Music Arcades: Brian Eno: Thursday Afternoon

This is the Eno I mentioned three days ago. Crank it up loud, coffee to my right, book on my lap, using the music to make a space where mind can wander more or less un-directed.

I love this album. I got it in 1986, very soon after I got my CD player and it was one of the albums that defined what CDs were about and gave them a purpose. In the early nineties, I quoted the sleevenotes in a paper I presented at the universities of Surrey, Lancaster and Manchester on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. "Technology," I wrote "could implicitly suggest options for change by opening up new design spaces" for organisations.

The most suggestive example of this modus operandi that I can offer is Brian Eno's exploration of the affordances of technologies for audio and video recording. Bofop writes that, "there has been an underlying consistency at the foundation of all Brian Eno's work. This consistency is the product of his curiosity about the nature of the medium in which he is working — a curiosity that has often succeeded in generating results just beyond current assumptions of what was possible. This experimental attitude asks several questions: what can be done now that could not be done before? What kinds of music does that suggest? And what kinds of listening behaviour? These questions, in turn, point up a central assumption of Eno's work: not only is music always evolving new forms of structures, it is also continually changing its social function, occupying new niches in the cultural landscape… Technological change is, of course, a major factor in this evolution… specific recording techniques have suggested entirely new ways of composing music." Closer to home, a similar approach to technologies for CSCW can be discerned in work at Xerox EuroPARC on media spaces. However, my concern here is to extend this experimental attitude beyond research and development departments to everyday working life.

Two levels of embarrassment about this. First I missed the clue that Bofop is a pseudonym of Eno. Then I compounded this by sending the paper to Eno's production company, Opal. To be fair, this was in response to notice in the Opal Newsletter that they were interested in receiving examples of Brian's ideas being applied outside music. I got a little A5 note back from the Opal office to the effect that they were sure Brian would be interested, though reading between the lines it may have said that he'd never lay eyes on it. I felt a little as though my paper had been treated as unsolicited fanmail, which it wasn't (well, tacitly of course that's just what it was, but they did ask, and it would perhaps have been polite to maintain appearances and keep it tacit).

Around the same time, I was staying with a friend of mine, a senior manager at a Training and Enterprise Council, and explained the idea of Eno's Oblique Strategies. She though it sounded a bit dotty, but, together with her lodger, who happened to be the TEC's research manager, decided to buy a copy — on the TEC's budget. Back then, before the days of Oblique Strategies java apps and iPhone apps, you had to get a physical deck of cards, and they were only available from Opal. A few months later Opal sent them an unsolicited letter politely enquiring how the TEC had been using the Strategies, but Opal didn't get a reply. That deck of cards never left the bookshelf at my friend's home, and remained unconsulted and unused. Yet my friend has an OBE now, demonstrating her own oblique canniness.

The album, you say? No, back to the sleeve notes first (reproduced in full here).

Much of Eno's work is predicated on an intuitive response to this evolution [in recording techniques]… "Thursday Afternoon" is perhaps the first recording specifically for the compact disc and it utilizes two new freedoms of that format: it is 61 minutes long (a duration that only the compact disc could accommodate) and it is occasionally very quiet (made possible by the disc's lack of surface noise). It seems likely that, just as the 78-rpm record set the scene for the 3-minute song, so the compact disc will foster an interest among composers in long-duration pieces like this one.

What makes me love Thursday Afternoon is that, not only do I love those ideas, I love the sound they make too. It may be my favourite 'long-form' ambient piece. There was a typically interesting interview with Eno last month where he's quoted talking about the rich ideas of the avant garde and the commercial disciplines of the pop world, "I wanted the ideas to be seductive but also the results." Over the last 20 odd years, I've found Eno's recorded results have only infrequently seduced me, while the ideas remain potent. Neroli is a case in point: a kind of sister album to Thursday Afternoon, another implementation of a similar formula; it may be more elegant in some ways, but it doesn't satisfy like Thursday Afternoon does.

I remember after I presented my paper at an afternoon seminar in Manchester in '93, John Bowers (himself a musician) took me to task for the above citation of this album, arguing that the recording was very hissy notwithstanding the supposed lack of surface noise. I don't hear that sound as hiss — to me it's a texture, an aural bed, similar in effect to a drone, that the more conventionally musical elements sit on. But then you'll probably tell me that the remastered edition has all the hiss taken off…

As well as this CD Thursday Afternoon was also a video, a series of very slow-moving grainy 'video paintings' of a woman in a bath. Silly me, why tell when I could just show, albeit in very dodgy quality?

I've got it on VHS, probably in the loft, along with Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan. Both videos were shot in 'vertical format' so you had to tip your TV on its side to view them as intended. Our main TV at home was too heavy to do that with, so I had to wheel in the small portable on a trolley and plug it into the VCR. I remember the videos being quite beautiful, but the hassle involved kind of negated the slow restful ambience intended, and I only ever watched them once.

You can get them on DVD now. But I've got a better idea for Mr Eno, if he's listening. Knowing how keen he is on the money he's made from his iPhone app, I think there's a great opportunity to make the Thursday Afternoon and Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan into ambient screensaver-style apps for the iPad. I know Eno's been interested in screensavers in the past, but the problem with them up to now has been that the place where you want to sit and watch some ambient visuals is definitely not sat at a desk loaded with distractions, staring at the same bloody screen that displays your daily grief as soon as you nudge the mouse. The iPad, however, is a different proposition: a sleek piece of hardware that you could easily forget is a computer; one that's easily turned to portrait orientation and propped up in a leisure space, like a photo frame. That would work very nicely, wouldn't it. I'm pretty sure I'd buy it (again). Maybe I'll write to him… No, he can google this suggestion if he's interested. He's probably thought of it already — and dismissed it for some obvious reason that I'm missing.