Obscure Records
No, really, that was the name of the label
In the mid-1970s, Brian Eno — who had left the band Roxy Music in 1973 and almost immediately released two solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and a collaboration with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting — started the Obscure Records label. They put out 10 releases between 1975 and 1978, and that was it. But he had good taste, and those 10 albums, some of which have never been reissued, contained some really fascinating works by composers who would go on to great renown.
Well, now the complete Obscure Records catalog has been reissued as a 10CD boxed set. (There’s also a 10LP version, for those who enjoy paying a 150% markup for a sonically inferior product. Anyway…) Each version comes with a thick booklet — 130 pages with the CD edition, 80 pages with the vinyl. I was sent a promo download of the whole set, so here are my thoughts, album by album.
Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic is a very famous piece that has been re-recorded a few times. This is the original work. It’s a composition for strings apparently based on the Episcopal hymn “Autumn,” which was reported to be the piece the band was playing as the ship sank. (Titanic lore has it that the musicians went down with the ship.) The music is interlaced with recordings of interviews with survivors, and individual instruments — piano, cello, horn — occasionally rise above the endlessly repeating string motif, but what’s most important is the processing to which the music is subjected. As the piece progresses, it is slowly swallowed up by reverberation, creating a poetic interpretation of the idea that the music is being heard from underwater (which would of course be literally impossible). It’s interesting, particularly on headphones where the pressure of the reverb can really get to you, like listening to Thomas Köner’s dub techno tracks as Porter Ricks. It’s haunted music. The flip side of the LP is much less effective. It’s a looped tape of a homeless man singing “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” over/around which Bryars assembles a gradually swelling orchestral accompaniment. I’m sure lots of people would love this, but I really don’t. It feels like terrible, sentimental tripe to me. (He later re-recorded the piece, with Tom Waits singing along with the original recording. Waits should have known better.)
The second disc in the series is a multi-artist release, Ensemble Pieces, containing works by Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, and Gavin Bryars again. Hobbs’ “Aran,” which opens the record, is a nice clangy percussion piece, like a cross between a gamelan orchestra and a Christmas bell choir, with some organ drones underneath. It’s short, so it serves as a kind of fanfare before John Adams’ 19-minute, three-movement “American Standards,” which starts with a slow-motion march that reminds me of the Residents’ interpretations of John Philip Sousa marches, then moves into a slow hymnlike piece over which we hear an argument between a radio host and a preacher. It ends with a kind of deconstructed chamber version of Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” retitled “Sentimentals.” Hobbs’ “McCrimmon Will Never Return” is a droning organ duo, nice but forgettable. The album ends with Bryars’ “1-2, 1-2-3-4,” which registers to me as kind of a companion piece to The Sinking of the Titanic, in that it sounds like a dance band on a cruise ship at the beginning of the 20th century, playing gentle, swaying music with occasional crooned wordless vocals, but it has a weird dreamlike quality, as if Bryars hypnotized the musicians, like Werner Herzog hypnotizing the cast of his movie Heart of Glass in order to get properly zoned-out performances out of them. Andy Mackay of Roxy Music plays oboe on this track, if that’s of interest to you; Derek Bailey is the guitarist.
Brian Eno’s Discreet Music has been reissued many times. It’s the only one of these discs I’d heard before, because I got it as part of a passel of Eno reissues on Astralwerks about 15 years ago. I love it. The title track runs nearly 31 minutes and consists of two simple keyboard melodies looped over and over and run through echo and delay. It’s one of the gentlest and most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. (Side note: I’m a little fascinated by how pieces like this and Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly,” which runs 32:13 and was a major influence on Eno’s later ambient pieces, were wedged onto single LP sides. I guess it works because the frequency range is rather narrow.) The second side features an orchestra conducted by Gavin Bryars working through three variations on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, with their work subjected to electronic warping by Eno. Like the other Bryars pieces in the series, it’s minimal and repetitive and nice enough, I guess, but the first side is what you’re gonna wind up obsessed with.
Max Eastley and David Toop get one side each of the fourth record, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments. Eastley’s four pieces are named after the instrument’s they’re played on: “Hydrophone,” “Metallophone,” “The Centriphone,” and “Elastic Aerophone.” They’re all sort of ambient, shimmering clouds of sound, each one slightly different from the others but basically unified in their ability to set placid, trance-inducing moods. Toop’s three pieces, “Do the Bathosphere,” “The Divination of the Bowhead Whale,” and “The Chairs Story,” are less relaxing. The first and last are short, childish songs which he sings in a very unnerving falsetto voice. The middle piece, though, is pretty nice — it’s about 17 minutes of metallic ringing and hums, with the occasional surge of feedback, deep rumbling scrape, or gong strike. I could imagine Einstürzende Neubauten coming up with something similar if asked to compose a score for a movie about deep-sea exploration.
Voices and Instruments (what else are there?) offers three pieces by saxophonist Jan Steele and five by John Cage. Steele’s compositions are mellow, slow-motion jazz/soul/art-song works that remind me somewhat of Fire! Orchestra, especially “All Day,” which includes vocals by Janet Sherbourne, singing lyrics taken from the writing of James Joyce. The band features Fred Frith on guitar, and Steve Beresford on electric bass, playing very Motown-ish lines that anchor the music. I feel like John Cage is better known as a conceptualist than a composer of actual music that people might listen to for pleasure, but that’s what happens when “4’33”” is your best-known piece. (Check out the 4CD box of his Number Pieces, performed by the UK ensemble Apartment House, to hear something really beautiful.) Anyway, Cage’s half of the album consists of arrangements of texts — poems by e.e. cummings, and a section of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — sung by Robert Wyatt or Carla Bley, either a cappella or with minimal percussive accompaniment, bracketed by two solo piano works. The vocals are incantatory in style, and I prefer Bley’s voice to Wyatt’s. That’s about all I have to say about this record.
