Aves y trompetas

For many years I was the only person I knew who thought that was a beautiful piece of music (laughter). It's quite a long piece, it's about 17 minutes long. It's produced by a very, very simple process. It's a loop of a preacher saying "It's gonna rain". Identical copies of the loop are being played on two machines at once. Because of the inconsistency of the speed of the machines they gradually slip out of sync with one another. They start to sound like an echo. Then they sound like a cannon, and gradually they start to sound like all sorts of things.

The piece is very, very interesting because it's tremendously simple. It's a piece of music that anybody could of made. But the results, sonically, are very complex. What happens when you listen to that piece is that your listening brain becomes habituated in the same way that your eye does if you stare at something for a very long time. If you stare at something for a very long time your eye very quickly cancels the common information, stops seeing it, and only notices the differences. This is what happens with that piece of music.

Quite soon you start hearing very exotic details of the recording itself. For instance you are aware after several minutes that there are thousands of trumpets in there - this is without drugs. With drugs there would probably be millions (laughter). You also become aware that there are birds, there really are birds -- in the original loop of tape there are some pigeons or something and they become very prominent as the thing goes on. Most of all, if you know how the piece is made, what you become aware of is that you are getting a huge amount of material and experience from a very, very simple starting point.

Brian Eno, para In Motion Magazine