Enowatch pt.48271 – I’ve been fair obsessed with all things Eno of late, not least because the recent Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes AV piece, ‘Nothing Can Ever Be The Same’, premiered at the Venice Biennale last week. This 168 hour installation takes Eno’s video and music archive and uses it as material to feed the generative engines they’ve built whilst also serving as a kind of trailer for Hustwit’s ‘Eno’ film due next year. See examples of it below.
There’s also the recent announcement of the Obscure label boxset that sees all ten albums on the label from the mid to late 70s run via Island records re-issued with an 80 page book, I’ll be writing more about this once I’ve devoured it.
Meanwhile I’m still trying to listen to everything on Eno’s Sonos radio station The Lighthouse, now with 424 unreleased tracks from between 1989 and 2023 streaming randomly 24 hrs a day but that algorithm just isn’t playing certain tracks. Of course Brian also plays London tonight with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic to perform his Ships show that’s been doing the rounds in Europe.
I decided to consult Holly’s 1994 autobiography, ‘A Bone In My Flute’, as his recall of the early Liverpool years is extremely detailed, hoping I’d find a reference to the name or address on the letter. Eventually my patience was rewarded on page 132 with first, the writer’s name, and simultaneously the origin of the band’s moniker. 
Tony Morley was the guest this week – who had then just launched his Leaf label – still going strong all these years later and releasing great music too. We met through Chantal aka Mira Calix (RIP) who interned at 4AD where he was working at the time and DJ’d with him at Robin ‘Scanner’ Rimbaud’s Electronic Lounge at the ICA. We invited Tony to play at both Telepathic Fish and onto Solid Steel and later he and I would go on a possible midlife crisis pilgrimage to Dusseldorf together to see the old men of techno perform their Man Machine and Computer World albums but that’s another story. This mix is a weird one, the selection is all over the place and the mixing too, maybe I was too busy chatting and not concentrating much, consider this all about the selection rather than any mix skills.
A slightly Beatles-themed start to this short set from late 2002 gives it its name – kicking off with two then-current mash ups, the mysterious white label 7”, ‘Bad Production’ and Avril Plays The Beatles. The former pairs ‘Come Together’ with Mary J Blige’s ‘Family Affair’ and the latter glitches up ‘Because’ and adds beats – two of the better examples around at the time when the internet was awash with such things. Incidentally I was just watching a video about AI mash ups and I think we may be on the cusp of the next iteration of the mash up although this time round they’ll be ‘original/unreleased’ tracks by artists no longer with us in every style conceivable. The Future Sound of London turn in a suitably Beatles-esque remix of Robert Miles, sounding more like their Amorphous Androgynous alias which isn’t surprising seeing as they had reactivated it in full psychedelic mode earlier in the year.
