Host John Schaefer welcomes Brian Eno back to New Sounds.  In collaborating with a young British poet Rick Holland, for both “Drums Between the Bells,” (July 2011) and  “Panic of Looking” (Nov. 2011), Brian Eno has made the jump into spoken word, or more accurately, a collision between words and music.

Eno discusses how he worked to manipulate the words into a place between melody and speech, although his writing partner, Holland, is into sound as much as meaning, and never let one triumph at the expense of the other.  “Panic of Looking,” the title track, plays with repetition that wasn't in the original poem, which Eno says arose from a musical need.  There's also one instrumental piece on the record, which allows the very long title of the work to serve as text - "watch a single swallow in a thermal sky..."  Plus, he and Schaefer briefly touch on the idea of a composer as a gardener in the music that Eno creates, a la "Generative Music 1," his generative soundtrack to the forthcoming video game "Spore," or his latest audiovisual installation “77 Million Paintings."

PROGRAM # 3276, with Brian Eno  (First aired on 12/1/2011)