In a Bri­an Eno inter­view from 2007, writer Gem­ma Win­ter remind­ed him of some­thing she had read about him and ring­tones:

GM: I read an inter­view with you in Q mag­a­zine about sev­en years ago, and you were asked had you ever com­posed your own ring­tone. You respond­ed by say­ing you would­n’t be that sad! But you’ve just com­posed ring­tones for Nokia — please explain.

BE: Heh heh! At that time they were ask­ing you to com­pose a piece of music, but you could only use those sounds. They would com­pose ring­tones out of these — beep boo boop, beepy nois­es. So I thought, ‘That’s hope­less — what can you do with that?’ You know the sound I mean, neep neep neep; so peo­ple were com­pos­ing neep-neep neep-neep nee-nee nee-nee. In the mean­time things changed so they had poly­phon­ic tones; so you could actu­al­ly have more com­pli­cat­ed sounds. It’s not real­ly a great medi­um for writ­ing music.

It’s a shame we don’t have the audio of this inter­view, because I would dear­ly like to hear what “neep neep neep” actu­al­ly sounds like. But in lieu of that, we have the above video, which col­lects all of the ring­tones Eno com­posed for the Nokia 8800 “Siroc­co”.

Eno was no stranger to writ­ing in minis­cule–he com­posed the Win­dows 95 open­ing chime. But in 2007 the “beep boop” lim­i­ta­tions had gone away and he was able to draw from a much larg­er palette. Now, we don’t know the para­me­ters of the assign­ment, but then again, look at what he was giv­en for the Win­dows chime, accord­ing to the same inter­view:

The music should be active, young, inspi­ra­tional, wise, stim­u­lat­ing, catchy, mem­o­rable, thought­ful, err glossy, futur­is­tic, nos­tal­gic — hon­est­ly a para­graph of adjec­tives. At the bot­tom it said the piece should not be more than three and a quar­ter sec­onds in length!

This time he was able to cre­ate over a dozen ring­tones along with alarms and alert sounds, all includ­ed above. The ques­tion might be: if we didn’t know this was Bri­an Eno, would we be able to rec­og­nize his music in such a small work? Also: Are these minia­tures inher­ent­ly more inter­est­ing than any oth­er com­pos­er?

For the first ques­tion, I did notice that some of the bright gui­tar tones sound a bit like his work with dul­cimer artist Laraa­ji, and the tone, the echo, and his choice of scale on some of the piano pieces come from the same world as his ambi­ent pieces, as do the round tones of his “alarms,” which are more of a con­cerned fur­rowed brow than a yell.

To the sec­ond ques­tion, I would say there is a cer­tain con­sis­ten­cy to this group than the grab bag of sounds on my iPhone. And if I used ring­tones anymore–does anybody?–I might be jeal­ous of the per­son with the Eno­phone.

Final ques­tion, prompt­ed by the nos­tal­gia in the YouTube com­ments: How many Nokia 8800 users bought a Bri­an Eno ambi­ent record because it remind­ed them of their phone?

Note: You can appar­ent­ly down­load Eno’s ring­tone col­lec­tion at this web­site.

via @darkshark

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Reich is Call­ing: A Min­i­mal­ist Ring­tone for the iPhone

Down­load Jim Rockford’s Answer­ing Machine Mes­sages as MP3s

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Pho­to via the Clem Burke Drum­ming Project

Musi­cians from clas­sic bands take all sorts of unex­pect­ed paths in their late careers. We’ve seen Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart col­lab­o­rate with NASA, Talk­ing Heads front­man David Byrne take on—among a dozen oth­er roles—the man­tle of librar­i­an, and Bruce Spring­steen gui­tarist Steven Van Zandt become a cur­ricu­lum devel­op­er. Turn­ing musi­cal expe­ri­ence to con­scious­ness-expand­ing avo­ca­tion has pro­duced very admirable results—perhaps no more so than in the case of two musi­cians who have used the lat­est research on music ther­a­py to help kids with autism.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson’s “Rock Your Speech” project, inspired by his autis­tic son Liam’s pos­i­tive response to music. Now reports from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester describes how drum­mer Clem Burke of Blondie fame has invest­ed his celebri­ty into research on how drum­ming can help kids on the spec­trum improve learn­ing and enhance social inter­ac­tions. It must be not­ed that Burke has not come late­ly to the sci­ence. His Clem Burke Drum­ming Project (CBDP), an asso­ci­a­tion of aca­d­e­mics, drum­mers, uni­ver­si­ty part­ners, and hon­orary “Doc­tor of Rock” Burke, just cel­e­brat­ed its 10-year anniver­sary.

