Brian Eno - Music For White Cube (1997)

'Music For White Cube' was a sound installation created by Brian Eno for the White Cube gallery in London, which ran from 25th April to 31st May 1997. It consisted of 4 CD players playing tracks of Eno singing one note with a background of traffic and other street sounds, which had then been slowed down and enhanced using audio software. The gallery describes itself as 'possibly the smallest exhibition space in Europe', and consists of a simple square room, painted white. During the show, white blinds covered the two windows in one wall and a suspended ceiling muffled lights that were suspended above it. Mounted on each of the four walls was a CD-player with two speakers on either side, playing random tracks.

Eno created the music by selecting random sites situated within a one-mile radius of the White Cube and recording a variety of ambient sounds around him, such as crowd-noise, the ringing bells of clock-towers, weather and rushing traffic. On top of this he also recorded himself singing a single, long note at each location. Taking the raw recordings back to his London studio, he ran them through a variety of enhancement software/hardware to produce a series of time-stretched, compressed, equalised, reverberating compositions, which he burned onto CDs (8 to 16 tracks on each). These were the discs that were fed into the Installation players and set to 'random'. Eno says "I was thinking of the sound less as music and more as sculpture, space, landscape, and of the experience as a process of immersion rather than just of listening."

I'll admit that it's debatable whether you would actually call this "music", and it's certainly one of his most challenging works, which perhaps needs to be listened to in situ to really appreciate it, but I'm sure fans of his who haven't heard it will be intrigued enough to try it at least once. This CD of extracts from the installation was released in a limited edition of 500, and I've created new artwork for it to replace the minimalist line drawing that it was housed in. 

Track listing

01 Notting Hill, Feb 20   (11:37)

02 Old Brompton Road, Feb 20   (3:03)

03 The Oval, Feb 24   (7:03)

04 Regents Park, Feb 01   (24:34)

05 Barbican Station, Feb 24   (1:39)

06 Bermondsey, Feb 24   (4:16)

07 Kentish Town, Jan 29   (2:27)

08 Lavender Hill, Feb 14   (7:00)

09 Camden Town, Feb 24   (6:20)