that point decided,
‘I’m never going to make rock music again.’” Whether it was
as clear cut as that—after all, he’d already been making ambient
music and ethnogrooves for years—it does seem that the
lukewarm response to Bush of Ghosts encouraged Eno to move
even further from song-based pop forms and into atmospheres
and soundscapes. That trajectory reached its pinnacle with the
ambient On Land, an album whose genesis can be traced back
to the Material sessions of January 1981.
On the first day of those sessions—which took place at the
newly equipped studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn—Eno arrived
with photographic slides he had purchased that morning at
the American Museum of Natural History. “He called me on
the way over, asking if I had white sheets because he wanted
to project images on the walls,” recalls Material’s soundman
Martin Bisi. Eno turned up in a cab with his German friend
Axel Gross, whose résumé includes experimental post-punk
projects Les Vampyrettes and Biomutantes, and promptly set
up projectors all around the room. “The idea was to play music
and record surrounded by images of animals like impalas and
water buffalos. Landscapes too—Kilimanjaro, the savannah.”
The session wasn’t very productive. Bisi, by his own admission,
was an amateur sound engineer in those days (he would
later become an accomplished, in-demand producer) and he annoyed
the typically calm and mild Eno so much that he hurled
a chair. Material bassist Bill Laswell would ultimately make
ambient records himself but his background at that point was
playing in Southern funk bands and he couldn’t get into the
Eno vibe. Laswell and Beinhorn are actually given co-writing
credits on “Lizard Point,” but Beinhorn says, “I can’t pick out a
note that actually comes from me. Maybe it’s in there as halfspeed
tapes or processed in some way.” Most likely the co-credits
are Eno’s way of honoring the first stirrings of a direction
that developed during the month-long session. One thing that
definitely made it onto the record was a tape of frog sounds
recorded in Honduras by Laswell’s friend Felipe Orrego, heard
on “Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills).”
Beyond musical affinities, Eno had opted to work from the
group’s base in Red Hook because of a longstanding inclination
to avoid expensive recording studios, where time-is-money
pressure could paralyze creativity. Eno gave aspiring producer
Bisi, then only 18, a month's advance, enabling him to equip
the place. After that session, however, Eno created his own
workspace in his new apartment, a large loft on Broadway and
Broome that he bought with his girlfriend Alex Blair and their
cat Poo-Poo. Although there were other sessions at proper studios—in
New York, Ontario, and London—much of the work for
On Land was done in this mini-studio.
The album’s working title was Empty Landscapes. But the
African mise-en-scène that was the backdrop of the Brooklyn
session faded as an inspiration, a residue of the Remain/Ghosts
phase. (Eno had even talked to interviewers at the time of wanting
to move to Africa.) Instead, the landscapes gradually took
on a decidedly English atmosphere, a nostalgic direction influenced
by Fellini’s Amarcord, with its dreamlike re-enactment of
small-town life in 1930s Italy.
Upon its release in 1982, Eno described On Land as an at-
ENO
ESSENTIALS
KEY ALBUMS FROM
THE ÜBER-PRODUCER'S
NYC YEARS
1
BRIAN ENO
AND DAVID
BYRNE
My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts
2
BRIAN ENO
On Land
tempt to conjure the atmosphere of the Suffolk countryside
of his childhood: desolate and melancholy, but also familiar
and comforting, “a nice kind of spooky.” “That mood is very
much a feature of the environment where I grew up,” he told
Musician. “It’s a very bleak place and most visitors find it quite
miserable. I don’t think it’s miserable but it’s definitely a sort
of lost place in a lost time—nothing has changed in this part of
England for many hundreds of years.” His goal was to create a
heightened version of this landscape from memory, partly by
using audio tricks that were non-naturalistic (a 70-second echo,
for instance). He titled “Lantern Marsh” after a phosphorescent
marsh in East Suffolk that he had seen on a map but never
actually visited. Other titles and sounds had actual memories
attached to them. Leeks Hills was a forest in which he used to
play, while “The Lost Day” featured a “little bell sound” that
worked on Eno like the aural equivalent of Proust’s madeleine.
