By this river - Brian Eno

31Jan08

On the recommendation of a friend, I listened to this song, ‘By this river’ by Brian Eno. I found it just too beautiful to be expressed in words.

Here’s the lyrics:

Here we are stuck by this river
You and I underneath a sky
Thats ever falling down down down
Ever falling down

Through the day as if on an ocean
Waiting here always failing to remember
Why we came came came
I wonder why we came

You talk to me as if from a distance
And I reply with impressions chosen
From another time time time
From another time.

And here’s the song…

Brian is the person behind the Windows startup sound which began with the Windows 95 edition. In 1994 he was approached by Microsoft which resulted in the six-second start-up sound for the Windows 95 operating system, commonly called The Microsoft Sound.

Later Eno in an interview said,

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.” The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3¼ seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

The 31/4 seconds trivia was asked in one of our college quizzes. Sadly, I hadn’t answered it then.

Filed under: Experiences, Friends, General, Music, Quotes, Trivia, Videos   |  
Tags: 3.14, Brian Eno, By this river, Guitar melody, Lyrics, Microsoft, Slow music, Soothing, Start up music, Windows 95