TUE., MAY 29, 2007
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From The Earth To The Stars: Brendan Perry and Daniel Lanois
by Robert Phoenix
Daniel Lanois does his best to summon the muses of chaos on “Two Worlds,” the opening track from the gorgeous Belladona, but it’s more like his frenzied harmonics are gleeful atoms pinging and arranging themselves into the physics of joy. Lanois has never really invoked true discord, and it’s been that way ever since he contributed to some of the most gorgeous space music ever on Brian Eno’s spectacular Apollo recordings.
Lanois’ chiming pedal steel guitar provided the weightless atmospherics to Eno’s cosmic void. He is a man who breathes resonant chords, plucks plaintive strings and leaves enough space in between notes to birth entire planets. Lanois is an alchemist who is able to transmute gravity into liberation on almost every track. Even when he's riffing on languid country and Latin sounds, such as the charming “Desert Rose,” also off of Belladona, it’s barely rooted to this plane.
Between the lush beds of synths and the overdubs of metallic strings and pedal steels, Lanois’ deeply affirmative music has a resonance that is, dare I say it, meditative. This is not the meditative sound of Gyuto monks, or Hindu bhajans, but of western man in search of his soul amidst a forbidding modern landscape. There is complexity, beauty and simplicity running throughout most of Lanois’ catalogue. It’s music for reflection, but not one that’s grounded in some other esoteric tradition. The music of Daniel Lanois is the “hu” and “aum” for the restless western psyche that can relate to the religion of beauty and the cosmology of aesthetic brilliance.
In this regard his music nicely echoes Wallace Stevens' modern meditation on perception and art in the poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This passage is the psalm of Lanois’ strings and his ability to evoke a spiritual response in the listener:
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
The tune is space and Lanois is our conductor into that airy realm which sets him apart from his contemporaries. The type of resonance inherent in his music is often breathtaking and places him in a unique realm that is often reserved for more traditional new age artists.
Back in the '80s, Will Ackerman crafted one of the finest and most influential new age labels, Windham Hill. A guitarist first and a record executive second, Ackerman made sure that a number of his guitar heroes made it to Windham Hill, including Robbie Basho and Bola Sete. Later he added Alex De Grassi and Michael Hedges. Lanois is part of that lineage in some ways, exploring the sacred textures of the guitar. Even when he channels the spirit of the Band on Shine he enlists the aid of Bono, who gives a great vocal sermon on the decidedly spiritual “Falling at Your Feet.” Does all of this make Lanois new age? No — just check the bins at whatever record store is still left — but he does carve out his own niche as an exemplar of something perhaps even more mystical: the rapture of sound and the six-stringed-poetry of a conductor to pure space.
On the other side of the universe, Dead Can Dance vocalist Brendan Perry summons different spirits from an ancient place. Unlike Lanois’ spiraling chords and ambient warmth, loosening our grip on this plane, Perry’s epic baritone on “The Voyage of Bran” from The Eye of the Hunter calls us deeper and deeper into the spirits of the Earth itself:
I live by the river
Where the old gods still dream
Of inner communion
With the open sea
With the eye of the hunter
Neither beast nor human in my philosophy
Again, this is deeply spiritual music but its source is old, Mithraic, subterranean, pagan. It’s not the sonic meditations of the modern man, it’s deeply reverberant, lusty and inspired by Pan, even when Perry gets a little jazzy on a track like “The Captive Heart.”
If Stevens’ vignette of “The Blue Guitar” is emblematic of Lanois, then it’s a passage from Stevens’ classic “Sunday Morning” that firmly resounds with Perry and his neo-pagan paeans of the heart;
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.
Paganism is anything but new age. It’s nearly as old as the Earth itself and the cycles of the seasons it worships, and yet the procurement of tinctures, herbs, salves, flower remedies and crystalline magic have become woven into the rubric of holistic living and “green” lifestyles. It could be said that environmentalism is paganism with a clean spin.
Together, Lanois and Perry propel us in different directions from the Axis Mundi, ascending and descending into space and rivers, stars and moss, firmament and fire, transcendence and desire, entry and escape, closing the loop on duality in a unified field of sound.
Lanois’ chiming pedal steel guitar provided the weightless atmospherics to Eno’s cosmic void. He is a man who breathes resonant chords, plucks plaintive strings and leaves enough space in between notes to birth entire planets. Lanois is an alchemist who is able to transmute gravity into liberation on almost every track. Even when he's riffing on languid country and Latin sounds, such as the charming “Desert Rose,” also off of Belladona, it’s barely rooted to this plane.
Between the lush beds of synths and the overdubs of metallic strings and pedal steels, Lanois’ deeply affirmative music has a resonance that is, dare I say it, meditative. This is not the meditative sound of Gyuto monks, or Hindu bhajans, but of western man in search of his soul amidst a forbidding modern landscape. There is complexity, beauty and simplicity running throughout most of Lanois’ catalogue. It’s music for reflection, but not one that’s grounded in some other esoteric tradition. The music of Daniel Lanois is the “hu” and “aum” for the restless western psyche that can relate to the religion of beauty and the cosmology of aesthetic brilliance.
In this regard his music nicely echoes Wallace Stevens' modern meditation on perception and art in the poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This passage is the psalm of Lanois’ strings and his ability to evoke a spiritual response in the listener:
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
Back in the '80s, Will Ackerman crafted one of the finest and most influential new age labels, Windham Hill. A guitarist first and a record executive second, Ackerman made sure that a number of his guitar heroes made it to Windham Hill, including Robbie Basho and Bola Sete. Later he added Alex De Grassi and Michael Hedges. Lanois is part of that lineage in some ways, exploring the sacred textures of the guitar. Even when he channels the spirit of the Band on Shine he enlists the aid of Bono, who gives a great vocal sermon on the decidedly spiritual “Falling at Your Feet.” Does all of this make Lanois new age? No — just check the bins at whatever record store is still left — but he does carve out his own niche as an exemplar of something perhaps even more mystical: the rapture of sound and the six-stringed-poetry of a conductor to pure space.
On the other side of the universe, Dead Can Dance vocalist Brendan Perry summons different spirits from an ancient place. Unlike Lanois’ spiraling chords and ambient warmth, loosening our grip on this plane, Perry’s epic baritone on “The Voyage of Bran” from The Eye of the Hunter calls us deeper and deeper into the spirits of the Earth itself:
I live by the river
Where the old gods still dream
Of inner communion
With the open sea
With the eye of the hunter
Neither beast nor human in my philosophy
Again, this is deeply spiritual music but its source is old, Mithraic, subterranean, pagan. It’s not the sonic meditations of the modern man, it’s deeply reverberant, lusty and inspired by Pan, even when Perry gets a little jazzy on a track like “The Captive Heart.”
If Stevens’ vignette of “The Blue Guitar” is emblematic of Lanois, then it’s a passage from Stevens’ classic “Sunday Morning” that firmly resounds with Perry and his neo-pagan paeans of the heart;
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.
Paganism is anything but new age. It’s nearly as old as the Earth itself and the cycles of the seasons it worships, and yet the procurement of tinctures, herbs, salves, flower remedies and crystalline magic have become woven into the rubric of holistic living and “green” lifestyles. It could be said that environmentalism is paganism with a clean spin.
Together, Lanois and Perry propel us in different directions from the Axis Mundi, ascending and descending into space and rivers, stars and moss, firmament and fire, transcendence and desire, entry and escape, closing the loop on duality in a unified field of sound.
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