Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I

Hop Scotch

Sound innovators

A pair of biographies examine two brilliant musical provacateurs

There are artists whose contributions to art enthrall us even while seemingly urging art itself toward some sort of end. Take Brian Eno and the late Glenn Gould, the former a self-described "non-musician" traversing the margins of pop and the avant-garde, the latter one of history's great virtuosos, working largely within the Western classical canon. Both avoided or completely swore off live appearances in favour of the recording studio, where their innovations focused on vertical or textural qualities over the documentation of performance or celebration of technique. Both sought to diminish the centrality of the artist in artistic production, the former an advocate of self-generating systems, the latter having pronounced art's eventual irrelevance altogether. There's something apocalyptic to such sensibilities.

Of course, both Eno and Gould have also been pegged as consummate bullshitters. In his absorbing new biography, On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Orion, $34.95), writer and musician David Sheppard describes how being interviewed taught Eno "to construct a theoretical context for his work after the event. He would subsequently develop a nonpareil facility for articulating persuasively plausible retrospective concepts for what had simply been intuitive, or happenstance creativity." In Glenn Gould (Penguin, $26), his provocative biographical essay, philosopher Mark Kingwell describes Gould's "after-the-fact rationalizations" and the "danger that his theorizing will undermine the joy given by his performances." What emerges in both books are portraits of artists whose capacity to apply systems or polemic to their art, however compelling, must be considered secondary to the art itself.

Eno was born the same year as the LP, the hologram and Velcro. As a child in mid-1950s Suffolk he collected fossils, saw a UFO and was beguiled by the alien-like sounds of doo-wop emanating from nearby USAF airbases. Sheppard gives a vivid sense of Eno's rather idyllic rural English upbringing and panoply of early fascinations. It's fun to read Sheppard's evocations of Eno's formative art school experiences, his attraction to John Cage, androgynous clothing, audio equipment, the Velvet Underground, Mondrian, Little Richard and girls. A vivacious dilettante, Eno's appetite for diverse forms and subversive approaches were matched by a particular bravado regarding his ability to interact with whatever medium. There is, Sheppard writes, "something of a late medieval polymath about Brian Eno, albeit cut with a very mid-20th-century strain of British 'garden shed' amateurism."

While methodically tracing the development of Eno's iconoclastic musical approaches, Sheppard, perhaps unsurprisingly, pays closest attention to Eno's tenure with Roxy Music, his quartet of watershed rock albums and his 1970s collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie and Talking Heads. Sheppard's study of these periods, as well as Eno's rigorous employment of both systems and accidents, yield countless great stories: co-producer Tony Visconti's four-year-old spontaneously "composing" the opening of Bowie's "Warszawa" during the Low sessions; Eno convincing David Byrne to jog on the spot to create his breathless delivery on Talking Heads' "Drugs"; or the transformation of ashtrays, lampshades and wooden flooring into musical instruments. Sheppard offers an unexpected defense of Paul McCartney, and suggests that Eno may bear some responsibility for Phil Collins' solo career. (Readers are advised to refer to Sheppard's footnotes, which contain some of his funniest findings, such as Eno's contractual clause that he never be obligated to set foot in Los Angeles, or the time he signed autographs a Quincy Jones for excitable Japanese Michael Jackson fans.)

The only real flaw with On Some Faraway Beach is Sheppard's compression of the last quarter-century of Eno's life into what reads like an annotated CV. Apparently, at some point Eno's near-superhuman productivity simply exhausted Sheppard. I can't entirely blame him.

"I have decided to tell Gould's story—really a linked set of ideas about perception, consciousness, time, and silence—not as a story but as a single contested piece considered from a variety of angles." There have been grievances with Kingwell's approach to writing about Gould, one of Canada's most beloved and enigmatic icons, but to be fair Kingwell makes his modus operandi explicit from the start, and it's not like there's any lack of other conventional biographies of Gould available to those who crave a more well-behaved, chronologically-ordered collection of facts. Having said that, Kingwell does court contention, having written a slim volume that isn't quite biography and isn't quite philosophy. Were he to concentrate his energies on fully realizing either of these he'd likely have had to compose something dauntingly bulkier.

Each short chapter pertains to a single idea that connects, however tenuously, to Gould's life and work. Titles include "Memory," "Existence," and, of course, "Genius." The structure is prismatic. Kingwell's observations form stimulating chains of epiphanies. He writes elegantly about the inherent constraints of disparate artistic forms and the challenges they pose. Whether or not these build toward a satisfying conclusion—conclusion in the argumentative, rather than the musical, sense—is open to debate.

In the end I got a lot out of both books, and found that so many of Kingwell's preoccupations while examining Gould's life and work dovetailed nicely into themes raised by Eno's life and work. It would be great if Kingwell could apply this same approach to an Eno book. Come to think of it, it would be great if Sheppard could apply his rigorous research and cultural and critical insight to a book about Gould. A trade-off—sounds like one of Eno's Oblique Strategies. What about it, guys? V

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