Neu!

I had the privilege of photographing one of my heros – Brian Eno.
For your reading pleasure, a great unpublished interview with Brian Eno by Lester Bangs from 1979.

Brian Eno: A Sandbox In Alphaville
By Lester Bangs

1.

The other day I was lying on my bed listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. The album consists of a few simple piano or choral figures put on tape loops which then run with variable delays for about ten minutes each, and is the first release on Eno’s own Ambient label. Like a lot of Eno’s “ambient” stuff, the music has a crystalline, sunlight-through-windowpane quality that makes it somewhat mesmerising even as you only half-listen to it. I had been there for a while, half-listening and half-daydreaming, when something odd happened: I starting thinking about something that didn’t exist. I was quite clearly recalling a conversation I’d had with Charles Mingus, the room we were in at the time and the things he’d said to me, except that I had in reality never been there and the conversation had never taken place. I realized immediately that I was dreaming, though I had no memory of falling asleep and had in fact passed over into the dream state as if it were an unrippled extension of conscious reality. So I just lay there for a while, watching myself talk to Mingus while one-handed keyboard bobbins pinged placidly in the background. Suddenly I was jolted out of all of it by the ringing phone. I stumbled in disorientatedly to answer it, and hearing my voice the called asked: “Lester, did I wake you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, and told her what I’d been listening to. She just laughed; she was an Eno fan too.

(Continued)