1982@40: AMBIENT 4 - ON LAND - BRIAN ENO

A booming drone. It might be a synthesiser or something found and processed. The high pitched whining rhythm over it sounds like mosquitoes. There is a slow moving melodic figure on a keyboard that seems to deteriorate. Sounds are hard to differentiate. There is no guiding light of central harmony or tone. As a listener you are lost and by the time the squirmy figures emerge to take a look at you before retreating back into the cave and dripping pools you are in a darkness that holds mystery but no real danger. Ghosts, perhaps, but your only harm would come from yourself. Just don't, at any cost, turn it off before the whole record finishes.

The first three Ambient albums, whether collaborative or solo made suggestions for the music of mood and atmosphere and all kept, however strangely, to notions like musical motif and definition of voice (e.g. piano or synthesiser). This final outing all but abandons this, only very occasionally providing a line of tone shifting in time that might otherwise be called a melody. But the point of these is to add further texture and mood. The record is about exploration, slow exploration, the kind of sortie done in the dark on your back with his recommended three speaker system. 

Bubbling mud fields here, the echoes of beaches long swallowed by the sea there, lantern marshes and unfamiliar winds. There is development on recognisable musical grounds but it takes the whole album to hear it. No songs, no vocals (the little girl's voice in Shadow is a processed muted trumpet) but so very much personal vision and genuine composition. If you think of spiky dance tracks when you hear the term electronic music locate a copy of this and live with it without pausing until the end.

I expected to have some fun describing what I see when I listen but it's different every time and wouldn't be what you see. Find it and listen to it while doing the dishes or go all in and lie on the floor with the lights off. You might not agree that this is some of the finest music made since electric recording began but you will have to admit it has something you don't get from other music, something fascinating and compelling.

If you wonder why you think you've heard all of it before you might cast you mind over some of the more strangely scored films you've seen since the '90s from which time this kind of goulash of natural sounds and big twisting subterranean drones made it into almost every horror movie that didn't have an orchestral score. It works beautifully as an ingredient in cinematic creepiness but more generally, weirdness, the confronting experience of nature itself. Seee, I'm doing it again, I'm recalling distant lights and purple grey skies and desert canyons. But no, if you want to go on this journey you need your own mind to guide you.

Some of the finest music made since electric recording began.

1981@40: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS - DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO

The opening track of Talking Heads' 1979 album Fear of Music is called I Zimbra and has a lot to answer for. Either that or it created a lot of debt. A stubborn African influenced rhythm precedes a guitar figure that contains nary a skerrick of rock phrasing. The vocals are a chant and are from a Dadaist poem and are composed of sonorous gobbledegook. A little over three minutes, the track yet feels epic. It was a product of the band's increasing affinity with the popular but critically snubbed disco. I Zimbra is often cited as the doorway to the band's gigantically-scaled fourth album Remain in Light. The album in question here, though, came between the two and deserves a barge more credit than it gets.

On the surface of it the record sounds like a holiday project as bandleader David Byrne and producer of the previous two Talking Heads albums got together for some fun with funk and tape manipulation. An uncomfortable amount of rock journalism from the time congratulated the pair for having discovered Africa, referring to the great musical debt they owed to that continent from top to bottom. It was released after Remain in Light because of the extensive clearance of the vocal recordings used. That was the other thing: all the tracks were musical but instead of either Byrne or Eno fronting the mic, it was what the world would come to easily identify as samples that provided the tonsil work. From Lebanese shepherds, pop stars from old Asia Minor, and screaming preachers to crewcutted DJs and exorcists, the record gave us slap after slap in the face through the culture shock alone.

But why? Throbbing Gristle had years on this with their variously funny and terrifying use of found sound. Yeah, but you could dance to this and people did. What about hip hop? The masters of the turntable had been leaving them gaping on the dancefloor from the mid '70s. Well, in that pre-web world you had to know about the stuff and the elevation of your profile did more for you than the quality or originality of your stuff. Not that Byrne and Eno were sponging towards a Bethlehem of mediocrity, Bush of Ghosts is mighty, it's just that the average punter had so little background at the time. Hip hop was on the verge of worldwide breakthrough. The tapeloopers like TG would not quite surface as so much of what they did was attack but the blend of dance and trigger exploded at the other end of the decade, rising from the ashes of rock as a developable medium. Anyway....

