Day 23: Mediocre Masters: Brian Eno.

Welcome to another installment of Mediocre Masters! This has been a long time coming. Brian Eno, your time is now. Eno, or more pretentiously, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (yes, that's really his name) is credited by some with the pioneering of ambient music. Since 1948 he has graced our dimension with his rare gift for tedium and a bizarre semblance of what the generous would call taste.

Really? Also, surprise palm frond.

The only thing more puzzling than his semi-drag charm and ninja-fern compatriot is the gray zone where a hairline should be. Granted, this photo is outdated.

There. Now I can direct my disdain just at the aimless buzzing he pimps as music. After drenching Eno in so much of my juicy ire, it might seem inappropriate to merely call him mediocre. However, as we shall see soon, an artist couldn't manage to be truly bad and sustain such a long lasting career. This is the strange enigma that is Eno: everyone seems to want to work with him. He tangled himself up with Talking Heads, David Bowie, Devo, U2, Coldplay, and others. He's participated in various acts over time, proliferated into writing, installation, and other, more esoteric projects (such as a deck of cards that uses randomness and quotation). He's been producing culture for over forty years now, and it would seem that everyone missed out on the joke behind his practice: his shit is cold. At his most energetic we get no better than the Microsoft opening sound. No, really.

Wow! That sounded like the beginning of something potentially intriguing. Too bad it was only some 3 seconds long. He even had this idea of doing lots of mini-pieces like this, which I think is neat, too. He seems to regularly have interesting ideas that get smelted through his forge of banality into something you can't quite believe is happening only because so little actually is happening. Let's study one of his fully developed pieces, 

2/2 (from his Ambient I: Music for Airports)

Its almost like watching a sunrise, if the sun were insufferably lame and had a questionable history of cross-dressing. And please don't think I'm hating on him just because his sound is "avant-garde", or "experimental." I can get my groove on to some pretentious shit with the best of them. Ghost Opera? I'm down. A saucy threnody? Sign me up. One of the largest tone clusters ever composed? Let's pop some popcorn. But please, I beg you, please don't make music where the most engaging thing you could add would be a soft voice intoning "You are a valuable person. People like you..."

Day 15: Mediocre Masters - Matthew Good

I'd like to take the time to introduce a new occasional feature in honor of the embarrassingly trite musical efforts I've stumbled across through my listening: the Mediocre Masters. It's time to pay homage to the astoundingly average. Lurking between the sexy glitch-tricity of Cut Chemist, R.E.M., and the personal vice of Audioslave (don't judge me - Show Me How To Live is fucking catchy) was the oeuvre of Matthew Good. I had the pleasure of two of his long-form works today - The Audio of Being and Avalanche. It turns out that between his solo work and his band I have six hours of his radio-slathering drivel. Give me drugs.

This man. Fuck him.

He hits all of the right beats for utterly generic music. He keeps his tunes at an even keel, somewhere around 80bpm. His voice hits that sweet spot of whiny/airy and unsupported. Its as if he thinks expression is summarily tied up in breathiness. Predictable percussion with a guitar riff slapped over the top isn't enough for this pinnacle of pedestrian effort. The requisite string sections make their due appearances in  songs that try desperately to be deep and poetic, such as In a World Called Catastrophe. 

Please note the complex motifs he weaves throughout this subtle meditation on death, existential angst, and contemporary sexuality. With startling, evocative lines such as

Here it comes, and there it goes/ Another day of decomposing light

He paints a surreal landscape where his inner emotional turmoil manifests in the ambiguity of distorted syntax and surprise antecedents.

At the risk of leaving a bad taste in your mouth, please enjoy some Cut Chemist.

You may recognize the animation as being from The Animatrix. 

Music left: 164.6gb

Cheers,

Bodhisvaha