MICHAEL BROOK W/ BRIAN ENO AND DANIEL LANOIS - HYBRID
EG Records 1985
SIDE ONE:
Hybrid
Distant Village
Mimosa
Pond Life
SIDE TWO:
Ocean Motion
Midday
Earth Floor
Vacant
(the rip is broken into two side-long tracks, as that is how i would listen to it anyway, and i'm lazy)
Michael Brook has kinda gone un-noticed for the last few decades. Best known these days for his soundtrack work for movies like Inconvenient Truth and Into the Wild, dude was at one point a deeper drifter tripper. This record, recorded in 1985 with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, is a perfect slow burner for a rainy winter afternoon. Sometimes i set side two on repeat on my record player and just drift away for hours. Michael Brook invented the Infinite Guitar, basically a pick up that acts as individual e-bows for each string. Here he throws that through a bunch of awesome 80's harmonizers and other effects, lets Eno and Lanois come up with some deeply drifted and tucked low-bit electro-afro beats, and lays it out slow and mellow. The guitar sounds like some sort of snake-flute languorously slithering atop the bed of a gradually shifting mauve and crimson sunset.
From Brook's website:
While still administering the artist-access studio Charles St. Video in his native Toronto, Michael helped Brian Eno prepare a series of environmental video-based installations, which the two subsequently installed in art museums around the world. Messrs.Brook & Eno would, on occasion, play in tandem with the video shows. In return for Michael’s technological expertise, Brian offered to help with the solo recordings that would yield Hybrid.
Sessions begun in Michael’s basement 8-track studio (The Crypt, located in Toronto’s Chinatown) migrated to 24-tracks within Daniel Lanois’ Grant Avenue facility in nearby Hamilton. Michael was well familiar with the Lanois studio, having recorded there previously with Jon Hassell, as well as for the sessions that produced Eno’s On Land. Lanois also ended up playing on Hybrid. Michael recalls the Hybrid sessions as a ‘thrilling time that involved much banging of my head against the wall,’ this being his first attempt at working in a proper studio, ‘having access to the sort of signal processing that people now have in their Palm Pilots.’ It was also the premier manifestation of what would become Michael’s sonic thumbprint: spiraling, Indian-inflected melodies articulated by his invention, the Infinite Guitar.
THIS RECORD IS STILL IN PRINT ON CD. MAYBE IF YOU LOVE IT BUY IT HERE
And you can make friends with Michael Brook here.
You can get an Infinite Guitar like device, called the Sustainer, from Fernandez Guitars. They even have a video section dedicated to it.
Or or there's also the ''original" mass-produced pickup mounted magnetic sustain device: The Sustainiac "Intense, predictable, infinite feedback sustain for guitars and other stringed instruments"........... or you could just get an E-Bow. or maybe you could try and build The Gizmo like 10cc...
WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO, DRONE ON IT.