So, when America is Waiting strutted out of the speakers in early '81 it felt strange, alluring and worrying at the same time. Why did he keep saying that? The funk 101 orchestra behind it just kept grooving on. Until you hear it a few times the album is really just that with a few breaks in pace and technique but those three and a half minutes pretty much say it for the approach. But then that's like saying seen one jet engine, seen 'em all. However deeply derivative this was (and, considering who was doing it, it was clearly a lift in approach) the discipline of putting it all in one place and releasing it under the pedigree of proven innovators guaranteed it a place on campus radio and in the stacks of uni students in share houses. This brash boy's own experimental funk was played at almost every party I went to for most of the year.

So, while nothing from it was going to get mimed on Countdown (or even subjected to the robot moves of the Countdown Dancers) it was preceded by the album it facilitated, Remain in Light, which had a hit single with a video that still looks good. The elastic management of moods and tone add up to a record that rewards the repeated listen with depth and range however samey the initial impression is. Borrowed, certainly, but also way-clearing.

I'm resisting description of individual tracks here as there is too much to describe. Instead of that I'll suggest you get in front of it if you haven't before and if you have do it again. despite the old chorused bass and vintage electronica the thing stands.

I came down to Brisbane after the break in Townsville with a clock radio my Dad bought me. He was pleased that I'd got into uni and concerned about me missing classes. I did use it. One setting was the alarm which didn't have a volume control so sounded like a foghorn in your ear and was unignorable by anyone else you lived with. The other setting was radio and it had an FM switch. Until I left for Melbourne years later that dial was set to either 4ZZZ or 4PBS. Nothing else.

Early in the academic year I had an 8.30 tutorial. In first year these were invaluable classes as you got to discuss any issues about the course and were great for picking up information about what you needed for assignments or seminars etc. To get to this appointment I needed to get the 37 bus into town and time it to minimise the wait for the long ride out to the campus. I had a choice of two buses that left from stops that were blocks away from each other so, if I missed one I had to think about how to get to the next one. All that travel time (over an hour each way) meant that I had to be showered, fed and out the door by a tidy 7.00 to get the bus on Milton Road. That meant I woke to whatever was playing at 4ZZZ at dawn. One morning it was Eno and Byrne's The Jezebel Spirit.

It was back announced as including the voice of an unidentified New York exorcist. The combination of the pre-dawn dark, the coldly confident funk groove, and the sinister sound of the voice which variously calls, whispers and, worst of all, laughs mixed in with what sounds like the huffing breath of a possessed woman. It was on my mind for weeks. 

The thing was, though, that like every such thing (Eraserhead, Throbbing Gristle and the film The Exorcist) I was attracted to it. Attracted the same way I'd been at eleven when I'd borrow tomes of collected ghost stories from the local library. I never genuinely believed in such things but the scare from them, the creeping threat of them beckoned me. The funk and the darkness in one track bled into the others. Regiment was played a lot on ZZZ for some reason and I got another spook for the mix of shepherd's call and Talking Heads style groove. The enigma of it beckoned. I'm still like this. I was so drawn to Gaspar Noe's severe film Irreversible that I spoiled it for myself just to make sure I wasn't going to see anything too bad (that was the last time I did that although I almost did it a few years later with the mighty and incomparable Martyrs).

I never owned a copy of this at the time. The one I did get was different but I was unaware why until I read the wikipedia entry for the record. The track Qu'ran which features readings from the holy book was removed following protest and replaced with Very Very Hungry. While this is less than a pure experience as far as the intent of the artists it does carry the advantage of being a much better track. If you want a copy with the original tracks you can haunt second hand vinyl shops or the first CD release. If not, just grab a current release and Youtube the missing track. Feeling adventurous? Find a download of the multitracks of two of the songs and make you own mix, for legals!

That last bit, using the available tech to make a point along with the one about free use (Creative Commons) goes not just to the music on this record but the cover art. The great Peter Saville, knee deep in mockups for Factory Records cut shapes out of gels, stuck them to a video monitor and pointed a camera at that, creating visual feedback. Swish and moderne, what? Well, it was. 

But here's the thing: like so much of the best of this era (or any) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts for all its innovation and aesthetic daring, sounds like the year of its release. It sounds like 1981. It was one thing in a population of things that heralded a new age of expression that bent technology for its purposes and broke into more discovery. That, like all moments of discovery, just gets absorbed by the market before the next flareup from the gutters and that's what makes it timeless (not the music or the approach, just the repeated history of its fate). A greater and more objective value that puts this disc beside The Whitle Album, Joy Divisions' Closer, or Nevermind, is durability. It's still good.

