8Sided Blog

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The Music We Dislike: Calculated or Cultural?

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From an insightful piece by Philip Cosores in Uproxx:

From track lengths to chord progressions to song structures, the amount of math involved in what sounds good to the ears is the least sexy aspect of music, right up there with the language of recording contracts and the cleanliness of tour buses. But it wasn’t until the rise of services like Spotify and Apple Music that the mathematics of music felt so dangerous. Namely, the math involved in streaming. […]

It’s been music critics who have been beating the drum about the dangers of streaming algorithms lately … but most of the time the criticism is less about well-researched investigations and more about gut feeling call outs, directed at music that is often simultaneously commercially successful and critically derided. Over the course of the last year, you’d be hardpressed to find a negative album review that didn’t at some point evoke the idea of The Algorithm being to blame for the music’s perceived lack of quality — it has become this specter hovering above popular music, ready to sink its talons into anything that finds commercial success. […]

Of course, the music world has changed because of streaming, and many artists and labels will always look to trends when creating their own strategies and aesthetics. But blaming streaming for the music that you don’t like feels increasingly closed off from reality, where streaming is, in fact, influencing most of the music that is being consumed, regardless of quality. This is no better or worse than it has ever been, it’s just a recent mode of consumption that musicians are learning how to work with.

It’s impossible to argue that in the history of commercial music — even before recording technology — there was a time when the means of delivery wasn’t an influence on songcraft. Whether it’s writing an opera with intentionally dramatic moments to enthrall a packed theater, to keeping the perfect pop song under three-and-a-half minutes for the best fidelity on a 7” single, to Brian Eno realizing his “Thursday Afternoon” around the amount of time available on a compact disc — format has always held sway on the music.

Of course, there are artists creating music specifically to exploit Spotify as a platform — the ‘poop song’ guy immediately comes to mind — but I agree with the thesis of this piece. It’s easy to accuse music we don’t like of solely catering to ‘the algorithm’ just as we once derided songs made specifically for pop radio or albums in the ‘70s that seemed so serendipitous they were obviously capitalizing on a trend.

The favored target of the music critic is ever-changing (and I love music criticism and feel it’s necessary, so don’t take this as a slam). The identity of that target is a gauge of where music stands and the ways we, as music fans, feel uncertain in its progress. Emerging trends create a widening feedback loop, making it increasingly difficult for the critic to separate the calculated from the cultural. Yesterday’s disparaged made-for-MTV band is today’s algorithm-friendly artist. And, soon enough, probably tomorrow’s A.I. assisted songwriter.

🔗→ Stop Blaming Streaming Services For The Music You Don’t Like

You Don’t Have To Read ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ To Name Your Song

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Previously I mentioned that Brian Eno and David Byrne named their seminal album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts without reading the book of the same title. The latest issue of Philip Christman’s The Tourist newsletter talks about other song titles taken from unread books:

Joy Division recorded the song “Atrocity Exhibition,” which in mood and feel is a pretty exact match to the almost unendurably grim J.G. Ballard novella of the same name. JD and Ballard are often mentioned together, as having a similar sensibility. But Ian Curtis wrote the song without having yet read the book–all he needed was the title. It’s as though he knew the book without knowing it. The inspiration for Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” was her catching the last few minutes of a 1967 TV adaptation of the novel as a child; though she did eventually get around to reading the book, you get the sense that her doing so was almost an afterthought. The song is about those last couple minutes, that demanding ghost at the window, as seen by a nine-year-old musical genius. {…}

{A way to think about it} is that our half-formed conceptions and the things that inspire them are both actualities–the song Ian Curtis started hearing in his head when he learned that there existed a novel called The Atrocity Exhibition and the actual novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, are both real things, and they need to be kept in some sort of ecological balance in order for both to fully exist. The song isn’t ready to confront the novel until it’s had some time to grow.

I remember, in my teenage punk band, naming songs after artsy books and movies I hadn’t read or watched. My motivation was to appear smarter and more rounded than I was but, I assume, it’s the same end result as Christman notes above. ‘Art’ is shaped by the ghosts and impressions of its inspirations, despite whether those inspirations are fully ingested or understood.

