„Primal, tribal, apple, egg, vegetable, eel I have a new canoe but it does not have a wheel Sex, sleep, eat, drink, dream Sex, sleep, eat, drink, dream“ (King Crimson)
Dreimal „Traumtext“ und Traumdeutung, zuerst ein Song von King Crimson, dann „100 Jahre Traumdeutung“ (Dank an Frank Nikol), und schliesslich, in „comment 1“, „On Electric Country Dream Music“, ein Interview mit Brian Eno und Beatie Wolfe: da sind, auf „Luminal“, die „lyrics“ die Traumtexte.
Brian Eno: With these records there wasn’t a single modus operandi. We didn’t think about a strategy or that we were making records. We just started playing and we enjoyed playing together so much. Like two kids who meet in the school yard and get on well.
Beatie Wolfe: And share each other’s toys.
Brian: Yeah, we didn’t have many toys. That was a big part of it. We did the whole three albums really on one microphone and one guitar and quite a bit of software, but not that much these days.
Beatie: I think with everything we’ve made, which is really across a very wide spectrum, we started out with nothing, with each layer then informing the next, wouldn’t you say?
Brian: Yeah, because of the way we work, we never start out with the thought, Let’s write a song, or let’s write a landscape or something like that. Instead we just follow our noses like little piggies and see what happens.
Beatie: When a piece of music did feel like it was in the song territory, which is what Luminal became a home for, the question was, “If this music could speak, what would it say?” That was kind of the approach with the voice and lyrics.
Brian: Yeah, making the feelings in the music a little bit more pointed. Sharpening up some of the feelings that are already there.
Beatie: And also seeing if it was possible to have a voice in this land without a personality to it.
Brian: Yeah. Most of the pieces I think started from us making a kind of landscape and then seeing if we could populate it with a voice
Beatie: A new kind of cowboy
Brian: Yep. A cowboy who loves the cows and understands them and feels on the same wavelength. Because Electric-Country-Dream-Music is about the idea of open landscapes (not people in middle America), and there’s a lot of that in this.
Beatie: “Big Empty Country”
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe | Photo by Manuela Batas
Brian: It really has a feeling of openness and wideness …
Beatie: And aliveness
Brian: Yes. And not sweetness exactly. But I think I’d say it had a feeling of peace to it.
Beatie: Originally it was eight minutes long. I was actually back in California. Brian was somewhere deep in the heart of the English countryside and we had both, somehow, on the same day, looped the original eight minute piece eight times.
Brian: Oh yeah, that’s right.
Beatie: Thinking that it needed to be longer. We wrote to one another pretty much at the same time saying, “Hey, I think this could be extended to around an hour,” because it felt so good to listen to. So that was pretty synchronistic.
Brian: Yes. That was very interesting. I’d forgotten that. I think people often find in music the world they would prefer to live in. Now if you are cynical, you can dismiss that as escapism, but I don’t think it’s escapism. I think it’s about trying to find the world that you would like to live in. It helps you to make that world, and that world in “Big Empty Country” is very real to me. It’s where I would like to live. It has breadth, it has possibility, it has change, and sometimes turbulence. It’s not sanitized. It has some wildness to it. So I think when you make music like that, when you make music that suggests a different world or invokes a different world, what you are really doing is saying to people, how about this as a future? What does that feel like to you?
Beatie: A lot of this is really about feelings, familiar and foreign.
Brian: Yeah, like “Play On” is a very unusual mood because it’s really a combination of moods, of feelings, but it’s a combination I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. Is that what you’d say?
Beatie: Oh yeah, exactly. It’s a complex mixture of unlikely bedfellows … ecstasy and anger, passion and purity, the monstrous and the beautiful …
Brian: Yes, so much of the thrill of making music is finding new feelings, new mixtures of feelings. That’s when it feels like something worth doing.
