I can see some really strong parallels with something like an improvisational music performance. WN: It's interesting you say that, because even though the work is structured to have very specific rules to go by, it still has the feeling of the unexpected. Sometimes some combination comes up and I know it's some result of this system that I invented, but nonetheless I didn't imagine such a thing could be produced by it. You think, "Wow - look at that one." That's rather what happens. Nonetheless, some of the combinations are really striking. You know it's only another combination that's no more or less likely than any of the other combinations of four cards you could deal. They're not actually infinite, but as far as any human observer is concerned they are, in that none of us will ever live long enough to see all of their possibilities exhausted.Įno: Well, I know I did, but it's a little bit like if you are dealing hands of cards and suddenly you deal four aces. Then, as I started doing installation work in the late 1970s and '80s, I started realizing that I could make effectively endless pieces of music and pieces of visual material by exploring the possibility of combinations and permutations. That was really the best way of explaining it. So you sort of had a diagram, or really you got a "still" from the piece. Theoretically, the processes were infinite but unfortunately, recordings aren't of infinite length. What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.
Discreet Music was like that and Music for Airports.
I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. That was one thing I found very interesting, because once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on and which would play for a while and finish. Brian Eno: Well, part of it is that it's an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material.
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