The Time-Lag Accumulator As A Technical Basis For Brian Eno’s Early Large-Scale Ambient Repertoire, 1973-75

Abstract

Commentators typically exaggerate the influence Erik Satie had on Brian Eno while he developed his large-scale ambient repertoire during the 1970s.  While Satie's concept of a musique d'ameublement ("furniture music") was important enough to warrant mention in Eno's notes for Discreet Music (1975), the first record he produced expressly for interior design, and while Satie's influence is easily discernible on Eno's later collaborations with the likes of  Harold Budd, Cluster, Roger Eno, Laarji and Daniel Lanois, by far the more crucial contributions came from American Minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley.  Riley's so-called "time-lag accumulator" was a particularly important influence.  Were it not for the device, Eno's large-scale ambient repertoire simply could not exist.  Developed by Riley in the early 1960s for tape experiments such as Music For ‘The Gift’ (1963) and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1967), the time-lag accumulator is actually a rudimentary analog delay processor, and it comprises the technical basis of most large-scale ambient records that Eno produced from 1973 to 1975.  In this paper I survey the development of the time-lag accumulator from its origins as an avant-garde compositional device to a preeminent technique in Eno's ambient repertoire.  In so doing, I position an often overlooked processing technique at the very core of Brian Eno's ambient recording practice.

1    Introduction

     Critics and historians typically exaggerate the influence Erik Satie had on Brian Eno while he developed his large-scale ambient repertoire in the mid-1970s.  Though Satie’s concept of a musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) was important enough to warrant mention in Eno’s notes for Discreet Music (1975), the first record he produced expressly for ambient interior design, and though the influence of Satie is clear on Eno’s later collaborations with the likes of Cluster, Harold Budd, Roger Eno, Laarji and Daniel Lanois, by far the more crucial contributions came from a pair of pioneer American Minimalists, namely, Steve Reich and Terry Riley.  Riley’s so-called ‘time-lag accumulator,’ a rudimentary analog delay processor, was particularly important.  Were it not for the device, early landmarks of Eno’s ambient concept like ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ (1973) and ‘Discreet Music’ (1975) simply could not have been made. Developed by Riley and an anonymous technician in one of the famed Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF) studios in Paris, France, while Riley was expatriated there in 1962, the time-lag accumulator had a tremendous, if almost completely overlooked, impact on the development of the ambient and progressive rock genres.  As Riley (cited in Peters 2008) explains,

      the accumulation technique hadn’t been invented yet....     

      I was asking the engineer, describing to him the kind of      

      sound I had worked with in Mescalin Mix [1960].  I

      wanted this kind of long, repeated loop and I said, ‘Can

      you create something like that?’  He got it by stringing

      the tape between two tape recorders and feeding the

      signal from the second machine back to the first to

      recycle [it] along with the new incoming signals.  By

      varying the intensity of the feedback you could form the

      sound either into a single image without any delay or

      increase the intensity until it became a dense [and]

      chaotic kind of sound.  I enjoy the interplay between the

      two extremes.  The engineer was the first to create this

      technique that I know of.  This began my obsession with

      time-lag accumulation feedback.

My goal in this paper is simply to demonstrate that the time-lag accumulator comprises the technical basis of every large-scale ambient record that Eno produced in the early and mid-1970s; and, as such, that time-lag accumulation forms the core of Eno’s early ambient recording practice.  Before I can do this, however, I shall first have to explain what exactly a time-lag accumulator is and how it achieves its remarkable effect.

2    The Time-Lag Accumulator

      The time-lag accumulator requires only four pieces of hardware: two tape machines, one piece of looped audio tape, and a patch chord.  A single piece of looped tape contacts the record head of tape machine #1 (a.k.a. ‘the record machine’) and the playback head of tape machine #2 (a.k.a. ‘the playback machine’).  ‘Live’ signal, whatever the source, is printed onto tape via the 1/4-inch ‘live-in’ jack on tape machine #1.  That signal then passes through the playback head of tape machine #2, which splits and sends it to (i) monitors, (ii) storage media and (iii) back through the ‘line-in’ port of tape machine #1.  With its record head engaged, tape machine #1 then combines the recycled ‘line-in’ signal from tape machine #2 with ‘live’ signal from the ‘live-in’ port of tape machine #1, and sends the summed signal back to the playback head of tape machine #2 for another round.  This entire process usually takes between 3 to 5 seconds, depending on the physical size of the tape loop and the rate at which the reels move.

