Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Brian Eno: The Art of Empty Spaces [Highlight From Episode 348]

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Brian Eno: The Art of Empty Spaces [Highlight From Episode 348] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  Speaker 1: Here's a highlight from a recent episode of book Don Rock.
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  Speaker 1: Our guest is artist and writer Beta A. She's the
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  Speaker 1: author of the upcoming book Slow Stories, a short story collection.
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  Speaker 1: The stories take place in strange and imaginary towns and
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  Speaker 1: villages from pasts that never happened, in futures that will
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  Speaker 1: never occur. These worlds exist without an elaborate background description,
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  Speaker 1: like islands in a misty c You also say that
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  Speaker 1: while making these stories that you discover the importance of
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  Speaker 1: leaving longer spaces. Can you expand on that.
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  Speaker 2: That was while making the record with Brian. In the
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  Speaker 2: writing itself, I discovered that leaving things out can be
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  Speaker 2: very helpful for the reader to connect through their own
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  Speaker 2: imagination and their own visual imagery that they have in
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  Speaker 2: their mind. So if I describe a town and I
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  Speaker 2: say there was a church in the center of the town,
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  Speaker 2: that might already be enough for you to mentally go
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  Speaker 2: to some town that you visited once or where you
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  Speaker 2: grew up. So the more details, the more it becomes
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  Speaker 2: my story, and the less you can have your own
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  Speaker 2: imagery in that. And Brian and I are very similar
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  Speaker 2: in that we like to leave a lot of room
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  Speaker 2: for audience in our art. When I was reading the stories,
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  Speaker 2: he kept saying slower, slower, slower, until I felt like
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  Speaker 2: I was going really slow, you know it, keeping half
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  Speaker 2: a minute in between sentences. And then when I listened
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  Speaker 2: to it again, I thought, oh, half a minute is
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  Speaker 2: actually not so bad because you can picture this this
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  Speaker 2: town with the church and the bells and some mountains
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  Speaker 2: in the distance. So working with Brian in that sense
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  Speaker 2: taught me that actually more empty space is better.
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  Speaker 1: Brian is on two of those tracks. Brian, of course
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  Speaker 1: known for Roxy music and Prousing. You too, David Bowie talking,
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  Speaker 1: how did you team up with him for this project?
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  Speaker 2: Brian and I connected over our shared interest in what
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  Speaker 2: art does, why do we do art, what's the point
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  Speaker 2: of it? And our frustration that nobody, in our opinion,
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  Speaker 2: had put this into words in a way that we
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  Speaker 2: agreed with. And Brian had decades of thinking about this
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  Speaker 2: and lecturing about this, and we made a book together
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  Speaker 2: called What Art Does, in which we describe why do
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  Speaker 2: we believe people do art, what is the use of it,
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  Speaker 2: why is it important? And we also collaborated on loads
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  Speaker 2: of things. So I would go to the studio, you
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  Speaker 2: might be working on lyrics, and I would help a
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  Speaker 2: little bit, not always successfully, but I was around and
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  Speaker 2: he would help me sometimes with my stories, give some comments.
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  Speaker 2: We painted together, so this came about very easily. And
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  Speaker 2: my publisher and named Press, has released records for a
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  Speaker 2: while where they put one of the stories or poems
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  Speaker 2: that their writers do on the music on final So
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  Speaker 2: when I said to Ryan I might do that, he said, well,
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  Speaker 2: let's do it today. Do you have a story ready?
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  Speaker 2: And of course we didn't finish it in a day,
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  Speaker 2: but we just got started. We started recording, looking through
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  Speaker 2: his archive, combining tracks, and it came together quite naturally.
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  Speaker 1: And you did mention the quote that he had where
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  Speaker 1: he told you slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow?
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  Speaker 1: Is the actual quote that's promo material? Why that approach
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  Speaker 1: from a stylistic approach? Why was that important?
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  Speaker 2: Brain thought about this longer, so he had he had
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  Speaker 2: a plan to do this one day, so he already
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  Speaker 2: thought about this, and he said that he always wondered
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  Speaker 2: why audio books are so fast and why they don't
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  Speaker 2: leave space, and he always had this idea of there
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  Speaker 2: should be a format with music very very slowly read
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  Speaker 2: stories and a lot of space for the music in between,
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  Speaker 2: and for the story and the music to be collaborative,
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  Speaker 2: and the music not too illustrative, and the story not
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  Speaker 2: too dominant. When I sat down to read, I read
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  Speaker 2: in my normal I'm doing a reading voice, which means
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  Speaker 2: you read at a decent pace. One of the stories
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  Speaker 2: starts with a girl was born in a village in
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  Speaker 2: a desert, so I would read it at this base
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  Speaker 2: and Brian would say slower, a girl was born, and
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  Speaker 2: then twenty seconds she was born in a village in
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  Speaker 2: the desert, with Brian's music next to it, which I
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  Speaker 2: didn't have as I was reading. It feels completely pleasant
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  Speaker 2: and natural to listen to it really is like it
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  Speaker 2: brings you into this dream like state. As I was
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  Speaker 2: doing it in a recording studio, it felt very unnatural
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  Speaker 2: to leave these giant.
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  Speaker 1: Gaps because you're reading it. You're reading it without the music.
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  Speaker 1: You said, yes, he added it after interesting, Okay, Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: We did put on some music at some point and
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  Speaker 2: had phones for me to make the reading less awkward,
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  Speaker 2: to get more of a sense of what he wanted
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  Speaker 2: to do, but that wasn't the piece that we used eventually,
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  Speaker 2: so once we had the recording, we started adding tracks.
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  Speaker 2: He has this great archive of music he's made. There's
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  Speaker 2: so much in his archive that's never used. And he
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  Speaker 2: has this wonderful program that he made together with Peter Choffers,
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  Speaker 2: where he can automatically shuffle and it combines, for instance,
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  Speaker 2: three tracks. And because his music leaves so much room
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  Speaker 2: for many of the tracks are pretty quiet and are
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  Speaker 2: not so dominant. So if you can stack three tracks
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  Speaker 2: and they might still sound good. So we did all
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  Speaker 2: this shuffling, We added some crickets, we took them out,
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  Speaker 2: and for both stories we ended up with what I
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  Speaker 2: think is really suitable music that adds a lot to
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  Speaker 2: the story.