On a Christmas visit to his parents in Suffolk he discovered the
reason he was attracted to it and why it affected him so much:
he went for a windy walk along the River Deben and heard
the sound of “the metal guy wires banging against the [metal]
masts of the yacht.” It was virtually the same sound that he’d
generated using a Fender Rhodes electric piano played extremely
softly, a sound that tugged at his buried memories with uncanny
power. Hence the title “The Lost Day,” so close to Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu.
Some of On Land’s glinting, diaphanous music soundtracked
his first major video work, “Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval
Manhattan,” which comprised glacier-slow images of the New
York skyline at sunset captured from the window of his downtown
apartment. Both the audio and video reflected a desire to
slow down the city’s hyped-up metabolism, to transform New
York against its will into a more tranquil and ethereal place. The
word “mediaeval” was a sideways allusion to an experience of culture
shock and stimuli overload in Chinatown, where his senses
were assaulted by strange smells and sounds. Eno decided that
to survive in the city he needed to imaginatively transform the
place into something less overwhelming; after all, he was a Suffolk
native raised amid the “aloneness” and “very slow pace of
things” that characterized that sparsely populated coastal region
of eastern England. The idea of New York as a “strange, medieval,
huge complex town in the middle of nowhere... suddenly made
the place tolerable for me. You can easily live in New York and
just see the mess of it. I wanted to make it mysterious again.”
4
NO NEW
YORK
compilation
Eno had started messing with video back in 1979. His first
installation was accompanying a Frippertronics performance at
The Kitchen (Robert Fripp dubbed it “video Muzak”). The early
roofscape work was also shown at Grand Central Terminal in
early 1980 and at LaGuardia Airport to accompany an airing
of Music for Airports. Eno also used a Polaroid snap of “video
feedback,” created by pointing the camera at its own monitor,
as the cover for Bush of Ghosts. He was interested in creating
“video painting”: something that could be left playing in someone’s
living room, watched inattentively or not at all, working
(like ambient music itself) as a tint in the environment, closer
to perfume or incense than a narrative-based art form. The concept
was hatched partly in opposition to how rock videos had
evolved. According to Eno, directors of pop videos misguided-
THE IDEA OF
NEW YORK AS
A “STRANGE,
MEDIEVAL, HUGE
COMPLEX TOWN
IN THE MIDDLE
OF NOWHERE...
SUDDENLY MADE
THE PLACE
TOLERABLE
FOR ME”
- BRIAN ENO
3TALKING
HEADS
Remain
in Light
5BRIAN ENO
Plateaux of
Mirrors
ly believed that “to make a thing interesting [they should] put
more and more action into it. But that just gives you a blur,
which takes maybe five watches to work out, and after that you
don’t want to see it again. My solution to this problem was to
take the video away from being a short film, a little story, and
turn it into something beautiful to look at, like a picture.”
Recalling “Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan” in
a 1989 interview, Eno said, “Like the music that accompanies
them, the films arise from...a desire to make a quiet place for
myself. They evoke in me a sense of ‘what could have been’ and
hence generate a nostalgia for the future.” But in truth they
seemed to be more simply a product of homesickness. While
still living in downtown New York—and even dabbling a little
on Wall Street after eavesdropping on brokers’ conversations at
the gym—Eno was little by little absenting himself from Manhattan.
He started to lead an increasingly reclusive life, spending
most of the day in his apartment holed up in the small studio,
which he described as “a sort of sacred space somehow.” He
would tinker with music, experiment with perfumes (one of his
obsessions), read, and think. Picking up on this cloistered vibe,
People magazine’s Arthur Lubow described a typical day in the
life of Eno as “self-indulgent and monastic,” and wrote of his
music’s drift toward “an Arcadian kind of yearning.” Alex Blair
spoke of Eno’s “social claustrophobia.” “He doesn’t like sitting
around gabbing,” she said.