Figure 1. Schematic for Terry Riley’s time-lag accumulator

      Riley made copious use of the time-lag accumulator throughout the 1960s.  Even if historians now tend to fixate monomaniacally on In C (1964), the vast majority of Riley’s compositions from 1963 to 1969 were tape compositions, and most —if not all — feature some form of time-lag accumulation. Compositions like Music For ‘The Gift’ (1963), Shoe Shine (1964), In B-flat or is it A-flat (1964), Bird Of Paradise (1965), Dorian Reeds (1967) and, most famously, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1967) all document Riley’s growing dependence on, and infatuation with, the device.  In fact, as I elucidate in the following section, during the late 1960s and early 1970s Terry Riley was arguably better known in rock circles for his work with the time-lag accumulator than for any cellular improvisations like In C or Keyboard Study 2 (1966). 

3    Rock & the Avant-Garde

      That Brian Eno followed Terry Riley’s tape experiments throughout the 1960s is clear.  While Eno was enrolled at Ipswich Art School, between 1964 and 1966, artist and professor Tom Phillips introduced him to Riley’s work.  By all accounts it was love at first listen, which should not have been especially surprising to anyone who had known Eno since he was a young boy obsessed with the magic of audio tape.  Riley proved so crucial, in fact, that within three years of discovering him, Eno seems to have elevated the composer to the status of something like an Oedipal father-figure — a widely celebrated authority whose downfall the young and insecure art student felt compelled to engineer in order to ensure his own ascendance.  In a passage from a notebook dated December 1967 to May 1968, written while Eno (cited in Bracewell 2007. p. 185) was still a student, this time at an art college in Winchester, the future rock star clearly articulates his ambivalence:

      Terry Riley, the cunt, picked up one of my

      seventeen-yea[sic]-old ideas and performed it at the

      Museum of Modern Art... Ah, these vultures!

      Of course, Eno was not the only rocker to express admiration for, or to participate in the performance and recording of, American and British minimalist works during the 1960s.  There was significant overlap between rock and avant-garde musical communities throughout the decade.  John Cale, a founding member of The Velvet Underground and a celebrated producer in his own right, spent much of the early 1960s with La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, only to be replaced by Terry Riley.  Pete Townshend, The Who’s violent guitarist and sometimes singer, positioned his earliest synthesis experiments as homages to Terry Riley; possibly the band’s best known song, ‘Baba O’Riley’ (1971), was named for the composer and Meher Baba, an Indian mystic.  David Bowie and Brian Eno attended the same 1971 performance of Philip Glass’ Music With Changing Parts (1970) at the Royal College of Art in London, six years before they collaborated on Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy.’  And rock fans grooved to Terry Riley’s time-lag accumulator when he performed at Manhattan’s Electric Circus in April of 1969; they piled into other rock clubs, just down the street from the Electric Circus, to hear Philip Glass debut his early synthesis and farfisa works (ie., Two Pages (1967/1968), Music in Fifths (1969), Contrary Motion (1969) and Music in Similar Motion (1969)); and enough rock fans went in for the psychedelic artwork and peacenik rhetoric on the front and back covers of Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air (1969) that the record enjoyed a surprise run in the rock market when Columbia released it in 1969.  

      However, for all the goodwill that rock and classical musicians and fans managed to muster between themselves throughout the 1960s, the 1970s saw what Eric Tamm (1990. p.21) massively understates as, ‘a parting of the ways.’  For every Terry Riley sampling willy-nilly from Chet Baker (Music For ‘The Gift’), Jimmy Smith (Shoe Shine), Sonny Lewis (In B-Flat or is it A-Flat) and Junior Walker And His All-Stars (Bird of Paradise) — and, in so doing, tacitly approving their music — another composer was waiting in the wings to tow the usual aristocratic and exclusive conservatory line.  As none other than Steve Reich (cited in Tamm 1990. p. 20) once told an interviewer:

      When I was fourteen years old there was rock ‘n’      roll —      

      Fats Domino and Bill Haley — but frankly I thought it

      was stupid.... If the whole history of rock ‘n’ roll

      disappeared tomorrow           morning, I wouldn’t care.... The

      only thing I admire about rock ‘n’ roll [musicians] is

      how much money they make.

Not surprisingly, rock musicians responded to the slagging in kind.  Robert Fripp (cited in Tamm 1990. p.21), lead-guitarist for the British progressive rock band King Crimson, had this to say about Reich’s music:

      [It] takes me to a point at which something really      

      interesting could happen, but doesn’t.... What I should

      personally like to do is to add the random factor, the

      factor of hazard, to what he’s doing — to walk onstage

      unexpectedly during one of his performances and,

      having become familiar with the tonal center, improvise

      over top of it.

