In her contribution to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, Geeta Deyal explores the contradictions of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. The album lives up to its title, presenting majestically meditative soundscapes which conjure a natural ecosystem. But Deyal describes how it was recorded in a state of panic, and illuminates the central paradox of how such an organic piece of art could be comprised entirely of synthetic components. She delves into this thicket and emerges with Eno’s philosophies and motivations, where seemingly digital concepts like algorithms and cybernetics are applied beyond their usual meanings, the systems of the natural world understood anew.
In a contemporary age of disinformation and Big Data, technology is often viewed as an opponent of creativity. Think of Spotify’s robotic ‘If You Like That, You’ll Love This’ style of curation. But having grown up in the 60s, Eno hails from a tech utopian generation, and viewed the work of cyberneticians like Stafford Beer as novel ways to further ones creativity. Systems not as inhuman, binary phenomena, but rather models of exploration and play. Models capable of moving the artist beyond their own obstructions and limitations. Eno was particularly taken by Beer’s definition of a ‘heuristic’: “a set of instructions for searching out an unknown goal by exploration, which continuously or repeatedly evaluates progress according to some known criterion.” Brought to life with such a technique, Another Green World is not so much an image of an ecosystem, but a system of its own.
When, last year, composer and Au Revoir Simone keyboardist Annie Hart travelled to Aunt Karen’s Farm, an artist’s residency site in rural New York, she went under the pretense of finishing a traditional album. But after finding Deyal’s book at a local store, and subsequently purchasing Eno’s Another Green World, Hart became fascinated by these ideas and found her focus shifting. “I had intended to use my time at the farm to finish recording a pop record,” she explains, “but I soon started sliding out of the typical song structure mentality and sliding into a playing/listening mentality. And I mean ‘play’ in the childish sense.”
Armed with a battery of analog synthesizers and a selection of effects pedals, Annie Hart began to create uninhibited by expectations or self-consciousness. The residency took place in a damp November, one all the lonelier thanks to the ongoing pandemic. And while the gray environment seemed a world away from Eno’s green world, adhering to his heuristic methods revealed the beauty behind the first impression. Hart came to appreciate the detail of the seemingly drab world around her. The endless variety of plants and animals. The degrees of change within weather patterns and times of day. And, most importantly, how every organism was both an individual and part of a wider whole. The ecosystem a symbiotic organism with a billion working parts.
The result of the stay was Everything Pale Blue, a collection of ambient music released by Orindal Records. Ostensibly minimalist, the tracks invite the listener in with warm, meditative tones, though the simplicity belies the nuance that emerges once inside. For these are songs at once gentle and playful, capturing the movement, stillness and space of natural systems as well as their shifting, cyclical patterns. Loop, delay and reverb effects interact with one another, each connection building upon the last until Hart’s seemingly modest means have crafted an entire environment from the ground up.
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The result might feel accidental if the process wasn’t so clear. Through exploratory play, Annie Hart learned to trust the directions her work took. Allowed herself to throw out the blueprints and instead feel her way through, brick by brick. Not an inadvertent creation, just one unshackled from prior expectations. Deyal quotes Eno “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there.” Hart kept going up and unveiled an entire new habitat. Not as verdant as Eno’s, but no less complete. Because make no mistake, Everything Pale Blue might not be another green world, but it is a world all the same.
Everything Pale Blue is out now and available from the Annie Hart Bandcamp page digitally and on cassette, and thanks to the success of the original release, a vinyl edition will be made available on the 19th November. Limited to 300 copies, the record will come on 140 gram, suitably pale blue translucent marble vinyl with full color photo labels, packaged in black, poly-lined innersleeves & full color, extra heavyweight photo jackets. Pre-order it now from Orindal Records.
Photography by Sebastian Kim