🔗→ The Tourist–Volume 65

A.I., Writer’s Block

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A terrific article on Medium by Stuart Dredge occupied my thoughts this morning. The title is provocative, but does accurately convey the piece’s thesis — Music Created by Artificial Intelligence Is Better Than You Think:

Human-created music already spans everything from the sublime to the unlistenable. While an A.I. may not be able to out-Adele Adele (or Aretha Franklin, or Joni Mitchell) with a timeless song and performance, it can compose a compelling melody for a YouTube video, mobile game, or elevator journey faster, cheaper, and almost as well as a human equivalent. In these scenarios, it’s often the “faster” and “cheaper” parts that matter most to whoever’s paying.

These ideas mirror what I was saying the other day. A.I. generated music will create significant problems for the library music circuit. But these ‘fast and cheap’ productions will fuel more soulful, distinctive music from those of us who are up to the challenge. I believe the environment will also create increased demand for highly personal music and songs with relatable stories behind them.

And I admit I’m excited about the idea of generative music in public and private spaces. There are many possibilities for this aspect, and my mind boggles. Yep, it’s Brian Eno’s world, and we’re just living in it.

However, there is one part of the article that I have questions about:

Amadeus Code claims to “enhance your songwriting with artificial intelligence” and is squarely aimed at people who are already writing and recording music. Its pitch: “Get unstuck with your songwriting with the power of artificial intelligence and say goodbye to writer’s block for good.”

I don’t have a problem with A.I. as a collaborator. That’s not far off from other creative games we already use, from Oblique Strategies to sample packs to unauthorized remixing. But I am wary of touting A.I. as a cure for ‘writer’s block’ rather than a tool a creator uses with intention.

I fall into the ‘there’s no such thing as writer’s block’ camp. I see it as a crutch, as the lizard brain screaming, as The Resistance. The cure, if we need one, is showing up and doing creative work with consistency and purpose. Selling A.I. as a remedy to ‘writer’s block’ gives more power to the concept. What are we replacing The Resistance with if we turn to A.I. whenever we’re not ‘feeling creative?’ Will there be a danger of letting A.I. tell us too much — giving us the chords, the melodies, the lyrics — whenever we don’t feel like showing up?

I’ll point to Izotope’s Ozone as an example. This software is a mastering suite that analyzes audio and, using an A.I. engine, creates settings for a mastered output. Ozone is an incredible tool. I bought it. I use it. And the company repeatedly emphasizes that what Ozone comes up with is meant to only be a suggestion, a starting place for your tailored tweaks. But I fear the majority of the software’s users probably default to the suggested settings. For some it provides a tempting fallback, an excuse to take it easy and not push oneself.

And that’s my issue. That feeling of ‘writer’s block’ is there for us to push through — to provide a challenge — and many times the result is our best work. I don’t doubt that collaborating with A.I. tools can result in great work. But, if we turn to the technology every time we feel blocked or in a creative rut, then I think we deny a very human aspect of the process. C’mon — we don’t need an easy cure for writer’s block.

🔗→ Music Created by Artificial Intelligence Is Better Than You Think

The Politics of Nostalgia

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I’ve written previously about the phenomenon of music made to sound like it’s playing in a mall and the evocation of fake nostalgia. A recent piece in MEL Magazine examines this oddball subgenre and attempts to make sense of it all:

… Tills’ life at the mall is imaginary. He’s nostalgic for the 1990s, which he thinks was a better time to live. At the core of this mental construction is “mallwave,” a lo-fi subgenre of vaporwave that listeners refer to as “music optimized for abandoned malls.” Like Vaporwave creators, Mallwave musicians use soft drum tracks, ambient sounds and low-quality synthesizers to create soft, calming electronic music. But they also mix in pop music associated with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the purpose of creating a holistic “nostalgic” experience, one that recreates the experience you would have had when visiting the mall. Or, in Tills’ case, what that experience might have been like, for people who lived it. […]

To Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the turn to nostalgia in vaporwave is all about this reflection of contemporary societal trends — whether it’s grappling with late capitalism or dreaming of an allegedly sunnier bygone era. Speaking over Skype, he tells me, “Nostalgia is a popular tool in marketing, and it’s probably the most defining cultural product of our time. You see it in movies and TV with reboot trends, and of course, apps like Spotify use algorithms that recommend music that you’ve probably listened to in the past.”