4    Fripp & Eno, No Pussyfooting

      Though Fripp never acted on this fantasy, in September

 of 1972 he did the next best thing — he hung out with Brian Eno, then of Roxy Music, and connected his guitar to a working time-lag accumulator which Eno wired together in the basement studio of his London home (Tamm 1995).  The product of that experiment, ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation,’ would become side-one of Eno’s first full-length release after leaving Roxy Music in 1973, namely, Fripp and Eno No Pussyfooting (1973).  A twenty-odd minute guitar and electronics jam, named after a short story by famed Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick, ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ occupies a unique position in critical evaluations of Eno’s oeuvre.  Critics generally agree

Figure 2. Block signal flow for ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ from Eric Tamm (1995).

that the record documents a transitional time in Eno’s development, when the recordist had the technical basis of ambient music worked out but not a musical aesthetic, that is, when Eno knew how to go about wiring up a properly ambient ‘process,’ in Steve Reich’s (1974) sense of the term, but remained basically clueless about what the content of that process should be.

      The signal path Eno devised for ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ is remarkably simple, given the complicated sound world it evokes.  Signal flowed from Robert Fripp’s Gibson Les Paul through a few unspecified home-modified stomp-boxes to the 1/4-inch ‘live-in’ port of two Revox A77 tape machines wired together into a time-lag sequence; and, from there, back through the ‘line-in’ port of the ‘record machine.’  Though this appears to be an exact replica of Terry Riley’s set-up, Eno added one small, but crucial, modification: he made the record head a variable component.  With the record head disengaged,  ‘live’ signal passed directly through the accumulator to monitors and tape without cycling back into the sequence, even as the accumulation loop cycled on.  This effectively paused the accumulation process, allowing Fripp to improvise in a more traditional manner until Eno re-engaged the head.

      ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ occupies the same middle-ground path between rock and avant-garde classical music that Terry Riley tread throughout the 1960s.  This ‘common ground’ did not go unnoticed by rock critics like Robert Christgau who, in his 1974 review of No Pussyfooting for the Village Voice, called the album, ‘the most enjoyable pop electronics since Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air’ (Christgau 1974).  In fact, No Pussyfooting (1973) is neither progressive rock nor ambient so much as it is ambient progressive rock.  Unlike Eno’s later ambient tracks, ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ is harmonically dynamic, moving through no less than three pandiatonic regions (ie., F# dorian, A, and then D, ionian); and dissonance figures prominently on the track, as do varying dynamics, distortion and a slew of sounds most readily associable with the progressive rock genre.  And, in any event, Fripp was so pleased with ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ that he had a pre-release copy piped over the loudspeakers before and after King Crimson took the stage throughout the fall of 1972, making the track, and the record it appears on, equally important documents of early 1970s English progressive rock in their own right.  It would be two years, however, before Eno used the lessons he learned with Fripp about the time-lag accumulator to make a record of unequivocally ambient music — his large-scale ambient manifesto, Discreet Music.

5    Brian Eno, Discreet Music

      One oddly warm evening in January of 1975, walking home from a particularly productive session in the studio, Brian Eno looked one way when he should have looked the other, stepped out onto the street and directly in front of a moving car.  The month-long convalescence which followed proved transformative.  It was during this time that Eno received a visit from Judy Nylon, an expatriated American punk singer who he had already rather dubiously immortalized in the song ‘Back In Judy’s Jungle’ (1974).  Nylon brought the distressed rock star a record of eighteenth-century harp music to soothe his shredded nerves.  As Eno tells it, in the liner notes for Discreet Music, that record inspired nothing less than satori for the recordist:

      My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a      

      record of 18th century harp music.  After she had gone,      

      and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the

      record.  Having laid [sic] down, I realized that the

      amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one      

      channel of the stereo had failed completely.  Since I      

      hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the

      record played on almost inaudibly.  This presented what

      was for me a new way of hearing music — as part of the

      ambience of the environment just as the colour of the

      light and the sound of the rain were parts of the

      ambience.  It is for this reason that I suggest listening to

      the piece [‘Discreet Music’] at comparatively low levels,

      even to the extent that it frequently falls below the

      threshold of audibility.^[1]

      According to Eno (cited in Tamm 1995. p.133), ‘Discreet Music’ is nothing more complicated than, ‘two simple and mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a synth with a digital recall system.’  Though nothing has been written which definitively identifies the synthesizer Eno actually stored those melodies on, he must have used the EMS ‘Synthi’ AKS, which was a suitcase version of the infamous VCS3 with a 250-step digital sequencer added.^[2]  Split to left and right channels, respectively, the two melodic sequences spell out a combined G major triad in second inversion, with major ninth, eleventh and thirteenth added.  Having routed the signal from the AKS through a graphic equalizer and an echo unit, and, from there, a time-lag accumulator connected to monitors and tape, Eno’s compositional work

was restricted to triggering the sequences and then, in his words, ‘occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer’s output’ (Eno 1975).  The second tape machine (the playback machine) in the time-lag sequence was set to a considerably lower level than the record machine, thus enabling an uniform sixty-odd second diminuendo for each note that sounds.  In between triggering and tweaking, Eno found time to greet the mailman, answer the phone, and attend to a number of other household distractions.  In fact, while ‘Discreet Music’ wound its way through the labyrinthine route Eno (cited in O’Brien 1978. p.31) devised for it in his basement studio, in his words:

      The phone started ringing, people started knocking at the                  

      door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all

      this stuff as I ran.  I almost made [‘Discreet Music’]

      without listening to it.  It was really automatic music....

