Brian Eno

Ramon was my savior, in many ways. After committing myself to going back to my high school campus for a year and filming the proceedings of the school year, I realized that I had doomed myself socially. Too old to (legally) conspire with the students, I was also too young to fit in with most of the faculty – besides, a good percentage of the faculty was still in place from my days as a student and it just didn’t seem comfortable to establish peer relationships with them. Just about the time I was making this discovery (about three hours after arriving on campus), I ran into Ramon.

Ramon was one of the accompanists for the piano department, and had joined the staff the year after I graduated. I had met him a couple of times that year, and he always seemed fun and irreverent and a little bit manic. And that was what I desperately needed, so I clung to him.

Fortunately, the friendship was mutual and we spent most of our free hours together. Ramon is probably the only genius I’ve ever spent time with. Razor sharp, hysterically funny, and titillatingly profane, he was the eternal life of the party, even if there were only two of us celebrating. He used to ask me for three random words, which I eagerly supplied him – say “orange”, “fire-hydrant”, and “penguin” – and he would instantly compose a bawdy Elizabethan ballad using those three words in the most sophisticated and ribald way, with complicated but consistent rhyming schemes and elaborate puns. He once had me laughing so hard while I was driving that I had to pull over before I crashed the car. (He also got into my car for an hour’s trip in the middle of the winter after having eaten nothing but chick peas for three days, but that’s another story.)

Ramon was also a devoted Buddhist of the “nam myoho renge kyo” school, and ran chanting groups and shakabuku’d anybody who’d sit still long enough. Being devoutly atheistic, I resisted his advances, and he respectfully let me live my life in heathen ignorance.

After I told him about the Oblique Strategies, he went home to light a stick of incense and chant for them. The next day, when I got back to my cabin, there was a set of Oblique Strategies lying on the kitchen table. He borrowed them from a friend and had to return them in the morning, but it would at least give me the chance to look through them and copy down the maxims. I opened the box and shuffled the cards. Pulling one out, I looked at it. “Lost in useless territory”. Kind of pessimistic, I thought, and I put the card back in the deck and shuffled it again. I pulled out another card and looked at its inscription. Lost in useless territory. Hmmm..... I put it back, reshuffled the deck, and pulled out a card. Lost in useless territory. Taking the hint, I put the deck down and went to dinner.

One of the defining moments of Brian Eno’s career came after a car accident. A friend had come to visit and Eno asked her to put a record on for him before she left. She put on an album of harp music, bade him farewell, and left him lying in bed, recuperating. Soon, Eno realized that the music was too soft to hear well, and one of the speakers shorted out, making the problem worse. Frustrated and unable to get up, he stewed over his misfortune. Suddenly, however, he had a paradigm shift. The music was too soft to follow, but occasional snatches would drift in from the other room, and, as Eno relaxed, he began to enjoy these faint whiffs of music perfuming the air. He became interested in creating a music that duplicated that experience – music that was unobtrusively interesting. Something you could listen to or ignore. Something that would support attention, but wouldn’t demand it. And so ambient music was born.

Now, there already was a pretty well-known form of music that was created expressly to be ignored, and that was Muzak (a linguistic contraction of music and Kodak). But Muzak was relentlessly cheerful, meant to soothe the somnolent consumer. Ambient music, by contrast, would have a larger emotional palette. Muzak, Eno complained, had no sense of doubt, and it was that eerie unfamiliarity that he hoped to inspire with his experiments.

Putting his ideas of interesting ignorability and random system maintenance into practice, he created an album made entirely of tape loops of different lengths running on different tape recorders. Because the loops were different lengths, they would combine with each other in random ways, each “performance” being different. Once he set these systems running, he taped the results and then released the sonic artifacts of the system as an album. That album was called Music for Airports, and stands as his best solo release. The pieces were originally created, as the title suggests, as installation piece for airports. Airports are interesting places in that they occupy a strange twilight netherworld – neither here nor there. You only go to the airport to go someplace else, and there’s a lot of mixed emotion bottled up in the people who occupy an airport, and Eno tried to tap into some of those feelings. The result is a wistful, peaceful, somewhat sad collection of tone poems that were apparently too evocative for their locations as people complained about them and the commissioning airport ended up removing them. But the pieces stand as unique tone poems, filled with a quiet sense of melancholy.