Brian Eno's Experience of Surrender
Eno on the overlap between sound and the idea of the sacred
It’s Brian Eno’s 74th birthday. Inspired by that clip up there, I’m thinking about “control” and how out of it everything is. Nationalistic White terrorism, fascistic attacks on reproductive rights, ongoing ecological weirdness, arguments about whether or not to feed the babies imprisoned at our borders, global catastrophes, spiraling crisis of the unhoused and unwell, the persistent virus, when it finally catches up to you. “America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.” I think the message is coming in clear enough, thanks.
This is a newsletter about spiritual exploration and music. Some of my most ecstatic musical moments have occurred listening to Brian Eno and the artists he’s produced. Though raised Catholic, Eno describes himself as “an evangelical atheist,” but concedes discussing his Constellations (77 Millions Paintings) project, “I’m starting to think I am sort of getting into the religion business a little bit….There’s something I recognize about religion that us evangelical atheists haven’t really grappled with yet, which is that it gives people the chance to surrender.”
When Brian Eno sang in a Black gospel choir in Brooklyn, he suggests to Jules Evans, he was having the same kind of experience as the faithful congregants, “but without the same structure of belief.” What comes next is my favorite bit: “I hope that’s what the artist does—create rich experiences of surrender, without the superstructure of beliefs.”
I struggle deeply with the “surrender” aspect of religion—my recently neglected meditation practice attests to this—but I suspect that’s why I’ve always been drawn to music, and why, as I have steadily increased the time in my life I spend making it, I have found myself drawn once again to a spiritual cosmic outlook. And yet when I think about the lack of collective action in the here and now regarding all the aforementioned impending apocalypses, it’s like riding an expressway to First Reformed “somebody’s gotta do something”-style dismay. Not that kind of surrender, right?
In A Year with Swollen Appendices, which I read in Oracle, Arizona, over respective weekends in November 2020 and January 2021, while KITIMOTO was recording our album Vintage Smell at Oracle Recording at Rancho Linda Vista, Eno writes: “Is the value of the art experience to be found in the ‘weightlessness,’ the suspension of disbelief, the floating surrender, that it produces, rather than in its objective mineral properties?”
“Floating surrender.” That was the quality I was after each take, and the search for it intensified when I began work on my solo project JPW. Eno has certainly flirted with, and profoundly influenced, what we call New Age music—not mention all those gospel-fied U2 records—a fact not harmed by his personal distance from religious faith. “I’m not anti-mystical,” he explains once again to Jules Evans, driving the point home by adding: “Mysticism isn’t an explanation. It’s a way of getting rid of a problem. You don’t know what’s happening, so you call it God. I’m interested in the mechanism.”
Uncertain how to close this letter, I reached for my Oblique Strategies deck and pulled a card at random. “Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate)” my card read. And so: I’m also interested in that mechanism.
News: My Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard show will air on dublab today (Sunday, May 15) in the 4-8 PM Pacific time slot; please consider supporting dublab via their 2022 Membership Drive—we appreciate them making the space for our freeform sounds; WASTOIDS hosted a killer session with sci-fi paranoiacs Reptaliens; MTVNews called my song “Wealth of the Canyon” “a standout track, play[ing] like a desert broadcast from the past where remnants of space-age pop mingle with an undeniably easy (and breezy) feeling you might've found out Topanga in 1972”; KITIMOTO and JPW (With Dadweed) are scheduled to perform at Luz de Vida: A Benefit Concert for Survivors of Trauma May 21, at Hotel Congress in Tucson.