BEEP discografie entry for The Equatorial Stars
The Equatorial Stars
Fripp & Eno

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Year: 2004
Categorie: Collaboration/Ambient
Cover Art Credits:
Producer info:
Recording Location info:
Catalog info:
Tracks:
1.- Meissa           8:08
2.- Lyra             7:45
3.- Tarazed          5:03
4.- Lupus            5:09
5.- Ankaa            7:01
6.- Altair           5:11
7.- Terebellum       9:40

Additional information:
BRIAN ENO COMMENTS ON THE EQUATORIAL STARS:

It didn't start well. Somehow my shoe nudged the little
 red button on the little black box with the little green 
lights. That button told the little box to tell the digital 
recorder that we would be recording in a manner far
 too tedious to explain when in fact we intended to 
record quite differently, in a manner also far too 
tedious to explain.

Unaware of the error of my shoe, and thus, one
 could say, carefree, we launched into playing, 
assuming that our efforts were being efficiently 
and uncomplainingly recorded bit by bit and byte 
by byte in the correct manner which is far too tedious 
to explain rather than, as happened to be the case, in 
the incorrect manner which is also far too tedious to 
explain.

The nature of the issue, not to be unnecessarily obscure,
 has to do with digital encoding standards. I promise I 
shall never again mention those words in our few brief 
moments together. 

That first performance was unlike anything weÕd ever 
heard before. All over Heaven, angels must have been
 turning green with envy and grey with worry that they 
might soon lose their jobs. And devils must have been 
weeping and gnashing their teeth and preparing to 
negotiate for our souls, souls big enough and dark 
enough to have made music like this. But listening 
back to what we expected to be nothing short of a 
singular masterwork, we heard instead nothing. To 
be perfectly honest it was not exactly nothing. It was 
a little bit more than nothing and therefore possibly 
worse than nothing. If you took a large sheet of metal 
and randomly sprayed it with a Kalashnikov or similar 
semi-automatic urban assault weapon, the sound 
would be close to what we heard. And if you now 
took that randomly perforated metal sheet and hung 
it over, let's say, Van Gogh's ÔNight Sky at ArlesÓ, and 
then tried to look at the painting through the holes, you 
could achieve a visual experience analogous to the 
musical experience that we now had.

This episode Ð all caused by a shoe, one of a pair 
(I am bipedal) that I had bought in Holland not five 
days earlier and which had unfamiliarly long pointy
 toes - rather took the wind out of our sales figures 
and we never quite returned to form that day, despite 
recording over 2 hours worth of bits and bytes Ð 
probably reaching into the tens of gigabytes before 
we retired, shoulders slumped, another day older etc.,
from the oven-like conditions of my recording studio. 
Robert returned to his idyllic and relatively undigitized 
life which involves a great deal of commuting between 
Nashville Tennessee and Bredonborough, Dorset, 
whereas, over the subsequent weeks I dragged the 
screaming tape out of its dank dungeon and cruelly 
interrogated itÉ.. stretching, squeezing, shredding, 
teasing, mashing, gnashing, splashing, trashing, looping,
grouping, cutting, gouging, still unable to believe that it 
had no secrets to yield. It had none.

Our next meeting was blessed with fairer weather. 
It was a Thursday.



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