Disquiet

This year, an electronic-music anniversary passed with little fanfare. Two decades after the release of Brian Eno’s album Thursday Afternoon, it was made newly available in a remastered edition. The occasion provided an opportunity for something I’d wanted to do for a while: host an online discussion on a specific topic, and then post a lightly edited transcript of the back’n'forth. I invited four people, one of whom ultimately wasn’t able to join in.

Over the course of two weeks, three of them conversed with me: Robert Henke, the German musician better known as Monolake; Michael Jarrett, a professor of English at Penn State York, and author of several books, including Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing; and Richard Kadrey, the San Francisco-based author of such science fiction novels as Metrophage and Kamikaze L’Amour.

I knew them all to be familiar with the subject, and to have creative imaginations. I’d interviewed Henke the year prior for e/i magazine (“The Organization Musician”), and I had assigned articles to both Jarrett and Kadrey while I was an editor at Pulse!, the music magazine once published by Tower Records.

The subject, Thursday Afternoon, is a unique recording in Eno’s discography. An hour-long swath of amorphous, largely organic-sounding quietude, it arrived during an ebb in the popularity of ambient music. The year 1985 was well past the tail end of the proggy 1970s, when Eno’s experiments with the studio as a musical instrument first flourished, and close to a decade would pass before a new generation of musicians, raised in the wake of the personal computer, would revive electronic music. Still, the album looked ahead more than it looked back. It took full advantage of the then new medium of the compact disc, making use of sounds that would arguably have been swallowed up in the hiss and crackle of vinyl. Likewise, it played for longer than vinyl could have accommodated without requiring a flip of the LP, certainly at any comfortable level of audio fidelity. On the other hand, it was less an album than it was a document; it was the soundtrack to a piece of video art that Eno had released on VHS the year prior. (That footage was also released this year, on DVD.)

As I warned Henke, Jarrett and Kadrey, I’d never really done anything like this before, and accordingly any lapses in communication or cogency are entirely my fault. The trio had insights into what is, in fact, one of my favorite albums, and in the course of our discussion they helped me listen to it in new ways. I plan to do more of these in the future, having gotten one under my belt. Read More »