Beatie: With all of this music there was no forethought about what was going to happen, but then as soon as these moods or landscapes or environments started to emerge and we’d realise, Oh, I really want to be here, it was about extending and expanding that. And especially when it was complex or ambiguous. Like your fascination with perfumery because of it containing so many complex notes that in theory shouldn’t go together. But actually that’s what makes it so intoxicating.
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flowworker
Electric Country Dream Music
Brian Eno: With these records there wasn’t a single modus operandi. We didn’t think about a strategy or that we were making records. We just started playing and we enjoyed playing together so much. Like two kids who meet in the school yard and get on well.
Beatie Wolfe: And share each other’s toys.
Brian: Yeah, we didn’t have many toys. That was a big part of it. We did the whole three albums really on one microphone and one guitar and quite a bit of software, but not that much these days.
Beatie: I think with everything we’ve made, which is really across a very wide spectrum, we started out with nothing, with each layer then informing the next, wouldn’t you say?
Brian: Yeah, because of the way we work, we never start out with the thought, Let’s write a song, or let’s write a landscape or something like that. Instead we just follow our noses like little piggies and see what happens.
Beatie: When a piece of music did feel like it was in the song territory, which is what Luminal became a home for, the question was, “If this music could speak, what would it say?” That was kind of the approach with the voice and lyrics.
Brian: Yeah, making the feelings in the music a little bit more pointed. Sharpening up some of the feelings that are already there.
Beatie: And also seeing if it was possible to have a voice in this land without a personality to it.
Brian: Yeah. Most of the pieces I think started from us making a kind of landscape and then seeing if we could populate it with a voice
Beatie: A new kind of cowboy
Brian: Yep. A cowboy who loves the cows and understands them and feels on the same wavelength. Because Electric-Country-Dream-Music is about the idea of open landscapes (not people in middle America), and there’s a lot of that in this.
Beatie: “Big Empty Country”
Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe | Photo by Manuela Batas
Brian: It really has a feeling of openness and wideness …
Beatie: And aliveness
Brian: Yes. And not sweetness exactly. But I think I’d say it had a feeling of peace to it.
Beatie: Originally it was eight minutes long. I was actually back in California. Brian was somewhere deep in the heart of the English countryside and we had both, somehow, on the same day, looped the original eight minute piece eight times.
Brian: Oh yeah, that’s right.
Beatie: Thinking that it needed to be longer. We wrote to one another pretty much at the same time saying, “Hey, I think this could be extended to around an hour,” because it felt so good to listen to. So that was pretty synchronistic.
Brian: Yes. That was very interesting. I’d forgotten that. I think people often find in music the world they would prefer to live in. Now if you are cynical, you can dismiss that as escapism, but I don’t think it’s escapism. I think it’s about trying to find the world that you would like to live in. It helps you to make that world, and that world in “Big Empty Country” is very real to me. It’s where I would like to live. It has breadth, it has possibility, it has change, and sometimes turbulence. It’s not sanitized. It has some wildness to it. So I think when you make music like that, when you make music that suggests a different world or invokes a different world, what you are really doing is saying to people, how about this as a future? What does that feel like to you?
Beatie: A lot of this is really about feelings, familiar and foreign.
Brian: Yeah, like “Play On” is a very unusual mood because it’s really a combination of moods, of feelings, but it’s a combination I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. Is that what you’d say?
Beatie: Oh yeah, exactly. It’s a complex mixture of unlikely bedfellows … ecstasy and anger, passion and purity, the monstrous and the beautiful …
Brian: Yes, so much of the thrill of making music is finding new feelings, new mixtures of feelings. That’s when it feels like something worth doing.
Beatie: With all of this music there was no forethought about what was going to happen, but then as soon as these moods or landscapes or environments started to emerge and we’d realise, Oh, I really want to be here, it was about extending and expanding that. And especially when it was complex or ambiguous. Like your fascination with perfumery because of it containing so many complex notes that in theory shouldn’t go together. But actually that’s what makes it so intoxicating.
From BIRDY MAGAZINE