21 September 2024. Infrastructure | Eno

The future of infrastructure: “start again and then rip it up” // The relevance of Brian Eno [#602]

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1: The future of infrastructure: “start again and then rip it up”

I was doing some work on a project about infrastructure this week, and it reminded me that I had bookmarked an interview in Public Books with the American academic Deb Chachra on ways to think about infrastructure.

Chachra is a Professor of Engineering at Olin College in the United States whose book How Infrastructure Works was published late last year. Her starting point is that infrastructure is the physical expression of our social and collective natures as human beings. She talks about the idea of “Infrastructural citizenship”:

Infrastructure reflects the social structure of the community that builds it. Having said that, it’s an argument that is being empirically tested, because there are some communities that reject the idea of working together to have infrastructure and they are not doing amazingly well... [Infrastructure] has everything to do with the fact that we are embodied creatures in a physical world.

All the same, the idea that you can get off the grid remains a theme in the political discourse, often from the hyper-wealthy. Chachra dismisses this, because there’s actually no sense of being self-contained, at least at any scale. Sooner or later, you’re going to need other people and their technologies:

If the idea is, well, “We’ll live on our little island that is totally self-contained”—good luck with that. Because even if you think you can replace human skill and labor with technology, you can’t untangle your interdependence, at least not indefinitely—you are still assuming that you are going to be able to bring in doctors and medicine, and get new filters when they clog or a new battery when your battery inevitably dies, because entropy is inevitable.

Infrastructure, in her reading, is a form of public good that both produces good social outcomes, by creating substantive positive external effects, and also economic growth. The case for investment in infrastructure is therefore not hard to make, because it also produces economic and social returns (though maybe the recently arrived Labour government in the UK hasn’t got this part of the memo yet).

There’s a condition attached to this, though:

Historically, once infrastructure is public, it fosters incredible economic growth. But a deregulated, 19th-century robber-baron-style approach to infrastructure fundamentally does not work. These are network monopolies of basic human needs, and the entire early history of infrastructure is of private systems being replaced with public ones in order to safeguard provision and access at reasonable rather than extortionate rates.

Of course, you can’t talk about infrastructure in the 2020s without getting on to the transition away from the infrastructure systems that have underpinned a century of fossil fuel use. Chachra describes her approach to this as being “start again and then rip it up”.

What she means by this is that you need to think about the opportunitythat climate change presents for new and better approaches to infrastructure.

If we’re building something new anyway, it can be something that works better, whether it’s mass transit that, unlike cars, scales up gracefully—it works better when more people use it, not worse... We want to get to the point where it is like, oh, yeah, we all are using the trains, so now it’s time to convert the highway into a bike path or a right of way for trains or whatever.

The book emerged from a course that she has taught over the past 10 years, as part of first-year humanities rather than engineering. She has found that by helping her students think about the wider socio-technical context and purpose of infrastructure also helps them become less immobilised by climate change:

A lot of my students are overwhelmed by the narrative that we are careening toward catastrophe... What I try to stress to my students is that the goal isn’t just to avoid catastrophe but to actually build out a just, resilient, decarbonized future—solving climate change is just going to be a side effect... It’s about that shift in perspective—and emotional affect—from “crisis response” to “here’s what we are actually doing to build this other world.”

There’s an extra level to this reframing, which is about moving beyond the black and white idea of “winners and losers” when it comes to technology:

[W]e [think] about technology as containing a set of benefits and a set of harms, and that those benefits and those harms are unevenly distributed across communities, but it’s not either/or. As students begin to consider how these distributions go along with existing inequalities, it gets them to think about a more relational ethics of care for technologies and technological systems.

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2: The relevance of Brian Eno

By the time I got to the end of On Some Faraway Beach, a recently republished biography of the musician, artist and cultural innovator Brian Eno, the end could not come quickly enough. I wondered why I hadn’t followed my initial instincts and given it away to a second hand shop after I had ploughed through the first rococo chapter about why we should be interested in Eno’s career.

That first chapter: so hyperbolic that if you know something about Eno you might think there was some over-claiming going on; so labyrinthine that if you know nothing about him you will not be able to prise any meaning from it.

