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Michael Brook: Cobalt Blue & Live At The Aquarium

The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Aquarium Drunkard: I think Cobalt Blue is a great record in what a couple people are calling the “ambient country” category. That’s the way I hear it, along with The Painted Desert by Ikue Mori with Marc Ribot and Robert Quine. I hear this as a sort of far-off parallel to that stuff. I wonder if we could start there: a lot happened between the time you released your debut, Hybrid, and then Cobalt Blue. You’d done a ton of stuff. Going into this one, what was guiding you back in those days?

Michael Brook: [With] Hybrid, I made that when I was still living in Canada and it was just trying to dip my toes into recording and composing. And then I moved to England around the time it came out around in 1985, and became much more immersed in the music world. I produced some people, did some concerts and just learned more about music. I think part of where I was coming from was that in Canada, I’d gone to York University and took some electronic music courses and things like that. People there were very into modern avant-garde music, and very atonal music. I think I was inhibited by that in a way, in that I like tonal music. I like textural music too, or non-tonal. I think when I started working on Cobalt Blue, I didn’t feel constrained. I just thought, “I’ll just make things that I like and hopefully some other people will.” So you do hear elements of JJ Cale and things like that in there.

AD: In “Breakdown,” you almost hear that funky country feel. You know what I mean? That’s like a really unique thing. “Red Shift” also feels evocative of a kind of Americana. 

Michael Brook: There’s a bluegrass element there.

AD: Previous to this, you’d been there as the ambient music thing is really coming into shape. 

Michael Brook: Brian Eno started it a few years before, but definitely I got in on the early days of it, that’s for sure.

AD: Did you get your start at the Grant Avenue studio with the Lanois brothers in Canada? 

Michael Brook: I had a home studio with an eight-track tape machine. I was playing in Jon Hassell’s band and met Dan Lanois through him, because Brian Eno had suggested that Jon record some of his album at Dan’s studio, and that’s where I came into contact with Dan and then decided to keep working on my album at his studio. But I was never an employee there. I really only worked on one outside project, but everything else was kind of either my music, or sometimes I helped Brian on some of his, but not a lot. So it was mostly just my stuff there.

AD: In contrast to the more atonal side of things, Cobalt Blue found you were in “song” mode.

Michael Brook: Songs, but without any words or without a singer. There is an element of that. It was just an area I really wasn’t thinking about it, quite honestly. A lot of this is retrospective. I was just kind of following my nose or my muse. I was recording a lot of little sketches and just going through them and seeing what resonated with me and then trying to turn those into larger compositions.

AD: It probably crosses the mind of anybody who’s making instrumental music at one point or another. I wonder if I should have a vocalist sing on this? Was that ever something you even considered?

Michael Brook: Not really. It felt like I maybe toyed with the idea, but I might not have. It just felt like I’m just going to see what this music will be, maybe if it had seemed like there was a good reason to do that, I would have. I’ve done it subsequently, but no, this was just follow the music really.

AD: “Ultramarine” is a pivotal song. It was featured on the soundtrack to Heat, but that didn’t happen immediately. It was a few years later. But that led to people understanding, ‘Oh wow, there’s like a sort of cinematic quality to what this guy does.’ Was that a part of your conception of the music you were making on Cobalt Blue as well, a sort of imaginary soundtrack mentality?

Michael Brook: Slightly. Another influence is Ennio Morricone, who I’m a huge fan of. There was the thing going around of releasing albums like [Brian Eno’s] Music for Films or doing film mixes, but not being the composer for a film, not doing scoring. There was something about thinking something might be in a film that was a little bit liberating in that it was going to accompany something else that may never actually appear, but I think it certainly allowed me to feel like a license to not necessarily make everything feel completely finished or complete in a way.

AD: Later on, you played Robert Fripp, along with David Sylvian. Were you a fan of either King Crimson or the early ambient guitar infinite loop compositions?

