{"id":9267,"date":"2024-05-27T03:38:59","date_gmt":"2024-05-27T09:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/?p=9267"},"modified":"2026-02-05T11:51:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T18:51:31","slug":"obscure-exposures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/27\/obscure-exposures\/","title":{"rendered":"Obscure Exposures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reminiscences regarding reissues by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It seems that every few years I look through my LPs for a 1975 album by Brian Eno called Discreet Music<\/em>, issued as the third in his Obscure series that includes records by a dozen more kindred crafters and composers, all of them men. It makes no sense that I let that album go because 1) I kept two others from the series, and 2) its jacket contains an audio-delay diagram that I adapted for my second electroacoustic performance, in 1981.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Perhaps I figured I could grab a CD of the same? Nevertheless, I continue to forget, figuring that surely I’ve misalphabetized it, only to flip through discs in vain. But grab a CD, I recently did. Because\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Brian<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2026some months ago, an old friend, Tom Recchion, posted on Facebook a box set<\/a> of all the Obscure discs, and that he had contributed an essay to its accompanying 130-page book(let) in which he describes how he came upon the Obscure LPs while working as the import buyer at Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena. “Everything about the series was an inspiration,” Tom writes, “and as the years passed many of its featured composers and musicians became collaborators.”<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serendipitously (because I rarely read about music anymore), I stumbled upon the most recent reissue of Robert Fripp’s debut solo album, Exposure<\/a><\/em> (Polydor PD-1- 6201), a promo of which I bought when it was released in 1979, and on which Fripp used a version of the delay technique illustrated by Eno. It became one of my favorite albums and so I picked up a cutout of the 1985 “remixed \u2022 remastered \u2022 rekindled” reissue<\/a> LP (missing \u201979’s inner sleeve) as well as 1989’s Definitive Edition on CD<\/a> and the Third Edition issued on CD<\/a> (with the First Edition) in 2006. The Fourth Edition was issued in 2022 as both a stand-alone CD\/DVD (with extras) and as part of a massive box set\u2014called Exposures<\/a><\/em>\u2014 with too many CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays to count. Oh, and the latter includes the Fifth Edition, featuring alternate vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this has my memories, well\u2026, rekindled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eno’s Obscure Strategies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Having left Roxy Music in 1973 after the band’s sophomore album, Brian Eno worked with Robert Fripp, who was winding down his band King Crimson. The first Fripp & Eno collaboration, 1973’s (No Pussyfooting)<\/em> (Island HELP 16), employed Fripp’s guitar delay technique, which he’d later call<\/a> Frippertronics, as shown in the diagram above.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> One method is to use two reel-to-reel tape decks that record and play back and (re)record on a single tape loop, building layers of sound with each loop cycle, as I did in my 1981 performance. My decks were about ten feet apart and I recorded (live) the thunk of my open palm on the end of an empty standpipe that was at the wall of our Little Tokyo loft. It created a polyrhythm that I suppose I could have mastered on my own, but as it became more complex with each cycle, it also dissipated when I moved to another area of the performance space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Frippertronics
In 1981 I used TEAC decks similar to these Revox. They are turned on their side for ease of threading the tape loop.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know why I bought the three Obscure LPs. Disc No. 5 (Island Obscure 5, 1976), which includes two settings by John Cage of poems by e. e. cummings, may have been my introduction to the distinctive tenor of Robert Wyatt. Included also are settings of James Joyce by both Cage and his album mate on No. 5, Jan Steele. Anyone who has heard the B-side to Disc No. 1 (Island OBS 1, 1975), Gavin Bryars’s “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” will not forget it\u2014a loop of a London tramp singing with devotion, set to a sumptuous score. (Bryars’s later embellishment of the original was inevitable, and included the participation of Tom Waits.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I say, I don’t know why I bought these discs but it could have had something to do with the LP covers (discussed in detail by Tom Recchion et al. in the box set), each of which consists of an image obscured\u2014get it?\u2014but for a single quadrangle (plus the title display) revealing what could be a video still. (It isn’t.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>) Such video\u2014Manhattan urbscapes\u2014can be seen in Eno’s 14 Video Paintings<\/em> from the 1980s, released in 2005.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September 1979 I saw Eno’s prototype-ish Music for Airports installation at a New York gallery, the audio being paired with the sort of imagery (albeit video) pictured on the Obscure LP covers. Absent the grandeur of, say, an air terminal hall, the installation came off, well\u2026, small\u2014yet just the sort of thing that could distract a traveler who really wasn\u2019t watching the coin-operated airport televisions of the time for their content but rather zoning out, as I recall Eno explaining.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eno’s contribution to his series, Disc No. 3 (Island Obscure 3, 1975), as noted above, obviously contains a Frippertronics-ish piece, “Discreet Music,” which I, obviously, found personally instructive. Just as intriguing was the B-side: his deconstruction of Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D<\/em> (arranged by Bryars). Background: Eno had been confined to bed after an injury, when musician\/artist Judy Nylon visited him, bringing an LP of 18th century harp music. Moving with difficulty he eventually played the record but the sound was low and one channel of the stereo failed. Listening with, say, John Cage’s ears, an aural arena illumined. Eno subsequently was inspired to deconstruct the Canon\u2019s absurd rendition by conductor Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Paillard, who in 1968 had culled it from the cobwebs, turning a Baroque (Eno writes Renaissance<\/em>) fugue form into a Romantic morass clocking in at 7:09. Herbert von Karajan’s version five years later: 4:06. Eno allows the players to take fragments of Pachelbel’s original, merely two to four bars, and have their way with them. And this is what, a few months ago, sent me back to Fripp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exposition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In February, YouTube pushed me “Pie Jesu,” a track from Robert Fripp’s The Wine of Silence<\/em> (Discipline Global Mobile DGM1102), his 2012 album of layered “soundscapes” orchestrated by Andrew Keeling and “re-imagined” by David Singleton, who coproduced all of the original recordings, which used digital, rather than analog, delay. “Pie Jesu” sounds very much like Eno’s Canon<\/em> variations, and I looked further at Fripp’s discography only to discover his latest iteration of Exposure<\/em>, the box set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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