      Since then I’ve experimented a lot with procedures

      where I set something up and interfered as little as

      possible.

      One last bit of serendipity intervened on the track’s behalf.    Having conceived ‘Discreet Music’ as accompaniment for another marathon guitar solo by Robert Fripp — a formula which, after No Pussyfooting and Evening Star (1975), was fast in danger of becoming a compositional cul-de-sac for the pair — Eno mistakenly played the track for Fripp with the machine set for half-speed (Tamm 1995).  This softened the sometimes piercing

Figure 3. Block signal flow for ‘Discreet Music’ provided by Eno in his notes for Discreet Music.

attack of the AKS and extended the decay and release times for each now-flattened and slightly detuned pitch, creating what was, to Eno’s mind, a warmer and more contemplative sound.  Eno and Fripp agreed that, even if the full-speed ‘Discreet Music’ required a guitar solo to spice the somewhat homogenous sound world it evoked, the half-speed version needed nothing more.   A half-speed master was thus dubbed forthwith and, in turn, released as side-one of Eno’s first record to bear the term ‘ambient’ on its sleeve, namely, Discreet Music.

6    Conclusion

      Eno (cited in O’Brien 1978. p.31) once described ‘Discreet Music’ as, ‘one of the best things I’[ve] ever done, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it.’  In fact, he wasn’t even paying attention when he made the track.  Nonetheless ‘Discreet Music’ would become the first track in Eno’s ambient canon, usurping the pride-of-place given by many to ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ almost immediately after its release.  Though Eno (cited in O’Brien 1973. p.31) had talked to reporters about wanting to make music which sounded like it was, ‘just a chunk out of a longer continuum’ almost as soon as he left Roxy Music in 1973, it wasn’t until the happy accident of ‘Discreet Music’ two years later that he finally figured out how to go about doing so.  The compositional method he devised to create ‘Discreet Music’ — a loose adaptation of the time-lag sequence he wired together for Fripp on ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ which, itself, was a loose adaptation of the time-lag sequence that Terry Riley pulled together the decade before on tracks like Music For ‘The Gift,’ Bird of Paradise, Dorian Reeds and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band — became the template for Eno’s long-form ambient experiments throughout the remainder of the decade.

5    Acknowledgments

An extra special thanks goes to my sister, the playwright Corrina Hodgson, for answering a few of my more block-headed questions about dramatic practice while I worked on an early draft. 

References

Bracewell, Michael.  2007.  Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music.  New York. Da-Capo Press.

Christgau, Robert.  1974.  No Pussyfooting: B+.  Available from: http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?id=2904&name=Fripp+%26+Eno.  [Accessed: June 2, 2009]

Cunningham, Mark. 1998. Good Vibrations. London. Sanctuary Press.

Elborough, Travis. 2009. The Vinyl Countdown: The Album From LP to iPod and Back Again.  Brooklyn.  Soft Skull Press.

Eno, Brian.  1975.  Notes for Discreet Music  London: EG Records.

O’Brien, Glenn.  June 1978.  Eno at the Edge of Rock.  Andy Warhol’s Interview 8, pp. 31-33.

Peters, Michael.  2008.  The Birth of Loop: A Short History of Looping Music.   Available from: http:www.loopers-delight.com/history/Loophist.html.  [Accessed: June 2, 2009]

Reich, Steve.  1974.  Writings About Music.  New York: New York University Press.

Tamm, Eric.  1989.  Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound.  New York: Faber and Faber.

Tamm, Eric.  1990.  Robert Fripp: From King Crimson to Guitar Craft.  New York: Faber and Faber.

Eno Ambient Discography, 1973-1979

Cluster and Eno.  1977.  Cluster and Eno.  Sky 010.

Eno, Brian.   1975. Discreet Music.  Editions EG/Obscure 303.

——.  1978.  Music For Films.  Editions EG EGS 105.

——.  1979.  Ambient 1: Music For Airports.  Editions EGS 201.

Eno, Moebius and Rodelius.  1978.  After The Heat.  Sky 021.

Fripp, Robert and Eno, Brian.  1973.  No Pussyfooting.  Editions EG EGS 102.

——.  1975.  Evening Star. Editions EG EGS 103.