12. Cluster & Eno‘Ho Renomo’
My understanding is that Cluster and Eno rented a whole house next to a river for 2 to 3 weeks or something, set up everything and then just hit record and improvised. I’m pretty sure that the whole thing was inspired by the river, or a river that just keeps flowing. And so when we were trying to develop Ritual from its original seed as a short piece for Dreamachine into what it is now, the concept Dan 7Rays kept coming back to was the idea of the river and things keeping on moving.
This song embodies that. You have these hypnotic riffs that come in. I don’t know which bit Eno’s playing, I don’t know which bit the Cluster people are playing, but it doesn’t matter. There’s some piano in there, there’s an amazing bassline that comes in too, but you get this feeling that it has no beginning and no end – it just keeps going. It’s a slightly cliched thing to say, but it’s about life being about the journey, not the destination: you just keep going. It’s also just a classic: it’s such a beautiful piece. Like ‘Isa Lei’, it’s that feeling of friends playing together – of that intention of being like, ‘We’re hiring a place, carving out the time and this is all we’re going to do for a couple of weeks!’ I mean, how nice would it be to do that? I’ve only been to a couple of residencies in my life, but they felt I imagine this would have felt, but they’ve never been quite so focused. I think in situations like [Cluster and Eno’s], it’s where a lot of magic stuff happens. I think some of the Talk Talk sessions were done in similar ways, like we’re just going to play and play and play until we’ve got some magic.
I feel like that’s probably a rarer thing these days because our attention is always under attack. It’s up to us to get the phones out of the room and turn the WiFi off and really, really go there – to really get deep into the music. With this, we’re hearing music from a time before that, and I think you can hear that focus and that ‘presence’. I have a studio downstairs and when I’m deep in writing, I do shut the Wifi off, but I only like to do that for three or four hours. There was a record I did ten years ago now called Asleep Versions, where I took components of Immunity, I went off to Reykjavík, and then drove from there out to the town and the studio where Sigur Rós recorded the ( ) album. When I was there, I didn’t use the internet and I went deep using all their interesting keyboard instruments. There was a residency again in Eau Claire, Wisconsin – separate from the festival I spoke about earlier – where I was essentially just in a room and other musicians would come in and record for a bit.
The studio here [at home] feels very timeless. When you shut the door, it does kind of feel like there’s nothing else and you need that. We can’t give in to these devices! They will win; they’ve been designed too cleverly. But I think people are starting to wake up to that and it’s great.