Simon Chandler, writing for Bandcamp Daily, dares to dig even deeper:

… society for decades has been pursuing consumerism and neoliberal capitalism when it’s often accepted that neither are perfect, and the way some of us have coped with this is through adopting a position or attitude of irony (cf. David Foster Wallace). We’ve mocked politicians on both sides while continuing to elect them and we’ve ridiculed McDonald’s while continuing to buy Big Macs, and vaporwave has masterfully symbolized this social phenomena by subverting clichéd samples while relying on them to a massive extent. […]

Nonetheless, it can be argued in vaporwave’s defense that, like much uncompromising music and art, the genre’s ‘mission’ appears to be focused more on mirroring our imperfect world than on reforming it. It may not offer any solutions, but it almost perfectly depicts a political domain in which media-generated images have alienated us from reality, and in which a minority of us have drifted into self-conscious irony as a way of coping with an imperfect environment (we think) we can’t change.

There’s an interview with Brian Eno (that I can’t find) where he says that he often makes music as a soundtrack to his hopes for a better world. This is like the opposite of that.

🔗→ The Teens Who Listen to ‘Mallwave’ Are Nostalgic for an Experience They’ve Never Had
🔗→ Music of the Spectacle: Alienation, Irony and the Politics of Vaporwave

America Is Waiting

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Brian Eno & David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is often credited as one of the first ‘sample-driven’ albums. It can be argued whether or not its cut-and-paste tape embellishments are ‘samples’ in the Art of Noise “Who’s Afraid Of?” or The Bomb Squad sense, but the influence is undeniable. The album did alert many already art-inclined musicians to the possibilities found in adding sounds and dialogue to productions. Rather than sampling, we could say it popularized collaging.

I was on a high school trip to Disney World, probably around 1986, and we ended up in Panama City for an overnight rest stop (we were coming from Louisiana). I was hungry for ‘alternative’ records, as they were scarce in small town I lived in. So, in our short stay in Panama City I sought out and somehow found an underground record shop. I was tempted by the many albums I’d never heard of — they all looked like something I should listen to — but I only had money to buy one. I did what you did in those days: I asked the record clerk for his recommendation.

He asked me what I was into and where my taste currently resided. I’m not sure what I said, but I was mining early Cabaret Voltaire at the time (Red Mecca was an obsession) so that may have influenced his decision. He pulled out a vinyl copy of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and asked, “Have you heard this?” I hadn’t, so he insisted I spend my cash on this unassuming-looking album. Once I returned home and put the album on the turntable I was transfixed. It was weird, completely different than anything else, and organic and sloppy while other sample-based/electronic albums at the time were technical and precise. I wish I could thank that guy at the record store.

I bring up My Life in the Bush of Ghosts today because of this sad news story reported in Soundblab:

Less than two weeks ago from this writing (December 2, 2018), the body of longtime progressive radio host Ray Taliaferro was discovered in the woods near Paducah, Kentucky. Taliaferro was a pioneering black broadcaster and community leader in San Francisco starting in the late ‘60s. Sadly, he suffered from dementia in his later years and mysteriously went missing several weeks before his body was found.

It’s hard not to think about Taliaferro wandering disoriented and alone when he was a lamp to so many in life. For posterity though, his voice was captured in a much more vibrant moment as the first that is heard on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s collaboration, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts.

If you know the album you immediately know the voice: “America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.” It’s so matter-of-fact, but ominous, almost authorative, denoting a conspiratorial paranoia that we recognize all-too-well in 2018. I knew nothing about Ray Taliaferro — I didn’t even know he was behind the song’s vocal until today — but he seems to have been a well-respected broadcasting forerunner. I wonder what he thought about his voice on “America Is Waiting,” portraying him with nervousness and an almost methodical mania.

This brings up some of the problems expressed about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There’s a matter of cultural appropriation and context-shifting that could be extended to Ray Taliaferro.

At the time, fellow world-tapping producer Adrian Sherwood seemed to sneer at this and Eno’s intent of creating a “vision of a psychedelic Africa” when he titled an African Head Charge album My Life in a Hole in the Ground, not soon after the Eno/Byrne release. Sherwood also later appropriated the Eno quote for another album title.