The project has pre­vi­ous­ly researched “the phys­i­cal demands of drum­ming; enhanced health and well­be­ing of drum­ming; enhanced brain struc­ture and func­tion fol­low­ing drum­ming prac­tice,” and oth­er drum­ming-relat­ed sub­jects, includ­ing a drum­ming video game for stress relief. The lat­est find­ings, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester and Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­tre Hart­pury, show that “drum­ming for 60 min­utes a week can ben­e­fit chil­dren diag­nosed with autism.” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester notes that pre­lim­i­nary results of a ten-week drum­ming inter­ven­tion com­pris­ing two 30-minute drum­ming ses­sions per week showed:

• A vast improve­ment in move­ment con­trol while play­ing the drums, includ­ing dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, tim­ing.
• Move­ment con­trol was also enhanced while per­form­ing dai­ly tasks out­side the school envi­ron­ment, includ­ing an improved abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate dur­ing home­work.
• A range of pos­i­tive changes in behav­iour with­in school envi­ron­ment, which were observed and report­ed by teach­ers, such as improved con­cen­tra­tion and enhanced com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peers and adults

These sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits do not apply only to stu­dents with autism; “Rock drum­ming,” says lead researcher and CBDP co-founder Mar­cus Smith, can be “a potent inter­ven­tion for indi­vid­u­als expe­ri­enc­ing brain dis­or­ders” of all kinds, and can also improve dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, and tim­ing (nat­u­ral­ly).

Although a num­ber of stud­ies over the years have made head­lines with sim­i­lar claims, the Clem Burke Project’s ten years of research into the effects of drum­ming on brain health and behav­ior give this study par­tic­u­lar weight. Still, as always in sci­en­tif­ic research, more evi­dence can help refine the appli­ca­tions. Anoth­er researcher in the study, Dr. Ruth Lowry, sounds both excit­ed and cau­tious­ly opti­mistic in her assess­ment of the find­ings, express­ing hopes that more research will “pro­vide fur­ther evi­dence that not only does rock drum­ming have pos­i­tive ben­e­fits in terms of changes in dex­ter­i­ty and con­cen­tra­tion but that wider social and behav­iour­al con­duct ben­e­fits can be observed.”

Maybe Dr. Clem Burke and his team should start a side project with Tom Peters­son, whose musi­cal inter­ven­tions in the lives of kids with autism seem to be find­ing exact­ly such wider ben­e­fits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Helps Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Steven Van Zandt Cre­ates a Free School of Rock: 100+ Free Les­son Plans That Edu­cate Kids Through Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Spend time lis­ten­ing to 1980s hits, Japan­ese pop, or dis­co clas­sics on Youtube, and you’ll almost cer­tain­ly encounter Mariya Takeuchi’s addic­tive song “Plas­tic Love.” Though first released in 1985 in Japan, it remained almost entire­ly unknown in the rest of the world until a few years ago, when it all of a sud­den attained an enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty. Now, hav­ing racked up more than 20 mil­lion views, the song has quite a few peo­ple — even many of those who have put it into heavy rota­tion on their per­son­al playlists — ask­ing what it is and where it came from. The video essay above, by explain­er of ani­ma­tion and Japan­ese music Stevem, breaks down the his­to­ry of “Plas­tic Love,” both as an obscure 80s Japan­ese pop song and an inter­net-era phe­nom­e­non.

