I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, “I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising?” I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my engineer, Danny Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note – just one note – made the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around that frequency and all the harmonics.

This was a case of having a technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It would have stopped there if that sound hadn’t appeared. The avant-garde technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.

Of course, when I got that sound, I was back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately suggested a direction I still haven’t resolved. I didn’t find anything more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on covered up parts of the sound.

And a second one:

I walked past an enormous rubber plantation in Malaysia. It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I thought it strange they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at one point could I see that.

(Brian Eno)

I think Blogdial is a place where you can see trees in straight lines, and when you see a straight line you know you can accelerate.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Beautiful, Music.