Because this book is both far too long and not very well-written. The author, David Sheppard, is a British music journalist, and the book suffers from a lot of the padded style of the British music magazine. He can never use a sentence where a paragraph will do. No piece of research has been wasted, no matter how trivial or irrelevant to his story.

Sheppard finds it hard to distinguish between the consequential and the inconsequential. Quotes from different people repeat themselves, but not to cumulative effect. The footnotes veer alarmingly from the irrelevant to things that ought to have been part of a more thematic discussion in the body of the book.¹ No one seems to have given him the editorial advice I was given when younger: “Kill your darlings”. Or that “writing is editing”. Everywhere, the text has the hallmarks of someone who hasn’t read his own copy back with a critical eye. It could easily have been a 100 pages shorter.

The book seems not to have seen an editor, despite having been published in 2008 and updated twice since then, most recently by a new imprint. No editor is credited in the acknowledgments (might they have asked to take their name off?). But it is ‘Pachebel’, not Pachabal’; it is Geoffrey Oremya, not Geoffrey Oramya; ‘exhaustive’ does not mean the same thing as ‘exhausting’; you don’t write “integrators” when you mean “interrogators”. The cybernetician Stafford Beer is referred to almost throughout as “Anthony Stafford Beer.” The M5 does not head west to Reading.

And then there are the music journalism cliches, on almost every page, which I started to collect after a while. Women are ‘squired’; bands, and businesses, are ‘helmed’; names are “monikers”; Tom Verlaine’s ambition for his band, Television, was “vaulting”; Jane Siberry is an “eccentric Canadian chanteuse”; Nico, in contrast, a “glowering chanteuse”, and a paragraph later a “doom-voiced trouser-suited diva”; John Cale is a “saturnine Welsh polymath”; Phil Collins is “the adept stickman”; Can bassist Holger Czukay has a “mustachioed presence”; the Bahamas is “a sun-drenched tax haven”; Martha and the Muffins are “new wave popstrels”. I may have missed some.

The result of all of this is that Eno’s life is reduced to one damn thing after another. You have to read it with some detachment to get to the meaning—the shapes of his career emerge only when you skim across the surface of all of this noise.

So let me try to extract some of the broader lines from this narrative: why might it be worth writing a book about Brian Eno?

(Eno with Roxy Music, 1973. Photo: Heinrich Klaffs/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A non musician in the music industry, just at the point when tape recorders and synthesisers made it possible to do that. Having initially made his distinctive contribution to Roxy Music’s first two records, which also made him a presence in the music industry, he continued to explore this in a variety of ways that were sufficiently profitable for his label.²

Perhaps because of this, he listened more widely than many others, and followed his curiosity. And so he went to Germany to record with bands such as Harmonium and Cluster, and the producer Connie Planck, at a time when the British music press was keener to write it off as “Krautrock”. He heard the work of the great reggae producers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry early on and drew the right conclusion—that the studio was the instrument. Of course, this idea is a commonplace now.

In turn this created space for his fellow travellers to try their own experiments. In systems terms, he represented a “strange attractor”, most famously invited to work on Bowie’s astonishing record Low and its follow-up, Heroes. Sheppard misses one of the important points about Low, though, which was that Bowie, Eno and the producer Tony Visconti agreed to work on it without making any commitment to releasing anything until they found out what they had.

Listening more widely involved listening to music from other cultures, notably from Africa, before the (marketing) notion of ‘world music’ became commonplace. Eno was influential in introducing African influences into Talking Heads’ later records, and although parts of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, with David Byrne, are problematic now, its mixture of electronica and ‘found’ radio was certainly innovative at the time.

Eno was a connector, in other words. He’s quoted in the book as saying,

”I’m not a gold mine. I don’t like to dig very deep. I just like to draw maps, maybe get out on the shore and walk around a bit.”

