Bruce Brubaker: Eno Piano: Music for Studios

I have been fascinated by Brian Eno for decades. I'm sure you have been too.

Yeah, definitely.

I don't even know how to describe the composition of Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

That the whole concept we have around the idea of composing... it almost doesn't apply to that. He's making something else, to the point where I've almost wondered whether "music" is the right word. It is music, but it is a music that has much less expectation in it. There isn't this thing that we often get in music, which is a story – even in wordless pieces – where there's a beginning, middle, and ending with development and a goal. With Brian, certainly some of his best music doesn't have a goal. It's just existing.

One of my favorite Eno pieces is “Discreet Music” [from the album Discreet Music]. I listen to it at least once a week while I'm falling asleep, and it always takes me somewhere different.

Well, when he talks about ambient music, he says it should be possible to pay attention to it, but it should also be possible to ignore it. Neither one of those is more, or less, valid. People will use it in different ways, and that's all fine. And we're not going to say that if you're not paying attention to every sound and listening attentively, you're somehow not as good as the other person who's really paying attention. It's all possible. We know that's true of all music anyway, but it's especially true of this open-ended… I guess we'll call it “ambient music.”

When did you first think of doing mostly pieces from Music for Airports as an album?

It started with the idea of just doing Music for Airports, and I guess I was already talking about it at least five years ago, but I was trying to remember now whether it was before 2018. Somewhere around there. We were set up to record in 2020, but the pandemic came along, and we were not able to do it. In a sense it was good, because I was able to go back and put in a lot more detail from listening to the albums very carefully. I added these other pieces that got recorded; some of those are on this album and then there are a couple more that'll come out later on.

Which one is missing? Is it “1/2?”

That'll be coming out.

Oh, cool.

It's a piano piece with the other swirling vocals around it, and it's a good one to play on the piano. But it turned out that the label wanted this album to be quite short, and it made sense to save some for the next release. The next release also has a re-edited version of the first Airports piece ["1/1"], a different part of the piece.

Is it something you wanted to present as an alternative?

Well, as you know, "1/1" is a big, big loop. It keeps going around, and in about four minutes it covers all the material in the piece. Then timing happens differently, but the basic theme keeps repeating. Our new version will essentially be a brief version. It'll just have all the material of the piece. Some of these other sounds around the piano, which do change throughout that piece, are going to be in there in a slightly different way than they are in the one. Conceivably, somebody could loop it. There are versions online of a ten-hour-long Music for Airports.

Cascading loops, all starting at different times.

Of course, as the way he made it in the first place. There were these several different loops which had been recorded from live playing. But when we hear "1/1" on the original album – it sounds like a pianist playing – it's not just one pianist playing in real time. It's an overlay of a couple of loops. When I started trying to do it in real time, playing it live, I felt I was imitating something. But then what he did in the first place was an imitation of something too. It wasn't real. There are these layers of unreality or imitation. I did this show live about two weeks ago, for the first time. It is playable as a live concert. Of course, each time I repeat it in the concert hall with the audience, it's going to be a little bit different. I guess that change is welcome, but at the same time it's not what Brian was doing in the studio. Because in the original, those loops really are loops. We hear exactly the same thing.

There's no room for improvisation there. [laughter]

No, and as I'm playing it, I think it's a fine balance. But I was trying to do it the same way, but at the same time to allow some slight changes of rhythm, as well as some little changes of emphasis so that it is not identical. The fundamental difference between human playing and something that's done as a loop with a machine.

Did you work up sheet music from the original works?

It’s all written down. I had help from a young composer, Simon Hanes. He did the original, quite detailed draft of Music for Airports. The way he originally did it was with an annotation of how much time had gone by. You could go through that score, run your stopwatch, and see what happens at one minute and 15 seconds. And, in a couple of the pieces, in the recording I did use a watch to keep track of where I was because I wanted a similar pacing to the original. Some of them I didn't do that, because I wanted to allow them to be a little freer. But, over the course of the pandemic, I was working on those scores that had been prepared by Simon and I added a lot more. There are so many layers of events that are happening in the originals which are ambiguous. A foggy sound; a little cloud of something. How much of that did I want to include? How much could I leave out? I kept putting in more. I was also able to be a little more specific about some of the rhythmic elements, so that I could give myself something to practice. In "1/1", you could probably write it down in 4/4 time. In fact, there is a notation out there.

Sure. That makes sense.