Oxycodonehydrochloride: Bian Eno and Harold Budd's The Plateaux of Mirror

On Bastille Day 2012 I climbed Lake Mountain to see the snowfall, slipped and broke my fibula. Read about it here. A week after initial examination I was booked for surgery to get a plate put in to hold the break in place so it could heal properly. There was one viable window for this and I took it rather than wait two more weeks and risk the bone healing the wrong way. I cancelled a vid night at home (there were to be plenty of those in the coming months) and the understanding friend who received this news offered to give me a lift to the hospital. This was a relief as it always felt a little wrong getting a taxi for two blocks. The first time I did that I was ripped off by the driver.

I presented myself at reception where my being in shorts on a day under ten degrees was wondered at. When you have a leg in a cast you have to improvise. As though that was the pass question I was fast tracked up the stairs to strip off, don a little white backless OT number and lie on a bed until attended by a series of medical personnel who asked me questions.

I was wheeled into the operating room, given a nerve block and an epidural both of which had an unsettling feel and asked to count backwards and close my eyes. I did but when I opened them again I looked straight into the eyes of someone who hadn't been there a second before who smiled and said: "That went well."

INTIMATE DETAILS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH MIGHT DISTURB. THOSE AFTER ARE FINE.

Then I was wheeled into a small ward where I was to lie down, shut up and be observed for about a day. I had no objection. Each hour I was asked by a nurse to rate my pain. For the first few I was numb from the waist down, unable to move my legs let alone my toes which were also tested. Something I would never have guessed going in was being unable to sense that your genitalia were there but knowing from vague referred pain that you needed to urinate but having no muscular force to do so. I tried the plastic bottle but that also involved feeling around there and the sensation of touching male genitalia that did not register as my own was disturbing. Worse when it's wet from urine you can't even smell. I nevertheless aimed into the bottle and heard some trickling from through the curtain. Looking at the bottle I realised the sound had been from me and there was a slight deposit visible through the plastic. My ability to control my bladder flow returned slowly throughout the evening and night but I will never forget that level of helplessness and unease.

Also returning through the following hours was me ability to feel pain which never left me nor lessened in the day I had yet to lie there. I was regularly given paracetamol which did nothing noticeable but when it became too hard to take another thing called Endone. Oxycodonehydrochloride. A hybrid of natural and synthesised opioid for the treatment of severe pain. It's getting its own chapter in the comic Fibula but a few words here will be necessary. Endone erases pain but also lessens every other part of your consciousness. There is no pleasure in the absence of pain in this case, merely the absence and a profound and constant fatigue. I felt a definite lack of everything I might have registered while conscious, as though I'd had about fifty IQ points removed while my flesh and nerves dealt with the pain. Effective but ... scary, like the situation in the previous paragraph.

I had brought my phone and charger with me and kept it close. With it I could futz about on Facebook, check my email and read whatever was in my Kindle stock. Also, I could send the music I'd put on it to my bluetooth headset, lie back and be still.

Having exhausted the first of Brian Eno's Ambient albums, Music for Airports, over the previous week I chose his next in that series and looped it so that I could drift in and out of sleep with its gentleness to meet me. Indeed, as the first modal fade in rose I lay back and felt more at ease.

Throughout the night I did indeed wake to it, every time a nurse came in to check on me and it provided a good bridge from sleep to wooziness. At about two in the morning the retreating nerve block made the pain it had concealed grow and burn. It rose in intensity steadily over a few hours until I could do no more than ackowledge it. As soon as I could I called a nurse who listened to me and gave me endone.

As this filled out my nervous system with its oddly harsh pain erasure and my consciousness lowered to static functionality the music continued. I concentrated on it until I could relax and accept it. It began to feel like a dose of something the drug had left out, the euphoria that an opioid is supposed to bring, the ingredient X that lulls and caresses.

The Budd/Eno set on this album is not time bound by structure. While there is clear motivation in each piece there is neither an urgency to fulfil a phrase here or stretch one out to the edge of its strength there. There is just a series of visits to landscapes strange but warm, places and vistas whose colours alone provide their shape, fields and horizons of uterine comfort, of ease, of peace.

Once out of hospital I had to continue on the Endone and intially did so from necessity but I learned to wean myself from it by missing dosage periods. This is where my phone's primary purpose enters as I would get whoever was available around for dinner and wine. This, of course carries a potential second problem but it's one I've never been owned by. In two weeks I was off all pain relief and coping with even the most infernal of outbreaks. And when alone during that time, when faced with nothing but the comfortless lack of concentration that ruled out even the lightest of reading or even the most trough-fed viewing I let the Endone harden me to old timber, let my cat parachute on to my doona to warm me in the frozen predawn, and go from wasted oak to floating driftwood just by adding this record.