“Plas­tic Love” has become the best-known exam­ple of “city pop,” a genre we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture and one Stevem describes as “a type of music that was reflec­tive of the new, shiny, mod­ern Japan” that emerged as the coun­try’s rebuilt econ­o­my boomed in the 1970s and 80s. “Con­sid­er­ing Japan did­n’t, nor could they, have a mil­i­tary, some of this mon­ey was fun­neled into new tech­nol­o­gy: cas­settes, Walk­mans, VHSs, cars, TVs, video game con­soles.”

The sound­track to “the cos­mopoli­tan lifestyle in full swing” took “bits and pieces from New Wave, synth pop, dis­co, jazz, and what­ev­er else was rel­e­vant at the time and shoved them into a blender to make what could be some of the sharpest pop music to come out of the Land of the Ris­ing Sun.”

The young Mariya Takeuchi was one of the era’s first defin­ing pop idols. Scor­ing a num­ber-one album in 1980, she low­ered her pro­file over the next few years, mar­ry­ing the singer-song­writer Tat­suro Yamashita (now rec­og­nized as a city pop icon in his own right) and col­lab­o­rat­ing with him on an album called Vari­ety, with which she re-emerged in 1984, retak­ing the top spots on the Japan­ese charts. “Plas­tic Love” comes as its sec­ond track, lay­ing down a “shim­mer­ing hyp­not­ic groove, strik­ing you with its beat and nev­er let­ting go.” Not only “a med­i­ta­tion on heart­break, it real­ly speaks to the hol­low, plas­tic feel­ing of what peo­ple do to fill in the sor­rows of their life and lone­li­ness,” acts such as “buy­ing com­mer­cial goods in the hopes that they will make us feel more and avoid deal­ing with our own per­son­al anguish.”

What­ev­er the song’s musi­cal strengths, it took an algo­rithm to bring them to world­wide atten­tion. Youtube, which 80s Japan­ese pop enthu­si­asts dis­cov­ered ear­ly as a way of shar­ing their music,  has become a ver­i­ta­ble “record store in the dig­i­tal space, affect­ing how peo­ple define their taste in the mod­ern era, mass-pro­duc­ing the feel­ing of find­ing these obscure gems on your own in a way that feels nat­ur­al, doing it so well with the pup­pet strings that you don’t even see them.” “Plas­tic Love,” as Vice’s Ryan Basil puts it, “is a rare tune that doesn’t exact­ly need words to expert­ly describe a spe­cif­ic, defined feel­ing – one of lust, heart­break, love, fear, adven­ture, loss, all caught up in the swirling midst of a night out on the town.” Count­less music fans here in the 21st cen­tu­ry — liv­ing in Takeuchi’s home­land Japan, else­where in Asia as I do, in the West, or any­where besides — can now make the sur­pris­ing dec­la­ra­tion he does: “It is, at the moment, my favorite pop song in the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Loads of “City Pop,” the Elec­tron­ic-Dis­co-Funk Music That Pro­vid­ed the Sound­track for Japan Dur­ing the Roar­ing 1980s

Every­thing is a Remix: The Full Series, Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty, Released in One Pol­ished HD Video on Its 5th Anniver­sary

Rita Hay­worth, 1940s Hol­ly­wood Icon, Dances Dis­co to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

Japan­ese Musi­cians Turn Obso­lete Machines Into Musi­cal Instru­ments: Cath­ode Ray Tube TVs, Over­head Pro­jec­tors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Among a num­ber of influ­en­tial women in elec­tron­ic music whom we’ve pro­filed here before, French avant-garde com­pos­er Eliane Radigue stands out for her sin­gle-mind­ed ded­i­ca­tion to “a cer­tain music that I wished to make,” as she says in the video por­trait above, “this par­tic­u­lar music and no oth­er.” Her com­po­si­tions are haunt­ing and med­i­ta­tive, “pre­fig­ur­ing the con­cept of ‘deep lis­ten­ing,’ expressed by Pauline Oliv­eros some years lat­er,” as Red Bull Acad­e­my notes in an exten­sive pro­file of Radigue.