But the trouble is that it makes it feel too regular. One of the things I tried to work on was, with my hand, to be able to play in such a way that it didn't sound like a human. In our new AI-enabled world, we're getting to this contrast between what people do and what people don't do. The nature of rhythm has evolved quickly in music since drum machines in the ‘80s. Human drummers don't play equal beats. They can't. It's impossible. But with hip-hop, or any music where we're creating loops or beats on the computer, for decades we have been hearing music where there are exactly equal beats. The result has been that human musicians are able to play more and more equal beats, much more than people could play in the past. It's a coming together of the machine and the person. At the same time, technology has allowed us to understand better what humans do when they play rhythm. We can see where the beat is elongated or where most people rush a little bit. Those are things that we like and are accustomed to. But up until fairly recently it was hard to study that, or to know people had a sense about it.

When I'm tracking a drummer to a click track, I can look at the click, kick, and snare and see it pushing and pulling.

It always is. And again, we probably like that. Probably every human musician has their own particular way of making rhythm. That applies to other aspects, too. It applies to pitch. We've all now heard electronic keyboards, which are tuned at the factory, and we've gotten more and more accustomed to that pitch. And other ways of using pitch are dying out. Different ways and understandings of how to temper the scale certainly still exist in lots of music. However, in terms of a common practice for people who are doing Western pop music, it's becoming more and more standardized. You're talking about the metronome, and then I'm thinking that the introduction of sound recording at the turn of the century had a long shadow over the way music is played. I'm not sure we've still absorbed all of the impacts of that. If we go back to old recordings of people making music in the first years of the 20th century, the style of performance was so different. They had never heard themselves on recordings, so their performances were unencumbered by that reality. Now, musicians grow up listening to recordings of their own playing. Before about 1900 or so, nobody had ever heard themselves play, and they'd never heard anybody else play, except as a live situation.

Yeah, right.

Music was made by people in a room, in a moment of time, and that was it. It was gone. That's a very profound change, that music now becomes something that is not a process but rather starts to be something tangible, a product. Of course, Eno is important in that because with Music for Airports and “Discreet Music” he's acknowledging that we're not really in that storytelling musical process that people were familiar with for hundreds of years. Now we're using this thing, and it's a sound product. Maybe it does connect to what people now increasingly call sound art. In a sense, it's not music; it's some other thing. Sounds are being used. They definitely can have great beauty. But it's not that “one thing leads to another” you find in most pop music, or a lot of Western classical music. I don't think Music for Airports relates to language. It's something outside of that.

Does it feel like a big difference stepping from Philip Glass to Brian Eno, as far as composition, and how it's translating out of your mind and hands, too?

It is different, and yet I do think there's a strong relationship there. Probably one of the reasons I was first attracted to this was because I felt Eno has not been understood as part of that repetitive minimalism, if you want to call it that, of the '60s and ‘70s, and that there are a lot of connections. It's good, for a more complete understanding of that music, to see that it is connected. One of the pieces that'll come out later is "The Big Ship" [from the album Another Green World]. It's a short instrumental piece. It has a little ostinato inside – da-dee-da-dee-da-dee – quickly played. When I started working on it and transcribing it, it struck me that those are the same two notes that are in many of Philip Glass' piano pieces. If we slow it down by 50 percent, it would be "Metamorphosis Two" by Philip Glass. Almost from the same period, too. There were also actual connections, because Eno heard the Philip Glass Ensemble in England in the early ‘70s. Later, there were these big symphonies ["Low" Symphony, "Heroes" Symphony] that Philip wrote that are based on the Berlin Trilogy, which was Eno and David Bowie's work. Of course, people on the classical side didn't get that at all. Some of my classical colleagues have said to me, "Who's that? I've never heard of Brian Eno." I found that shocking, but it shows us that these musical worlds are not as connected as we might think they are.

As musicians we should always be drawing from a multitude of sources. You've spent a lot of your career pushing back on that in the new classical realm.

I've certainly tried to. One thing that bothers me is that – coming from the classical side – people are content with a small niche audience. That, to me, is a mistake. The level of instrumental playing that there is in the classical world right now is extremely high and fantastic. But it's not reaching very many people because it's confined to the repetition of a few pieces by Beethoven or whomever. A larger audience doesn't find that interesting. I think a bigger audience is possible. There has been this cultural divide between acoustic music and music made with technology or enhanced with electronic sound. For some people, the sound of the acoustic piano is associated with high culture, stuffy music. If we can use that and bring it into a different listening experience that will be more accessible to people who are listening to electronic music all the time, that is a good thing to do. I did this project a few years ago with Max Cooper, where I'm playing the acoustic piano on the stage in real time and this whole overlay of sounds was being made by Max with his computer and synths.

