“Machine music”: the 1975 Brian Eno song that could be infinitely long
While Brian Eno is frequently cited as the genius mind that helped to transform multiple acts from the 1970s into the most artistically adventurous forms of themselves, not enough attention is paid to just how peculiar his approaches were.
Of course, it isn’t completely ignored that Eno, often while sporting a glittery cape, was the mad professor who provided so much of the synthesised texture to the first two Roxy Music albums, that he pushed David Bowie to create the ambient halves of Low and Heroes, and squeezed an insatiable groove out of David Byrne and Talking Heads. These three examples, while not an exhaustive list of his achievements in performance and production, certainly do a good job of highlighting just how versatile Eno has always been.
However, when you look at what he managed to do in the context of being a solo artist rather than in conjunction with one of the many projects he assisted with, you begin to realise just how radically different Eno has always been, and just how ahead of the curve his creations often were.
Many of his solo works in the 1970s stuck to his roots within art rock, with Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) feeling distinctly like continuations of the sound he co-created with Roxy Music, but by the time he reached Another Green World in 1975, he was beginning to branch out further towards creating albums of ambient texture, and would eventually find himself releasing more and more in this vein as the decade progressed.
However, it was shortly after the release of Another Green World that Eno chose to deliver his very first recording of entirely machine-generated music, which stands out from the rest of his experimental and ambient works for how reliant it was on its generative creation process.
Discreet Music, the second of three Eno albums released in 1975, features the title track on the first side of vinyl, taking up just over half an hour of runtime, and three interpretations of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, but it’s the first part that forms the more fascinating aspect of the record.
Choosing to expand on Erik Satié’s concept of ‘furniture music’, whereby the ambience of the room can be heard and is given equal importance to the music itself, Eno wanted to make a piece that continually evolved and would never repeatedly return to the same forms, but also have it playing at a low volume.
Speaking to Uncut in 2017, he declared that because of the nature of the composition, the only reason it ever cuts off is because of Eno’s intervention. “Discreet Music is the first piece of machine music that I made,” he explained. “It could be infinitely long, that piece. It was the length it was because that was the most I could get onto one side of vinyl. Once you set it going, it could keep generating itself. It could still be playing now.”
While he’d go on to create even more adventurous masterpieces in ambient music, Discreet Music is perhaps a landmark release in ambient composition, and a stunning example of how allowing a subtle motif to constantly evolve over time can produce some of the most profoundly touching music.