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The sixth release on Obscure was composer Michael Nyman’s Decay Music. This is the only disc in the box that contains any bonus material. The original LP consisted of two tracks, “1-100” and “Bell Set No. 1.” The former is a solo piano piece, individual notes or sparse chords plunked out with long wavering silences in between, allowing the notes to, you guessed it, decay very patiently. It has an almost underwater quality, making it feel like a companion piece to The Sinking of the Titanic, though it also reminds me of the desolate piano parts on albums by Danish black metal musician Nortt. The second piece is performed on bells and gongs and is slightly more active, but still swaddled in atmospheric reverb; you could play it alongside the Max Eastley pieces from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, or alongside Tom Waits’ “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me.” Here’s the thing about the bonus track, though: “1-100” achieved its 27-minute running time by being played at half speed. So when this album was reissued on CD, they appended the original 13-minute version, like when Neu! padded out their second album with versions of the songs “Neuschnee” and “Super” played at 16 and 78 rpm. The quick version doesn’t have the impact of the dreamlike original, but it’s an interesting diversion.
Penguin Café Orchestra’s Music From the Penguin Cafe was a departure for the series, in that PCO were not really related to classical music, even as a jumping-off point for weirdo experiments. They were a quirky chamber pop act who wrote cute little “baroque ’n’ roll” songs that they performed on electric guitar, violin, cello, and electric piano, occasionally adding ukelele and female vocals. Ugh, right? This is one of those records that goes straight in the Not For Me bin, and I have nothing else to say about it.
The eighth album in the series, Machine Music, features four compositions by John White and one more by Gavin Bryars. The White pieces are classic exercises in minimalism, with musicians playing repetitive figures at length. “Son of Gothic Chord” is a two-piano piece, for example, while “Jew’s Harp Machine” is for four players, all using the titular instrument to create its signature boinging sounds. But there’s a wavering, uncertain quality to the repetitions — they lack the mechanistic, relentless precision of Philip Glass’s or Steve Reich’s music of the era. As a result, listening to them is not relaxing at all, but a rather tense experience. The album’s second side is taken up by Bryars’ “The Squirrel and the Rickety-Rackety Bridge,” on which the composer, Eno, Fred Frith, and Derek Bailey played two guitars each, simultaneously (no overdubbing). It, too, is highly repetitive, but the effects through which some of the guitars are fed make it interesting — they sound like the primitive synthesizers that would later turn up on Residents albums.
The ninth Obscure release, Irma, was a three-way collaboration between Bryars, Tom Phillips, and Fred Orton. Phillips created the core of the piece by pulling phrases from a 19th century novel, W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document; Bryars came up with the music, which was recorded by an ensemble of 13 instrumentalists and four vocalists, using some graphic notation by Phillips as a starting point; and Orton wrote the libretto. Although it’s nominally an opera, there are only a few passages with vocals, and they’re not telling a story — the vocals often feel almost like placeholders, like the chanted numbers in the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach, which came out around the same time (1976). Bryars’ music is pretty enough, in the placid and romantic way of his other Obscure works, but I didn’t find Irma very interesting overall.
The series concludes with Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams, easily the most beautiful item in the Obscure catalog. Budd’s compositions are arranged for lots of instruments one can use to create shimmering, rippling melodies (harp, vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, acoustic and electric piano) and a lead voice, either alto saxophone — played by avant-jazz legend Marion Brown — or a six-member female chorus. The women (and, on the closing “Juno,” Brian Eno) sing wordlessly as the piano, harp and various other instruments drift along, creating sunlight-on-the-surface-of-a-pond backdrops. This is almost spiritual jazz in an Alice Coltrane or Brother Ah mode, particularly the first track, “Bismillahi ’Rrahman ’Rrahim,” which is practically a concerto built to showcase Marion Brown. If I could only keep two albums from this set, they would be Discreet Music and The Pavilion of Dreams.
That said, this is a very interesting collection of material — more interesting, to my ear, than much of Eno’s own work. If it’s within your budget, do consider grabbing this (on CD or on LP), as it’s a limited edition and very likely to sell out and go out of print quickly.
Before I go: My latest Stereogum column is up. I used André 3000’s album of ambient flute jams as a springboard to discuss Yusef Lateef, Bobbi Humphrey, Hubert Laws, and Nicole Mitchell, and reviewed a bunch of great new records by Ambrose Akinmusire, JD Allen, Myra Melford, and others.
Just one more thing: Last week I reviewed 10 live albums by John Coltrane for the Shfl, recorded between 1961 and 1967. His music grew and changed a lot in that six-year span, but there were some elements that remained the same throughout, to a degree that kinda surprised me. Here’s that link, if you’re interested.
That’s it for now. See you next week!
I have about half of these albums on vinyl, a couple on CD, all 10 as MP3. They're um, obscure and hard to find. At least they were, I spent years asking Mr. Eno et. all. for a box set, in either format, now that it's here, I can't afford it. Yet, anyway. I'm sure I'll eventually breakdown, the artists on this label were foundational in what I listen to and how I think about music.