Back in 1972 Eno had told Disc that he’d “always been attracted
to whatever place on the planet seemed to be the center
of the most tension and energy.” London had been that
place; now it was New York. By the ’80s, it seemed that all the
things he once found so magnetic about New York—the border-crossing
conversations, the musical ferment—had become
negatives, a form of mental crowding threatening to his own
creativity and equilibrium. His last North American musical
projects—Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, made to accompany
Al Reinert’s film about NASA and the moon landings,
and The Pearl, made with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois—
were both recorded in the relative seclusion of Hamilton, Ontario.
There was also a video painting of a nude woman, shot
in San Francisco and designed to accompany his most vaporous
ambient album yet, Thursday Afternoon. Then a burglary
at the Broome Street apartment sealed the deal of his utter
alienation from New York. In the middle of 1984, Brian Eno
returned to his homeland.
17

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Can you take us through the making of Voodoo briefly? It
seems that you must have seen yourself in a different role
as far as that unit. Yeah, D’Angelo and I, we briefly met when
I was making [the Roots’ 1995 album] Do You Want More?!!!??!,
and he was making Brown Sugar. The engineer of both records,
Bob Power, had told me like, “Yo, you should really get on this
guy’s record. He is the one, he is the one.” And I was stupid, I
made up some flimsy excuse. I think I wanted to go play some
pool. I was supposed to play on two songs on Brown Sugar. I
think I just lied. I missed a chance to be on a classic record, but
I actually think it was all for the best.
D went to see us perform in April of ’96, back when we were
on with the Fugees and Goodie Mob. And by then I had become
a D’Angelo fanatic, because that was the first time that I ever
heard somebody sing over music that could have easily been
A Tribe Called Quest or music that I liked. R&B music had become
so watered down and crap that I just thought hip-hop
was the only music with real soul in it. And so here he comes.
So after the show he was like, “Yo man, I didn’t know that a real
drummer can sound like a drum machine. You sound just like
Jay Dee.” [D’Angelo] and I are the Jay Dee disciples, you know?
So, how I felt about Jay Dee, that’s how he felt about Jay Dee as
well, his drum programming and the whole thing. We are the
only two people in America who have record deals and probably
care about this thing and we speak the same language.
After the tour ended in August we invited him to sing
on the Illadelph Halflife record. And on the next two days
we started working on Voodoo, of which we didn’t do much
talking. We spent the first day probably just testing each other’s
knowledge, [stuff like], “OK, let’s see if we can ‘out-Prince’
each other.” So then that became the process of Voodoo. Like,
we take what we call the Yoda figures. The Yoda figures were
the wise all-knowing masters of whatever music that we were
into: Hendrix, Clinton, James [Brown], Stevie [Wonder],
Prince. Literally, for the next five years we were just going
through their discography. And if something stuck, then we
started working on a song. For instance, for Prince, there is
a song called “Africa” that ends D’Angelo’s album. It took us
about five hours to get to “Africa.” We literally went through
every Prince song. We went from the For You record, nothing.
Took a break. Came back to the Prince record, nothing. Came
back to Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Around
the World in a Day, Parade. As soon as we got to the third song
on Parade, which is called “I Wonder U,” he was like, “Yo, keep
on playing that beat.” And I just kept on playing that beat.
That’s the thing, now I am lazy about it, because now there is
ProTools and easier ways to execute it. But back then I was the
ProTools, I had to play the beat over and over and over again.
18
Q&A
?UESTLOVE
At 2005’s RBMA in Seattle, the Roots’ drummer and
ace music historian spoke on working with D’Angelo and
the magic of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.
ILLUSTRATION MARK CHIARELLO
And he just sat there and then he discovered something. And
next thing you know, that’s how “Africa” got born. Then for the
“Chicken Grease” song we went through every Ohio Players,
Westbound Records, the earlier Ohio Players. From the Ecstasy
album, we were doing “Never Had A Dream” and there is a
very stoic sounding drum break in it. The cymbal had broken,
and I had to go get some duct tape and tape it up. And next
thing you know he said, “Aha, stay on that!”
Initially, Common was going to take it and D gave me that
wink like, “You know I’m keeping that, right?” I had to go outside
and explain to Common, “Look, D says he will give you
one of his songs and you give him this song.” You know, that’s
the type of environment that was in Electric Lady [Studios
in New York]. We were all living in the studio, it was like a
commune, and every day was something different, you know?
