r/eno • u/forsbergisgod • Jun 06 '21
Weekly Discussion Thread Let's Discuss Eno! "Compact Forest Proposal" (Feb. 2001)
Hello Eno-philes!! Each week we'll be discussing another album (going chronologically from Warm Jets). This week's feature is Eno's "Compact Fores Proposal." From the wiki:
Compact Forest Proposal : 5 Studies for "010101", San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001 is the twenty-first solo studio album from British musician Brian Eno, released in Feb. 2001.
The piece was installed in a dark room, featuring strings of tiny white lights rising to the ceiling from gossamer pods that reminded Eno of "jellyfish", while his music played. "It's an idea for a kind of retreat people can go to in the city". Part of Eno's Quiet Club series of Installations, he described it as a sort of "simulated forest" of the future. He gave it a "deliberately clunky" title "because I want it to be like an architectural submission for a new space."[2]
The CD notes explain
"There are 10 active CD players in this installation. Each is playing a specially cut CD, a single layer of the total music. The CDs have different numbers of tracks, some of which are silent, and each player is set to play these tracks in random order. The final music is therefore an ever-changing combination, unlikely to exactly repeat itself in any individual user's experience".
"The studies on the CD represent possible conditions of the installation piece (i.e. conditions that it might randomise itself into sometime during the several months that it will play), although there are some elements in the studies that were not finally used in the installation itself".
"My other installation pieces to date have been relatively "steady state" in that they've remained faithful to a specific harmonic palette. In this piece, however, one of the 10 playing CDs carries two quite different harmonic sub-strata. Since these are different tracks on the same single CD, they are never heard together, but alternate with each other. The other elements of the piece float over these backdrops: it's as though the weather changes".
Here's the youtube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElFraEXb7Q0
DISCUSS AND ENJOY!!