GAVIN BRYARS
The Sinking Of The Titanic
First album on Eno’s Obscure label gets deserved reissue.
Lauded for his many achievements since leaving Roxy Music in 1973, the founding of his Obscure Records label in 1975 was surely among Brian Eno’s very best endeavours. On the back of the surprise success of Fripp & Eno’s ‘No Pussyfooting’ and his own flourishing solo career, he persuaded Islands Records to provide a specialist Eno-run outlet for some of the academia-based experimental music practitioners in the UK and beyond.
Eno’s involvement in curating the series on a budget label was crucial to its success, creating as it did a bridge over which curious rock fans could gingerly reason that if Eno liked this weird stuff then it must be okay. His knack for picking composers whose work was largely tonal and melodically accessible also helped.
Several of those featured in the 10 albums released between 1975 and 1978 and moved from the fringe to the mainstream thanks to Obscure, with John Adams, Michael Nyman and Bryars all making their recording debuts on the label, with Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Harold Budd also achieving wider recognition following their releases.
‘The Sinking Of The Titanic’ is underpinned by the notion that the sound of the ship’s orchestra would continue rippling outwards indefinitely through the sound-efficient medium of the Atlantic Ocean itself. Accordingly the slow churn of strings, layered with subtle distortions and rolling overtones, ebbs and flows with chords seeping and blurring as harmonies co-mingle. Occasionally in the 24-minute piece, the voice of a survivor recounting her experience bobs into earshot accompanied in part by the twinkling melody of a music box. While understandably solemn and deliberate, the cadences of the hymnal fragments in Bryars’ score lack any mawkish sentimentality and become oddly calming.
It’s accompanied here by Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet which further exploits Bryars’ interest in repetition. A tape loop of a homeless man singing a fragment of a hymn forms the basis of the piece. As the fragility of the voice and the uneven tempo of the looped refrain spool forward it gradually accrues sympathetic, understated orchestration from strings and brass. For all its relative simplicity Jesus’ Blood... is poignant, uplifting, haunting and deeply moving as Bryars treats his found subject with compassion and dignity. In the 47 years since the album appeared both pieces have gained enormous popularity. With original pressings of this profoundly influential series of recordings changing hands for eye-watering sums, this reissue, available on CD and LP, is very special indeed.