Spending the night there was one big ass—it was no sleep for
five years. It was me, D’Angelo, Erykah [Badu] was always
there, Common was always there, Mos [Def], Talib [Kweli], Jay
Dee, James Poyser... and every week there would be something
new. Like, Q-Tip would always bring in a luminary. He would
bring in Russ Titelman, the guy who produced the Doobie
Brothers and stuff. He tells us stories and, you know, maybe
I come back from a tour from Japan, I have a whole bunch of
Soul Train tapes, and we sit there and we watch it. It was a 24hour
affair. One of the hardest things about the Voodoo record
was stopping it, because it was like graduating high school. It
was like: “Well, this is the last song. Are we going to see each
other again? And what are we going to do?” It was like a sad
thing to finish that record, but that was the greatest period.
Some of the music and the stuff that we did between 1995 and
2000 was some of the best years of my life, ever.
So there has got to be a lot of that has yet to come out.
Reels. Dave Chappelle shot a documentary, so to speak. Dave
Chappelle and Michel Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind fame, we sort of redid the Wattstax thing. For those
who don’t know, Wattstax was a film that came out in ’73 that
featured Al Bell and his array of artists that were on Stax Records;
they gave a concert. We recreated the spirit of that by
doing a show in Brooklyn in September 2004 with Kanye—basically
the Illadelphonics, the group of super-musicians that I put
together for the Jay-Z event. We backed up Kanye, the Roots,
Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Dead Prez, and the reunited Fugees. So
we’re scoring that right now, but we’re doing it at Electric Lady
in the C Room. And I went into one of the storage rooms and,
sure enough, there’s like 400-plus 2-inch reels of just Voodoo.
I remember the Block Party was a big deal because the
Fugees were reuniting. Would they show up or wouldn’t they
show up? We didn’t know. Basically, will Lauryn show up? And,
you know, Dave Chappelle wanted to create an atmosphere. He
was at the peak of his powers by that point. He figured probably
the best thing that he could do with the peak of his power is to
expose the world to the hip-hop that he listens to. Which he really
didn’t have to do. But the fact that he was willing to do that
was a beautiful thing, and he used his resources to get some of
the best people to shoot it. The fact that Michel Gondry, one of
my favorite directors in video and movies, was directing it and
that Dave pulled all these people in to make this event special,
it was one of the greatest weeks ever. It felt like we were back
at Electric Lady all over again, you know? The first night, like
all 19—well, 17 or 18—of the acts, we were all on a conference
call and cracking jokes at each other and that type of thing,
trying to figure out what we wanted to do. They wanted us to
do Wattstax with each other. I wanted Jill Scott to do a song
with Common, I wanted Dead Prez to do a song with these people,
mix and match and all that stuff. And at the end it came
out really brilliant because no one in New York even suspected
something like that happening. And the fact that we pulled it
off without a hitch! And the way it is depicted in the movie, it’s
not a concert film. I mean, the narrative is basically Dave in his
native Ohio, outside of Dayton, going around like he is doing
this Willy Wonka thing, where he is handing out golden tickets
to various people and flying them and bussing them to Brooklyn
to see this concert, and it’s brilliant.
For the full Q&A head to redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures
19

COLUMNS COLUMNS
the cbgb logo has long since
transcended its humble beginnings at
315 Bowery. What had once been a dirty
club in a fringe location is now enshrined
within an expensive menswear boutique.
Even when Patti Smith performed the
club’s last rites in October 2006, it was
well past its “home for underground rock”
prime. (Founder/owner Hilly Kristal died
of lung cancer less than a year later.) But
the essence of CBGB & OMFUG staggers
on. It’s an idea that’s been perpetuated,
commodified, and memorialized ad
nauseam. And while much of its history
has been documented, little has been said
about where that infamous logo came
from. Kristal’s ex-wife Karen has claimed
credit for designing and painting it,
but the truth might have gone with Hilly
to the grave.
“If she did paint it, I wouldn’t be
surprised if she looked at some sign
painter’s alphabet book for inspiration,”
says typographer Nick Sherman, a
20
LOG OS
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
consultant for the The Cooper Union’s
typeface design program, who sees links to
19th-century Tuscan wood type. With its
split ends and spurs in the middle, Tuscan
type has a Western feel, which makes sense
considering the club was originally meant
to showcase “Country, Bluegrass, Blues &
Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers”
rather than the punk rock that made it
famous. Painted askew and DIY-style on
its dingy white awning, the CB’s logo was
like a beacon for misfit artists, poets, and
musicians, all drawn to the club’s Wild
West saloon vibe.
Those days are long gone, though.
Richard Hell, one-time bassist for
Television—the first band of the punk
scene to play CBGB, in 1974—doesn't know
the logo's origins either, but had this to say
via email: “I’m continually struck, when I
see it on t-shirts everywhere, by the horror/
hilarity of the phenomenon. Because of the
club’s cachet, all these people walk around
with such ugly chests!” - SUE APFELBAUM
A column on
the gear and processes
that inform
the music we make.
it's short-sighted to claim a country
has a single distinct sound. But even with global
hardware distribution as good as it has ever
been, we are all still interested in the kinds of
creative restraints that geography puts on the
sounds we make. Harald Björk, a 2013 Red
Bull Music Academy participant, makes synthesizer
music in Sweden. We spoke with him about
the gear he uses, Swedish and otherwise, and
how these machines have shaped his sound.
RBMA: What Swedish synthesizers are popular
in Sweden?
Harald Björk: The modules and synthesizers
from the fancy brand Cwejman sound really
good but are a little out of my budget. Then
we have Nord. That has ruled the live market
for quite some time—almost every band has a
Nord these days. Their products are quite sturdy,
built with a quality feel. Teenage Engineering
is another interesting brand that is more
about the design and playfulness. Their product
OP-1 made a real buzz.
RBMA: How did your gear setup change from
the track “Bigfield” to the Estelle EP, which is
much more lo-fi?
HB: On “Bigfield” I used the Korg Electribe
EMX quite [a lot] for some internal sounds and
filters, but also to sequence drum machines
like the MFB-522 and my JoMoX AirBase99,
and synths like Technosaurus Microcon II.
[The] Estelle EP was more or less written and
produced with two drum machines and three
synthesizers, except for the vocal parts. It was
made in a quite old-school way: Roland gear
from the early ’80s and some Korg PolySix sunshine
and glimmer on top.
RBMA: In what ways do you think your
equipment shapes your music?
HB: My works are half experiment that I want
to try out with a machine, and half spontaneous
ideas and transcribed feelings that pop
up the moment I create. So the machines give
me quite a lot of inspiration.
RBMA: Do you ever impose creative limitations
on yourself?
HB: My interest in analog gear has made a lot
of limitations. With software I could get stuck
forever automating parameters and faders.
Recording hardware, I have the limitations of
movement by my hands.
RBMA: Have you ever built a song around a
mistake?
HB: Since I’m the worst key player in the
world, most of my leads and chords are mistakes.
But I believe it gives a little human touch
in a very controlled environment.
-NICK SYLVESTER
TOP 5…
MUSIC-RELATED
ACTIVITIES IN THE
EAST VILLAGE
PRESENTED BY
MAX
NEUHAUS'
"TIMES
SQUARE"
when antonín dvoRák came to New York from
the Old World, he was on a quest, as he put it, to “discover”
American music, as if it were a rare earth element or
a creature from the depths of the sea. In an 1895 essay
for Harper’s Magazine, the Czech composer wrote, from
his house at 327 East 17th Street: “The music of the people
is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching
weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample
it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will
perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit
who will prize it above all else.”
This idea of one person entranced by a siren song
while surrounded by the oblivious hordes is in keeping
with Max Neuhaus’ “Times Square” installation, which
sits beneath a series of metal grates on Broadway between
45th and 46th Streets. It was here in 1977 that
Neuhaus, a Texas-born, New York-bred percussionist
and sound artist, conceived of a work so subtle yet so
dynamic that the “discriminating spirit” would have
no choice but to stop in his tracks and let the sounds
of the city wash over him. Or, more accurately, synthesizer-generated
tones amplified by miles of subway
tunnels into never-ending peals of deep and sonorous
vibrations, as if a church bell, clanging away, was somehow
buried in the pavement.