Was he processing what you were playing?

Yeah. Every sound that you'd hear from the synths is being provoked by something on the keyboard. We had a special piano. It was an acoustic grand piano, but it was generating MIDI information. All of that was going out in real time and being processed through this funky algorithm, which creates a lot of chaos. Then Max was using some of that and creating something else. If I touched the key on the piano something would happen, but I didn't know what would happen. As I was playing, I could understand that there was a total connection between what I did and what was coming out, but I didn't know in advance what it was going to be. We did this at some festivals – we'd find that the audience often was people who were aware of Max, or who were interested in IDM [Intelligent Dance Music]. They would come up afterwards and say, "Oh, I've never heard anybody play a piano in a live concert." I thought that was good.

Speaking of that, what is the sustained piano device you used for Eno Piano?

All the sounds in this album are coming out of an acoustic piano. There is no electronic sound. However, those long notes, those ghostly notes, and those somewhat funky overtone sounds – those are piano strings that are vibrating, but they are being made to vibrate with these electromagnetic devices. We call them bows, but they're not really bows as they don't touch the string. They're suspended over the piano string, and with electromagnetism there's a signal coming out of this device, and it makes the string of the piano vibrate. Pianists have always wanted to make long notes and we can't. We push the key down, the hammer inside comes up and hits the string, and then mostly what we're hearing is the ringing out of that attack; then it's getting softer and decaying. The idea that we could provoke this string to keep vibrating like it would on a violin, we've never heard that before. In the middle of the piano, most of those notes are produced with single wires. Many of them, they're three wires are all tuned the same way. But it's just a piece of wire. But when you get into the low notes on the piano, those are heavy wires, and then they're wrapped with another metal. What happens when we make them vibrate for an extended period is that these different metals create an interaction that's complicated, and we've never heard anything like this. In some cases, it would create a pulse because there's something going on between these two different metals. They're not vibrating exactly in the same way. I won't say it was easy to control, but it was possible to control. It was also possible to keep changing the way those vibrations would happen. Florent Colautti created a way of controlling these electronic bows so that he could specify a frequency. He can dial it in specifically, down to two or three decimal points, and get the string to vibrate. But, in that same way, he can dial in an overtone to get the first or second partial. Even in a murkier combination, and some of those were fascinating. Then our sound engineer, Martin Antiphon, had a good idea while we were in the recording sessions. What we had found was that turning the bows on and off was too obvious. Like an organ note, it would just turn on. Martin had this incredible idea of creating a track. I would play something on the piano that would be the notes that we wanted the bows to make, and then we don't hear that in the recording. But that control track was used to play back through the bows. Those notes, as they would be heard by the electromagnetic bows, would turn the bow on and off at the appropriate frequency. If I was playing an A in my control piece, then when the bow on that A would hear the sound of it, it would come on. Does this make sense at all?

Yeah, I think so!

With the relative levels that I had used when I played this, if one note was louder or softer then that would change the response of these electromagnetic bows. Instead of getting this too obvious on-and-off sound, in some of the pieces on the album there's this cloudy, amorphous sound that is sometimes hard to understand what it is. It is the result of the bows being turned on and off in a much more subtle way that we didn't really even understand. We could observe it, and, in some cases, we would do multiple takes with the bows, and then we would take the ones that we thought were the most successful. We also used upright piano, sometimes. We had two pianos. My piano playing is all on the Steinway grand piano. But then we had another piano in another room, and some of the bow sounds were made on this other piano. On a modern piano a lot of the strings are crossed inside the instrument. With some of the notes we wanted to get, we couldn't get at those strings.

I was wondering about that.

Some of those pitches were available in a better way on the upright. The upright also has different properties of resonance, so some on of the pieces it's turned out to sound more appropriate. So far, we haven't managed to do this live. The live show that I do now is using samples that were recorded from these bows, and I'm triggering them on stage. I'm playing the part that sounds like piano music, and I'm triggering a lot of these other sounds by touching keys and using pedals. The actual sound being made by the electromagnetic bows, so far, is still too fragile. We haven't been able to get them to be rugged enough to be able to use in real time; they have to be adjusted all the time. Playing a regular EBow on a guitar is very finicky – the note will die out of the blue. That's the way this started, by the way. I heard a jazz pianist use a guitar EBow in a piano. It made a long note, and he improvised something around it. I told this to somebody at the label, and they were acquainted already with Florent Colautti, from France, and we got in touch. He had already started working on something like this without much of an idea of how he would use it. It seemed like this was perfect for Eno's music. I had already been thinking of doing a piano version of Music for Airports. But I was always wondering, "What am I going to do about those long notes?" In the second piece, "1/2," it's vocals. What could I do about that?

