Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapted from James Joyce’s Finnegans WakeĬolin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style.
How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”īrian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989) It came out as the flagship release from Eno’s Ambient Records - and the rest, my friends, is popular-experimental music history.Īlbums from Obscure Records can be sampled over at UBU.ĭavid Bowie & Brian Eno’s Collaboration on “Warszawa” Reimagined in Comic Animation It ultimately made more sense, however, to found an entirely new operation to put out this work, a certain Music for Airports. This may seem colorful enough for any label’s lifetime, but Eno did have an eleventh Obscure record planned. Obscure’s fifth release, Jan Steele and John Cage’s 1976 Voices and Instruments, features “The Wonderful Widow Of Eighteen Springs,” previously featured here on Open Culture as interpreted by Joey Ramone. 3), which contains a composition made using the then unheard-of technique of running several tape loops simultaneously and letting the sound recorded on them run gradually out of sync. Though he mostly acted as producer on Obscure recordings, Eno also used the label to put out his seminal 1975 solo album Discreet Music (no. “The label provided a venue for experimental music,” says Ubuweb’s Obscure Records page, “and its association with Eno gave increased public exposure to its composers and musicians.” There, you freely can listen to all ten Obscure releases - which, I suppose, effectively makes them obscure no more - although they don’t include the famously detailed original liner notes “analyzing the compositions and providing a biography of the composer.” 10), all of which we might broadly categorize as “contemporary classical music,” with a strong bent toward new compositional techniques and what we’d now call ambient textures.
6) to Harold Budd’s Pavilion of Dreams (no. After all, one of my most treasured possessions is my limited edition Brian Eno Oblique Strategies deck (home to my favorite riddle: 'Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before. In that short period, Obscure Records managed to put out ten albums, from Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic (catalog no. But at one point, he did call his own efforts obscure - or at least those efforts required to establish and run the label Obscure Records, which he did between 19. To help guide production of the album, Brian Eno and the albums cover artist Peter Schmidt developed the highly influential Oblique Strategies cards which. Given his celebrity status in the realms of both music and visual art, I don’t know that we can really call anything Brian Eno does obscure.