In the music of the new album, there are a lot of low, groaning, distorted sounds that are really remarkable. What am I hearing?
Eno: Partly because I don’t have bass and drums on there, there’s a lot of space for those kinds of sounds. Often when I’m making a piece, I’m thinking like a painter: I need more shadow here in order for this brightness to shine. One of the catastrophes of recording lately—not so much now; people got wise to it—but there was a period when people wanted every instrument to be at the front of the mix. I call those “cocaine mixes,” because they often seem to accompany the ingestion of lots of cocaine. Everything is brightened up and sharpened up and pushed to the front of the mix. Of course, that means that everything is in the same place, essentially. You start to realize after a while that in order for something to appear bright, there has to be something dark beside it. And vice versa. So just from a purely painterly point of view, those [low] sounds are counterpoint to the higher, brighter sounds that I’m using. I want to make universes that seem credible, which means that they have threat as well as joy in them.