In Dvorák’s time, Broadway entertainment was clustered
around Herald Square, so Times Square rang out
not with sounds of musicals such as the 1891 blockbuster
A Trip to Chinatown (and its hit number “After
the Ball”), but the clip-clopping of horses transversing
crooked cobblestones. In the 1980s, when the area morphed
into the psychographic center of cheap thrills and
video arcades, the sonorous clanging of “Times Square”
continued unabated. “Times Square” went silent in
1992, when Neuhaus moved to Europe, but it returned
with its creator in 2002; upon Neuhaus’ death in 2009,
the DIA Foundation took over the installation’s maintenance.
Today you can hear “Times Square” as Neuhaus
intended it—a surprising yet gentle respite from the
chaotic city above, pointing to a world of never-ending
music beneath your feet. - ADRIENNE DAY
East Village Radio (EVR.com) is a premier
Internet radio platform, streaming live to an
international audience. Located in the heart
of New York City’s famed East Village, EVR.com
carries on our neighborhood’s tradition
of producing and nurturing vital music and
culture and placing them on the world stage.
EVR.com’s original programming streams live
from a storefront studio, providing a view
into downtown NYC’s legendary history for our
local and worldwide listeners.
1
CATCH A GIG AT
MERCURY LOUNGE
Whether you’re in
for the early set
or sticking around
through the late
show, this Houston
Street venue is
sure to tickle your
musical fancy.
Upcoming dates
will host JEFF the
Brotherhood, Peace,
Sky Ferreira, and
DIIV, to name a few.
LANDM ARK S
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
STATEN ISLAND
2
CHECK OUT THE JOE
STRUMMER MURAL
Head to Avenue
A at East 7th
Street to see a
fitting tribute
to the Clash’s
Joe Strummer. The
punk icon spent
many years in the
East Village, so
what better way to
capture his lasting
spirit than with a
splash of graffiti
vérité?
MANHATTAN
BROOKLYN
3
SNAP A PIC AT
MADONNA’S OLD
APARTMENT
The queen of pop
wasn’t born into
royalty. She slummed
it like the rest
of us and spent her
budding years at
234 E. 4th Street
(between Avenues A
and B). Chill here
for a few minutes
and then tell
your friends you
walked in Madge’s
footsteps.
WHAT:"TIMES SQUARE"
WHERE: GRATES ON
BROADWAY BETWEEN
45TH AND 46TH
STREETS, MANHATTAN
WHY: SOUND
INSTALLATION
WHEN: 1977–1992;
2002–PRESENT
4
GET WEIRD
See some live shows
at the New Museum,
especially the Get
Weird performance
series. The Bowery
building manages to
keep things strange
along the revered
street.
THE BRONX
QUEENS
5WAVE AT
WHOEVER’S LIVE
IN THE EVR STUDIO
We’re at 21 First
Avenue, situated in
a glass storefront
space; you can see
what’s happening
live on EVR at any
given time! We also
suggest grabbing the
free EVR Mobile App
to take on the go
while you do each of
the aforementioned
activities.
21

NEW YORK STORY
22
THINGS
FALL APART
The 2001 edition of RBMA kicked off in New York
on 9/3. On 9/11, everything changed. A rap journalist
and Academy lecture host recalls the experience.
i remember very well when I first heard about the Red
Bull Music Academy. I was on a stealth mission in the Belly of
the Beast (aka Wall Street), shooting B-roll for my first feature
film, Crooked, when I got a call from a music writer friend of
mine, Matt Diehl, asking me if I wanted to participate. “Red Bull,
the energy drink?” I replied, “What do they know about music?”