That second piece, "2/1," is originally all vocal-based. Is that just the bowed sounds on your version?

It's a mixture. The bows are playing all of the notes, except one. There's one note that's always played only by the piano. Then the piano is also playing and they're resonating together, so it also evolves a little bit. It starts out more in the direction of a bow sound, but then by the end of the track – after four or five minutes – we're hearing a lot more piano and less bow.

Was there a change that happened to you, after transcribing all of this, learning how to play it, and conceptualizing and recording in this manner?

Yes, there definitely was a big change, and I hope a learning that happened. In the beginning, I had the idea that I would make a pretty good written version of it so that I could repeat it. Then I was going to allow the various elements to interact in different ways and not necessarily follow what is in the original recording of Music for Airports. Just as Brian created it from these different loops, I thought, "Well, I can take it apart and put it together in another way." But the more I experimented with that, and also the more I experimented with adding more material, the less happy I was about it. I started to feel I didn't want to add anything or change the order of events. Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies have a card that says, "Repetition is a form of change." I tried to live by that. My feeling was that if I'm playing these out by hand, and I'm going to play the same material over and over and over again, it's going to be a little different each time. I was going to welcome that in, but not in an obvious way.

How long did you spend on the tracking portion of this album?

There were five days in the studio, and a lot of that was trying to get these electromagnetic bows to work. We did start to record on the first day, but we were still lost about how we were going to make it work. It seems five days should have been a lot of time, but in the end it wasn't. We were scrambling to finish everything. There were many more days of post-production in the studio, mostly in Paris. I worked with a guy in New York too, who did a little bit of work on a couple of the pieces.

Just editing and mixing and trying to...

Those were just editing because there are a couple of piano tracks where there is no electronic bow.

Like "By This River?"

"By This River" actually has quite a bit on it. But "Emerald and Stone" is a straight-ahead piano track. There's another one coming later called "Failing Light," which has a lot of reverb and room placement in it, but it isn't anything other than the piano.

That's a Harold Budd piece, isn't it? [From Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror]

Yeah, he did that one. I believe that when Eno produced that, he was using different kinds of reverb on different parts of the texture. The lower frequencies have one room sound, and the higher frequencies have a different room sound. That combines to make something which is puzzling and cool. We've gone a lot farther with that. We have the microphones rotating in one way and the room is rotating in another way, and they're not synchronized. It feels disorienting, like floating in the room. It's always a question of, “How much do we do,” versus restraint. I think there are people who will hear it and say, "Oh, it's a piano record," and they won't notice any of these other things. These different levels of listening and paying attention to it are all acceptable.

You can play it in the background at an airport.

You can, and I guess they did. When this project started, there was some talk about recording it in an airport. That was not a good idea, because airports are really noisy. Then there was some idea that we would try to use an airport hangar, because that is an interesting acoustic space. That's hard to manage because there's too much going on. We'd end up putting the microphones so close that it could be in any room. But I would like to do a live show in an airport. It would be a fun thing to do.

Looking back on your earlier career, was getting proper recordings of grand pianos a battle for you early on?

The piano is hard to record. I've been lucky to work with a lot of great people, but it is always a challenge. There are many different approaches, and they all have some problems. There isn't a single point where the sound is emanating. In classical music, we're used to hearing the piano from the side. I'm looking at a piano right here in my studio, and the bass strings are much further away from me than the treble strings. This spatial relationship is always confusing. Even to just make a stereo image of a piano is quite difficult; to make something that sounds plausible and is suitable to the music at hand. On the first Philip Glass record I made [glass cage] we spent five days placing microphones before we started recording. It was a funny little theater, but, in the end, it was well suited to this music [Cowles-Kruidenier Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa]. It turned out well, but it was something that could never be repeated. In fact, I went back to that same place a year or two later, and we could never find the right positions to get the same sound.

Wow.