Eno used these multiple ideas, together with his interest in cybernetics, to construct the idea of ambient music (yes, others were doing it, but Eno was well enough known to make it visible in the mainstream). This was a significant challenge at the time to the way that we understood what music was. Sitting behind this was the idea that cybernetic ideas and generative patterns could create new types of music. In time this also led him to the Long Now project and its 10,000 year clock.

Related to this, some of his experiments with location-based music (such as his ‘rain forest’ installation in the Barbican conservatory, are also about different ways of listening, but here gets treated as just another passing project.

Because of his reputation, he was able to create platforms for other musicians. The records released by his Obscure Records label have stood the test of time. Not just his own Discreet Music, but Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, the music of Harold Budd, work by Michael Nyman, and the first release from Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

At the end of the spectrum, while in New York Eno assembled No New Wave, a compilation that showcased New York post-punk bands such as Lydia Lunch and James Chance and the Contortions, bringing them to broader notice.

Or, as the BFG tells Sophie,

"You is hearing only thumping loud noises with those little earwigs of yours. But I am hearing all the secret whisperings of the world.

(Photo of the Oblique Strategies cards and box by ‘the justified sinner’/flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Finally, there was his interest in the use of the random in creative work, which I think goes back to some of the avant garde musicians whose work he was introduced to while at art college in Ipswich. This was formalised as the set of Oblique Strategies cards which he developed with the artist Peter Schmidt. Again, I’d say this disrupted the idea of the ‘purposeful creative artist’ and the notion of creative intention.

Although his work with U2 eventually made him financially secure, it’s not his most interesting work, but it takes up a lot of space in the book. Somewhere in there, there’s probably a story about the way in which creatively stuck mega-bands eventually turn to ideas that were once avant-garde to refresh themselves, but if so Sheppard doesn’t manage to find it. Eno also worked with Coldplay, of course.

Eno also seems to have been driven more by curiosity and possibility than money. His second wife Anthea, who manages him, is quoted as saying that he doesn’t like to know how much he’s being paid so it doesn’t influence him. He can’t have been paid much for working with the experimental film-maker Derek Jarman on his early films, for example.

It’s striking that he has turned repeatedly to a fairly small group of collaborators whom he trusted, I think because they were as curious as he was. Robert Fripp and Robert Wyatt, notably, and later Daniel Lanois and Michael Brook as well. I liked Robert Wyatt’s advice to Eno when he got stuck on Before and After Science:

”You commit yourself to what you’re left with.”

(Eno and Daniel Lanois, 2009. Photo: Montroyaler/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The book is also a story about a particular moment when Britain still had some social mobility. It’s hard to imagine now that someone who leaves school at 16 with 4 O-levels having the chance to continue his education, but Eno was able to go first to a local art college and then later to do an art degree. Art colleges played a central role in the British music boom in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the unsung heroes of the book is Roy Ascott, who used his role as an art college lecturer to introduce his young charges to innovative work, before moving on. At Ealing Ascott had introduced Pete Townshend to the work of Gustav Metzger, which prompted Townshend to wreck The Who’s equipment onstage. At Ipswich Eno learned about the work of the experimentalist composer Cornelius Cardew and cybernetics. Sheppard doesn’t make much of any of this, but it’s like reading about a lost age.

At the end of the book, I wondered what a good cultural writer might have made of all of this material—a Michael Bracewell, say, or a John Higgs.³

You might be wondering why I ploughed on to the end. The main reason is that Eno’s musical instincts are impeccable, and on almost every page was a reference to a piece of music I have heard and thought I should listen to again, or hadn’t heard and thought I should go and find. Looking back over the 50 years of Eno’s career in music there is a fabulous innovative counter-cultural playlist. And, of course, some U2. You can’t have everything.

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j2t#602

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1. Among the former: the debts of a music festival at which Roxy Music played; Slade moving to the United States in an attempt to break the American market; the radio producer John Walters’ regret at not having agreed to a John Peel Session for the Sex Pistols.

2. Roxy Music’s first record is more than 50 years old now, but I’d say it still sounds surprisingly fresh, unlike many of its contemporaries.

3. At one point I fantasised about scanning the text into ChatGPT and asking it to rewrite it in the style of John Higgs, but I fear this might have broken the AI.