Additional information:
Edited and shortened version of the music to the
video with same title.
Origination team Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger
Eno
Mix team Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois &
Michael Brook
Engineers Daniel Lanois (Grant
Avenue,Toronto)
Tim Hunt (Marcus,London)
Digital engineer Nigel Gayler (Decca,London)
Dig Consultant Carlos Olms
Liner Notes:
Despite his considerable and varied musical output, there has been an underlying
consistency at the foundation of all of 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. We make music in
new ways, and we hear music in new places. Technological change is, of course, a major
factor in this evolution. The development of recording processes extended the cultural
niche of music beyond live performance and into all sorts of times and spaces, turning
music into a durable, transportable art in much the same way as writing transformed the
spoken word. And, besides extending those listening options, specific recording
techniques have suggested entirely new ways of composing music.
Much of Eno's work is predicated on an intuitive response to this evolution.
"Music for Airports", for example, is a series of pieces that could only have been
generated in a multi-track studio and which are designed to take advantage of recently
created listening spaces made available for background music. As he has often done in
his work, Eno recognised the unused capacity of a new cultural landscape and took
advantage of it. "Thursday Afternoon" is perhaps the first recording specifically for
the compact disc and it utilized two new freedoms of that format: it is 61 minutes long
(a duration that only the compact disc could accommodate) and its 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. Perhaps less p
redictable is how composers will respond to the prospect of silence within recording.
Compositionally, "Thursday Afternoon" belongs to the family of works which also includes
"Discreet Music" and "Music for Airports". Like them it is an even-textured, spacious
and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less
regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the
whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised
this style of composition as "holographic", by which he means that any brief section of
the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a
hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. Eno's
intention with these pieces is that they should function as tapestries; large-scale,
non-intrusive atmospheres which lend a consistent mood to the environments in which
they are heard. Perhaps, then, they should be seen as more closely related to painting
(and in particular that school of painting that verges into environmental design) than
to any traditional notion of music.
C. S. J. Bofop, August 1985
From the inset in Eno's album "Thursday Afternoon":
The music on this disc was originally recorded for the video made in April 1984 at the
request of Sony Japan. The video THURSDAY AFTERNOON is on vertical format i.e. the TV
set has to be turned onto its right side. It consists of seven video-paintings of
Christine Alicino filmed in San Francisco and was treated and assembled at Sony in Tokyo.
The following is an extract from the video's inlay card:
These pieces represent a response to what is presently the most interesting challenge of
video: how does one make something that can be seen again and again in the way that a
gramophone record can be listened to repeatedly? I feel that video makers have generally
addressed this issue with very little success: their work has been conceived within the
aesthetic frame of cinema and television (an aesthetic that presupposes a very limited
number of viewings) but then packaged and presented in a format that clearly intends
multiple viewings, the tape or disc ... Unfortunately, the cinematic heritage seems
inimical to the idea of multiple-view video tapes or discs. It relies heavily for its
impact on a dramatic momentum which is sustained by frequent scene changes, fast editing
and the narrative development of the plot. As a result, being in some way a function of
surprise, this impact is eroded by repeated viewings. The usual response to this problem
has been to load the video with more scene-changes, faster edits, stranger camera angles
and more exotic special effects, in short, more surprises - presumably, in the hope of
delaying the inevitable decline in interest in the work as it becomes more familiar.
This is the condition of pop-video, and it has almost nowhere left to go in this
direction.
So long as video is regarded only as an extension of film or television, increasing
hysteria and exoticism is its most likely future. Our background as television viewers
has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a
significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between
viewer and screen - you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type of work which
does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work
which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you
move.
BRIAN ENO, 1984
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