A piano is essentially always out of tune, and it's always out of regulation. We're always trying to finesse it to a point where it'll be okay, but it's never absolutely the best or good enough. The other thing that happens in some kinds of music is that, as you play the piano, the tuning does change. It may be difficult if I record something in the morning, then tried to record the same thing again three or four hours later. And then we want to match those in mixing it or editing it; they may not match. If you're finicky about this, it can be hard. I've always been particular about that. I do think the sound of the instrument is important. On the classical side, a lot of musicians are not sufficiently aware of how the sound is. They tend to focus on the "music," about the way the piece is working. But in terms of the physical sound, they're maybe not paying so much attention. A lot of times, even high-level classical recordings don't sound very good. That's a problem. I've been interested in that, and I've recorded a lot of music where the sound is important.

A lot of sonic issues come from the way players are trained. Cellists will breathe in on the rest. I'm thinking, "Breathe while you're making the loudest sound, so I don't hear it in the recording."

Absolutely. It's such a problem. In the Eno Piano recording, I had my shoes off most of the time and we'd put a rubber mat down under my feet so we could try to get rid of some of the sounds of the sustain pedal.

I hear the pedal on the record, though.

You did. In the second piece, especially, we decided it was part of the piece. You'll notice that the pedal is not synchronous with the notes, because that's the way the pedal is used. It's a syncopation. It adds a good or bad element, but it is part of the piece. I made a recording several years ago in Iceland with Valgeir Sigurðsson [Nico Muhly's Drones].

He's been in Tape Op [#85].

He's great. We were in his studio [Greenhouse Studios] in Reykjavik, and he has this approach that a lot of the noises that happen in music are an important thing. They have an antique piano in that studio, a late 19th century Broadwood & Sons piano, and they make all their piano records with that instrument. It had some issues. Plus, the bench I was using would sometimes make a big creaking noise. I would think, "Oh, that's not going to be a usable take." I said, "I don't think we can use that." On the talkback, the engineer comes back and says, "That creak was great!" [laughter] So, I thought, "Okay, I guess there are two ways to look at this."

True.

As we've become more and more able to make excellent recordings with an incredible purity of sound, then. at a certain point, maybe we're not so interested in that anymore and we'd like to welcome back a little bit of the dirt. It continues to be an exchange. Some of what I was calling dirt, maybe we perceive that as "more real." The finesse with which we can change music in mastering is more detailed than ever, and we're able to hear clearly and with more detail. That also has changed the way musicians operate, because at least the people who are interested in that, they can use that as part of what is performative in the music. And in the past, you would get something you liked and say, "Oh, we better keep that because that sounds okay." Now we can get in there and maybe try to manipulate it.

When we have ultimate control, then everything becomes a choice that must be made.

That's problematic, because we're adding on layers and layers of time. I made a recording in New York City at the Academy of Arts and Letters; an auditorium they don't use anymore except for recordings. Great venue and everything seemed fine. Nobody noticed that there must have been a taxi out in the street. Later on, when we were listening very carefully, we noticed that there's a high-pitched frequency. It must have been the taxi's radio, and it was in every track. My mastering guy was able to go in there with his tool and erase it, but it was painstaking. We couldn't do it except in the places it was obvious because it was so time consuming. If somebody had noticed that and moved the taxi we wouldn't have had to spend all those hours later on.

Yeah, oh man!

Sometimes mastering leads to a good result. I did an album where I handed it over to my mastering guy and he said, "I don't think that the way these mics were placed is good. You should do this over." That was not a possibility, because everything had already been done and the label had invested a lot of money. He was able to create a room simulation using what we did have and was able to reconstitute it. In the end, it's a good sound. In more recent years too, I've been wishing to make a piano sound that doesn't sound like a classical piano record. I don't want it to sound like Deutsche Grammophon. It should be something a little bit more of our moment. And, as we said, there are so many ways the piano can be recorded that the goal is to find some of these other ways. Especially in music where the nuances of quiet sounds in the close part of the piano, that could be an important thing in the music.

I've really enjoyed hearing your interpretations of Eno's work on Eno Piano.

Thanks! Some people know this music inside out. It's part of their life. I did this live show in France a couple of weeks ago, and I was signing some old records afterwards. This guy comes up to me, and he starts out by saying, "I listen to Music for Airports every day." After that, I was expecting him to say, "And your version is nothing like the original." I was a little worried. And then he said, "But I'd never heard it live before. It was amazing to hear it live." He accepted it as a version of Music for Airports instead of kibitzing the details. I was happy about that!