Loops

To understand Brian Eno’s techniques in the studio, one of the worst things to do is to read up on how records are actually produced. Over the past few years, there have been several books on the role of the producer. Two of these books are The Producer as Composer: Shaping the sounds of popular music by Virgil Moorefield, which devotes almost an entire chapter to Eno, and Echo and Reverb: Fabricating space in popular music recording, by Peter Doyle. Echo and Reverb is far more successful in discussing Eno because the author ends his story in 1960, sidestepping the question of Eno’s productions entirely. Moorefield is a professor of music; Doyle writes mystery novels. And so perhaps it’s not so surprising that Doyle is better at explaining the art of production.
     How do you understand a producer who has generated reams of words and yet claims that words are meaningless, who says he doesn’t like to talk about the past but can’t help referencing it in his rhetoric about the future, who fades to the background as easily as he rushes to the surface? In the liner notes for Music for Airports, Eno wrote that the record was designed to be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’. Eno, too, is as ignorable as he is interesting. It seems like a fool’s game to construct a narrative around someone whose entire modus operandi seems based upon denying any threads of narrative structure.
     Frustrated by this, I put on Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), and as ‘Mother Whale Eyeless’ was spinning these lyrics flew out:

     The proof was in the pudding.


– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.