Using feed­back, tape loops, field record­ings, and, begin­ning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, Radigue “devel­oped sound­scapes… an inter­weav­ing of elec­tron­ic drones, sub­se­quent­ly assim­i­lat­ed to what would lat­er be called drone music.” But she has reject­ed the term as too sta­t­ic, stress­ing the vari­a­tions and con­stant change in her music:

In Radigue’s work, sounds inter­act with each oth­er like the cells of an organ­ism, pro­gress­ing in glis­san­do in an extreme­ly slow and sub­tle way. “I had found my own vocab­u­lary. For me, main­tain­ing the sound did not inter­est me as such; it was pri­mar­i­ly a means to bring out the over­tones, har­mon­ics and sub­har­mon­ics. This is what made it pos­si­ble to devel­op this inner rich­ness of sound.”

Radigue seems par­tic­u­lar­ly self-assured, pos­sessed of an intu­itive sense of her work’s direc­tions from the begin­ning. “I can­not start a piece if I don’t have an idea of what it would become, but what I would call the spir­it,” she says in an inter­view with Elec­tron­ic Beats.

“The spir­it of what I want­ed to do should be there… And I keep that spir­it, that theme in mind, quite often sev­er­al months before I start to do some­thing. So, when I come to make the sounds it’s already there.”

But her career took many turns on a path through the com­po­si­tion­al cen­ters of mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music. After study­ing tra­di­tion­al music the­o­ry as a child, she left her home in Nice at 19 and mar­ried the artist Arman. She was swept into an “excit­ing bohemi­an life” that would soon take her, in 1955, into the orbit of musique con­crete pio­neers Pierre Scha­ef­fer and Pierre Hen­ry.

While work­ing as an intern for the com­posers (“If I claimed to be more, I don’t think they would have accept­ed me, because they were both the damn­d­est machos!”), Radigue learned their meth­ods and col­lab­o­rat­ed on their com­po­si­tions. In 1967, she worked with Hen­ry on L’Apocalypse de Jean, a piece designed to last for 24 hours. She end­ed her (unpaid) appren­tice­ship that year and began focus­ing on her own work, like Vice Ver­sa (1970, excerpt­ed fur­ther up) and Geerl­rian­dre (1972, above) and Trip­tych (1978, below).

You can hear more of Radigue’s work at Ubuweb, includ­ing a more recent syn­the­siz­er piece record­ed in 1992, as well as a 1980 inter­view for pro­gram The Morn­ing Con­cert with Charles Amirkhan­ian. That same year, she became a con­vert to Tibetan Bud­dhism, and her work—like the Adnos series, below—was inspired by the religion’s his­to­ry, her own med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and texts like the Bar­do Thodol.

As the puls­ing, dron­ing, hum­ming com­po­si­tions she cre­at­ed through­out the late 20th cen­tu­ry have become inte­gral to the sound of the 21st, Radique has moved on, since 2001, to writ­ing work for acoustic instru­ments. She made her last elec­tron­ic piece, I’lle-Re-sonante, in 2000. The move came in part from requests she received from musi­cians, but it also rep­re­sents a delib­er­ate turn away from mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. “There’s always some­thing miss­ing with dig­i­tal,” she says, even if it is some­how clean­er and clear­er.”

Radigue has always favored the absorp­tion of ana­logue sound, intent on tam­ing its unpre­dictabil­i­ty as a med­i­ta­tor tames the dart­ing, leap­ing, busy mind. “My music is always chang­ing,” she says, “It comes from the first access I had to elec­tron­ic sounds which was the wild sounds com­ing from feed­back,” the noise of a micro­phone and a speak­er get­ting too close to each oth­er. “If you find the right place, which is very nar­row, then you can move it very slow­ly and it changes but that requires a lot of patience.”

The word could define her entire approach, one rad­i­cal­ly opposed to instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and quick fix­es, focused sin­gu­lar­ly on out­comes while also ful­ly present for the process.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness