Eno's On Land & Biosphere's Substrata - the figure in the landscape

Brian Eno's 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land stands as a landmark piece of ambient music, probably the most accomplished of the four works comprising Eno's ambient series. An equally-accomplished ambient work came out fifteen years later: Substrata by Geir Jenssen under his Biosphere moniker. What's interesting in considering these two albums side-by-side is that while both espouse a relationship with some notion of landscape or environment, they each do so in very different ways despite their shared genre labelling, leading to different effects on listening. One revealing approach to these different relationships is via the albums' respective portrayals of human interaction with its environment. How is the figure of 'the human' represented in each album's landscapes? How is the interaction between person & environment understood in each? And how does this shape our listening experience?

Eno is the more explicit of the two artists in his intentions regarding landscape and person. In his own words, he sets out to “transpose into music something that you can do in painting: create a figurative environment”. Indeed, everything from the track titles ('Lizard Point', 'Lantern Marsh', 'Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960') to the album cover itself (a detail of an apparently invented map) adds to this intention. Eno has made clear the place of the person within these musical landscapes:

“An aspect of this landscape concern is to do with the removal of personality from the picture. You know how different a landscape painting is when there is a figure in it. Even if the figure is small, it automatically becomes the focus – all questions of scale and depth are related to it. When I stopped writing songs, I took the figure out of the landscape.”

The evocation of landscapes 'empty of people' is achieved in a number of ways. Take the track 'Lizard Point'. The immediate sounds lack the kind of elements associated with a typical human performance of music. For one thing there are no obvious human-played musical instruments. The sounds we do hear are based on field recordings: we hear blowing, rustling, scraping, wooshes, the sound of things being dragged along a surface. Even those sounds that do indicate a musical key are difficult to identify as 'instruments'. Many of these sounds, furthermore, seem to extend beyond our perceptual limits; there are sounds just on the periphery of the mix such that we can't quite make them out. What we have, then, is a rejection both of typical human personality in performance and of the restrictions of human perception, of sounds being conventionally presented to us as 'easy to pick up'. Not only do these sounds contribute to the representation of a landscape – the low-pitched gravelly sounds 'grounding' the piece, as Paul Roquet puts it, the different timbres being manipulated by panning and reverb to give the illusion of space, the arbitrary track lengths and lack of musical development implying a temporal & spatial stasis – they also embody an anti-anthropocentrism, a removal of the figure from the landscape.

As well as this removal, there is to a lesser extent a move away from the framework of satisfying the expectations of listeners. The lack of musical development, the peripheral nature of many of the sounds, the lack of a clear lead instrument & accompaniment, a rejection in Eno's words of “a sharp distinction between foreground and background”, all contribute to the impression that the tracks have not been composed to suit the conventions of Western-socialised listeners. Just as physical landscapes were not made to fit our senses, so these musical landscapes are not adapted to our listening habits. As listeners we are not presented with a clear marker of what to focus our senses on; the idea, rather, is to allow, as Eno put it in On Land's liner notes, “the mood of that landscape to determine the kinds of activity that could occur”.  

Compare the landscapes of On Land with those of Substrata. In the grand scheme of musical things, these two albums often share a similar aesthetic, but within the realm of ambient music they are important differences. Substrata does not aim nearly as explicitly to create a figurative landscape within each piece; there is no attempt at an auditory equivalent of pictorial representation. Substrata carries with it the weight of electronic music's development since On Land came out, particularly in the form of ambient house and techno. In place of On Land's manipulation of found sounds to create grainy textures, we have synthesiser pads and intermittent blippy repetitive melodies. While Eno attempted to create a feeling of stasis within songs that lacked clear beginning and end, Jenssen creates well-structured rhythmic and thematic development, with riffs and melodies layering over one another throughout each piece, none of which feel particularly arbitrary in their construction. Alongside these synthesised rhythmic musical structures, however, lie very direct and explicit field recordings that evoke not a landscape as such but the experience of a landscape. The tracks of On Land are not intended to be literal experienced embodiments of landscapes; Eno indicates this when he explains his use of the term 'landscape' as involving “places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke”, as well as “expanded moments of memory”. Jenssen's use of field recordings, by contrast, in their lack of manipulation or audible editing, drags the listener into an experience of place. (It's significant in this respect that the album's opening track is simply nearly 2 minutes of a field recording; this grounds us in this experience of place from the beginning.) Rather than being immersed without guidance or signposts in the mood of an evoked environment, we are made complicit in the construction of the landscape through our human senses. We hear rainfall or the crackling of a fire, and through this we hear the up-close rendering of those sounds, both through the act of recording and through the imagined direct experience.

Further distinguishing Substrata from Eno's ambient work is the former's use of vocals. There are samples from TV shows ('Hyperborea'), sudden interruptions of the music by a voice directed at the listener ('The Things I Tell You') and even psychedelia-tinged singing ('Times When I Know You'll Be Sad'). The use of acoustic guitar on some of the tracks adds to Substrata's distinction from On Land, since the latter avoided clearly-identifiable instrumentation almost entirely. The contrast that is set up between the traditionally-musical parts of Substrata and the direct explicit field recordings shapes one's listening experience around what you might call a 'worldly-otherworldly' opposition. For the most part the field recordings and the rhythmic synths don't mix together, but follow one another. As a track like 'Poa Alpina' illustrates, a field recording will open a track before fading out as traditionally-musical elements are introduced; those elements will then themselves fade out at the end of the track as another field recording is introduced. The vocals occur almost entirely during the traditionally-musical parts of tracks; they too rarely overlap with explicit field recordings. A clear separation is consequently evoked: the musical elements do not take place within the experience of a natural environment, but occur alongside it, fighting for space within our experience of the album. The opposition is crucial here since the field recordings create a frame of reference which affects how we then listen to the structured musical parts and vice-versa. The experience of up-close field recordings and musical elements provokes the imagining of a 'real world' within which one is awake and lucid, contrasted with a dreamlike 'other world' that's divorced from a natural environment. This dreamlike quality of the musical parts is enhanced both by the artificial space of the music, with the manipulation of reverb and panning standing out from the seemingly-untouched field recordings, and by the nature of the music itself, whose sparse repetitive guitar lines and muffled chants evoke hallucinogenic psychedelia (the hints of Jenssen's ambient house background probably contribute to this aswell). If the field recordings establish bodily experience of an environment, the musical elements by contrast are experienced as something out-of-body.



This worldly-otherworldly opposition determines the place of the figure within Substrata's landscapes. Because the vocals & conventional instrumentation that does appear on the album occurs separately from the field recordings, the human in Substrata is in one sense divorced from place. But this divorce is very different from Eno's banishment of the figure within his landscapes. There are moments in Jenssen's field recordings where a human presence is implied: there's the sound of footsteps in the recordings bridging 'Antennaria' and 'Uva-Ursi', and what sounds like wood being burnt or broken apart between 'The Things I Tell You' and 'Times When I Know You'll Be Sad'. The human being in Jenssen's landscapes, it seems, cannot deliberately make herself heard in the direct experience of those landscapes; she can, however, indicate her presence through implied interactions with those landscapes. Those implied interactions force us to consider whether she is in fact present in all the field recordings we hear. The lack of vocalisation, however, negates this possibility of a collective. It is a lonely figure that seems to be struggling to survive in Substrata's harsh wintry environment (I acknowledge here the influence of the album's cover art). When vocals & instrumentation do appear they suggest that the human can only gain some dominant foothold in the hallucinatory dream-world outside of nature. Substrata also appears consciously designed to shape and guide the listener experience in a way On Land avoids. While the latter 'dumps' the listener in the musical landscapes of each track, ignoring listening convention, Jenssen's work couches the listener in a narrative structure, moving from natural environment to dreamlike state and back again. Where On Land's tracks are arbitrary in length, Substrata's are more clearly thought-out and song-like in their construction. This narrative effect is enhanced by the fact that all the tracks on Substrata mix into eachother, usually via field recordings. As listeners we feel like we're being led through the landscapes, the lonely figure implicit in the tracks acting as our silent companion.

Eno's and Jenssen's respective treatments of the human-landscape relationship throw up some really interesting insights into the listening process in environmental ambient music. The two albums prove that not only can one achieve representation in music, one can do so by a wide variety of means. Where Jenssen uses untouched field recordings of nature juxtaposed with traditionally-structured music, Eno manipulates found sounds to conjure up atmospheres. Despite the different approaches, however, both albums relative to experimental electronic music in general share a similar aesthetic. Both largely adopt long-held minor-key chords with slight dissonances alongside sonically rich, grainy timbres and textures. Both evoke a certain timelessness, one through a lack of musical development within dense structures, the other through sparse psychedelic riffs. Yet within this shared aesthetic lie very different implications for each album's potential listening experience. Key to this difference is their respective attitudes to anthropocentrism, both in their representational endeavours (the content of that representation) and in their attitude to the listener in terms of adherence to or attempted manipulation of listener convention (how music should present itself) and listeners' likely referential framework (what certain sounds, eg. the crackle of a fire, and their absence, eg. voices, signify). The intentions of the composer, the sounds themselves and the listener's experience of both all play a role here. All three rely on an acknowledgement and interpretation of the role of the figure in each representational landscape. Ultimately, then, each album cannot be successfully 'performed' (when we listen to each on our MP3 player) without this acknowledgement and interpretation. A further interesting question would be how our emotional and judgemental attitude towards each album is affected by our recognition of the role of the figure in the albums' environments. Does the removal of the figure in On Land encourage a feeling of wonderment at 'navigating uncharted territory' when listening to the album? Does the precarious existence of the figure in Substrata's experienced landscapes provoke more tension & worry? Do we enter into a survivalist attitude? Whatever the answer, the achievements of these albums in our experience of them that I've argued for should be enough to get anyone excited in environmental ambient's potential.