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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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