Michael Brook: I liked that and I really loved his work with Eno. In a certain sense, it wasn’t exactly an influence, because I felt I would never kind of go to where Robert does. He’s such a virtuosic, disciplined, incredibly powerful player and nobody’s better at being Robert Fripp than Robert Fripp. I didn’t have the music training, he’s very into, I suppose, early math rock-type thing sometimes and I just can’t do that. It doesn’t really ring my bell either, quite honestly, but more power to him.

AD: Cobalt Blue was originally going to be released by Eno’s label, Opal. Then that fell apart and then 4AD swooped in and brought it to the world. But I’m curious about the in-between there. Was there a moment where you thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this record’s going to come out?’

Michael Brook: Yes. Opal, Brian’s label and their distribution deal in the US with Warner’s fell through, or ended on a pretty short notice, because they used to mail cassettes out to the journalists and all that for review, and those were all ready to go. Tat’s how far along it was. And when I found out it wasn’t coming out, yeah, it was pretty disappointing and there was a period, I don’t remember how long, where I just didn’t know what was going to happen with it. I had become friends with Ivo [Watts-Russell] and I think I’d worked on Sleeps with the Fishes then and we would just hang out every once in a while and he just would say, ‘Well, what’s going on with the album?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it all fell through and I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ And then he expressed an interest in releasing it, which was great.

AD: The new version also includes this Live at the Aquarium concert and you’re gearing up to do more shows. I’m curious what presenting this music live, what’s the process of bringing it to the stage like? What was it like then and what is it like now?

Michael Brook: Well, it’s always challenging. Back then, the challenge was to essentially rearrange the material so it could be performed solo. I had one of the early loopers that would synchronize and I had some MIDI-based backing tracks and it took a long time to figure it out, and then it sort of became its own thing. Yes, it’s derived from Cobalt Blue, but I think it’s kind of a distinct entity now. Trying to get to perform it now, there were challenges that… but, one thing amazingly, my floppy discs from 1992 still worked. 

AD: Wow, that’s some durable technology.

Michael Brook: It was remarkable. I had or reacquired the same hardware so I could get the sounds and the backing tracks, which was a big help because it would have been a ton of work to figure all that out again because there’s no tapes. There’s just two-track recordings. Then I was going to take the old hardware on the road, but then it seemed like it’s 40 years old, it’s so delicate, hard to repair and hard to get if you need a spare, hard to find, and heavy. I started looking into replacing some of it with software and all of that is pretty darn good. I used DX7s for the backing tracks and I think the software on sounds as good or better and in terms of guitar sound, I’m still actually using the old pedals that I used. 

AD: After Cobalt Blue came out, you did some shows with John Cale to promote the record and get the word out. What were those shows like?

Michael Brook: It was the best of days and the worst of days.

AD: That’s the best kind of opening response I could ask for. [Laughs] Do elaborate.

Michael Brook: I had met John. I helped engineer some recordings of a string group he and Brian Eno were working with. Then he asked me to open for him and he was doing, I think it was like five or six or seven dates in the US. The money was not good, but just at that time, United Airlines had a sale on, where you could fly from on any city in the US to any other city for $50. So that’s how I was able to do the tour. I was very naive, inexperienced, traveling with three flight cases—each one weighed about a hundred pounds.

I didn’t realize you couldn’t check that in, because that was plan A. So that was daunting, but we made it. In terms of the actual performances, well, it was just fascinating to see John play multiple nights in a row. Some nights it was sublime genius. He just had the whole room in his hand and it was beautiful and impressive. Other nights, it was a bit of a train wreck and I really don’t know why. He just traveled with a briefcase with some written music in it, whereas I had my 300 pound flight cases and guitars and blah, blah, blah. He would just get them to rent him an acoustic guitar that he’d play some numbers and he played the piano. I don’t know why he was great some nights and not others, but he really was. I would say typicallyhe was pretty great. What an amazing musical mind. Just like the stuff he did in The Velvet Underground and then his solo things and the stuff he did with Brian. I think he works and thinks about music in the way that most of us think about going for a walk. You just do it; it’s just part of who he is. It’s fascinating to be around people like that.