A few days later I met Diehl, local coordinator Todd Kasten,
and several other writers and music people at the Academy’s
headquarters in an old public school in the Lower East Side. I
had walked past this spot on Rivington Street countless times
in the early ’90s on my way to a friend’s home studio, where I
cut my chops producing music. In the time it took for my indie
label WordSound to stack up 40-some releases, this formerly
smack-riddled neighborhood had come clean, trendy restaurants
and bars sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
As I entered the school building, the smell of new paint and
carpeting filled my nostrils. Mini-fridges full of Red Bull were
everywhere. Following a brief meet-and-greet, we took a tour
of the Academy’s classrooms, which were filled with Technics
turntables and Vestax mixers—straight out the box—that had
me practically salivating. (“Wow,” I thought. “I wish I could be
a student here.”)
But the Academy had other plans for me. They asked me
to moderate some of the seminars they were conducting that
related to hip-hop. I was no stranger to rap, having written numerous
articles for The Source, Vibe, and Rolling Stone, as well
as publishing a book on the subject (The New Beats: Exploring
The Music, Culture and Attitudes of Hip-Hop). I also enjoyed
being on both sides of the coin, producing and releasing music
on WordSound and Black Hoodz, a vinyl-only sub-label that
embraced the experimental fringes of the art form. I considered
myself a purist with a taste for the extreme.
A perfect example of this dichotomy could be found in a
record I put out by the legendary group the Jungle Brothers,
who hailed from Brooklyn and Harlem. They were part of the
Native Tongues, a loose collective of highly creative artists
(their ranks included De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest)
who defied rap’s clichés. At the peak of their commercial success,
the JB’s went far off the beaten path, boldly attempting
to take rap into uncharted realms, only to be stymied by
their major label, Warner Bros. After spending two years and
hundreds of thousands of dollars in the studio recording an
WORDS S.H. FERNANDO JR.
album called J. Beez Wit Da Remedy, the group’s magnum
opus was outright rejected. The label eventually released a
watered-down version, which suffered from anemic sales, and
the Jungle Brothers were unceremoniously dropped by the label.
A couple years later producer Bill Laswell played me the
album’s original master tapes, which he had had a hand in
mixing. It was as if I had just caught a glimpse of a very brave
new future. I contacted Jungle Brothers Afrika Baby Bam and
Mike G, and we agreed to release parts of those original tapes
independently under the name Crazy Wisdom Masters.
You can imagine how charged I was to learn that Mike G was
a featured guest at one of the Academy’s seminars, and that I
would moderate the discusision. I wanted him to tell his story
because it was really the story of rap—a tale of art versus commerce,
in which big money won (as it often does). But in the
case of Crazy Wisdom Masters, the record had garnered a dedicated
cult following, and was still alive in the nether regions
of the underground from where hip-hop itself had originated.
I wanted to spread the virus even more, so I brought copies
of the Black Hoodz 10-inch as a gift for all the students at the
Academy. Though Mike didn’t like to speak about his whole experience
with J. Beez Wit Da Remedy, sitting there on the couch
in that setting, he opened up. I think our conversation was actually
therapeutic for him. I could certainly see the inspiration reflected
in the eyes of all those aspiring musicians in attendance.
The power of music never ceases to amaze me, and I was proud
to be part of Crazy Wisdom and the Academy. When I left that
day, I was looking forward to my next session at RBMA. Unfortunately,
it never occurred.
The following morning I was awoken by a frantic call
from my brother in Brooklyn. “Turn on the TV, quick,” was
all he said to me. I clicked the remote in time to see a jetliner
crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center. That
was all she wrote for the 2001 Academy. A lot of other things
ended that day too. Though times have certainly changed, my
commitment to music hasn’t; it looks like the same can be
said for Red Bull Music Academy.
S.H. Fernando Jr., aka Skiz, just released WordSound’s
57th album, The True & Living, under his alter ego
Spectre. His most recent book, Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan
Home Cooking, was a New York Times notable cookbook.
23

A CONSTANTLY
EVOLVING SOUND
AND IMAGESCAPE
BY BRIAN ENO
RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY NEW YORK 2013
APRIL 28 – MAY 31
236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.
WWW.REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
BRIAN ENO
77 MILLION PAINTINGS
MAY 4 - JUNE 2
145 W 32ND ST
12PM-8PM (CLOSED MONDAYS)
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