Writing for Getintothis, Jono Podmore is heavily critical of Eno and Byrne’s ethics with regards to the project but eventually celebrates the tension:

The musicians were by and large white but the style is rooted in African American forms of funk, replete with thumb slapping bass and the sound world of George Clinton. There’s no rock drum sounds, no wailing guitar solos. And then there are the “found voices”. Of the 10 tracks on the original release, there are 9 vocals and 6 of them are American, and at least half of them are clearly African American voices. None are African. There’s a sense of selling American culture back to itself as exotica. A slight change of context, a touch of “African psychedelic vision” and the picture we get is a Pynchonesque world, a filmic unreality directed by Wim Wenders featuring Harry Dean Stanton as a sweaty southern preacher …

Cultural appropriation is a tricky subject. No one disagrees that the originators should get their due. And context-shifting is fine and dandy until it happens to you. But the mash-up of different cultures is how new movements and genres are made — Hank Shocklee has even stated the influence of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts on The Bomb Squad and his innovative production for Public Enemy. And these combinations also release a bubble, inspiring fans to track down the influences. Paul Simon got a bit of flack for Graceland, but the album did turn a lot of people (including me) onto Soweto street music.

Even Jono Podmore admits, “The first African book I ever read was My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – because the album had introduced the title to me.” The line is even blurrier once we learn that Eno and Byrne never read the book themselves — they just liked, and appropriated, the title.

Disco’s Shadow

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Musical collisions can create the most exciting and innovative sounds. I’m fascinated by that gray space on the Venn diagram between two disparate genres, instruments, or creative objectives. Jon Hassell combined elements of ancient world music with electronics and spawned a blurred terrain he termed ‘fourth world music.’ And I’ve written previously about the fun things that happened when classic rockers ran head-first into the new wave.

But the often-reluctant introduction of disco to other styles is curious and complicated. Disco is a combination of genres in itself, and the results can be extraordinary – queue Brian Eno’s “I have heard the sound of the future” pronouncement upon encountering “I Feel Love.” But love it or hate it, we must accept that we are living in disco’s shadow, with every genre touched not just by its beat and groove, but also by disco’s radical production techniques and rearrangement of format (singles, remixes, extended versions, etc.).

There was a period of collision when disco was forced upon, rather than accepted, by mainstream artists of the non-disco persuasion. Alexis Petridis writes about this phenomenon for The Guardian:

Critical opprobrium, a collapse both of sales and artistic credibility, fans who paid good money to see you baying for your blood: you couldn’t wish for a more vivid illustration of the risks awaiting the late-70s rock artist who chose to go disco at disco’s height. It was a hell of a gamble. There was always the chance of some short-term commercial gain, but the odds were stacked against you: the back catalogues of umpteen 70s artists are flecked with ignored attempts to cash in on the success of Saturday Night Fever, remembered largely by fans as catastrophic career aberrations. Even if you did get a hit out of it, your success would almost invariably be accompanied by mockery or even anger.

It’s easy to identify the artists that embraced the opportunity for experimentation versus those unwittingly dragged by their feet into the studio session. There are plenty of aberrations, but then there’s also “Heart Of Glass,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” and “Miss You.” Talking Heads would’ve been a different band without the combination of disco and their artsy ethos, and I’d argue new wave and post-punk may not have taken off without the ’70s nightclub’s groovy influence. We wouldn’t have this surprising moment from Crass either:

It’s a bit old-fashioned to mock disco — I think the consensus, finally, is that it was a significant cultural movement, not just musically but socially as well. A lot of the resistance to disco had a sinister backbone that had nothing to do with the music, as evidenced by the infamous Disco Demolition’s quick transformation into a riotous hatefest.

I remember a moment watching Late Night With David Letterman as a kid in the early-80s. Paul Shaffer would regularly have a guest fill in with the band who would often be a studio musician of some renown, though unknown to the general public. There was a drummer with the group that night and, I can’t recall who it was (though I can guess), but Shaffer introduced him as “the man who ruined music.” When Letterman asked what that meant, Shaffer explained that this drummer “invented the disco beat.” The drummer then demonstrated by playing a simple four-on-the-floor rhythm with a slight shuffle as Letterman and the audience jeered. I remember being confused by this — ruined music? I know they were joking, or maybe half-joking, but in retrospect, it seems that Shaffer — the guy who co-wrote “It’s Raining Men” — really should’ve known better.

P.S. – I do realize the photo of Klaus Schulze at the top doesn’t have a lot to do with disco, but, man, it’s such a great image.

Musical Memories from Imaginary Places

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I came across this wonderful article in The New Yorker about a YouTube-posted version of Toto’s “Africa” made to sound like it’s playing in a shopping mall:

In my 3 a.m. mood, the YouTube edit, uploaded by a user named Cecil Robert, was almost too affecting to bear; it sounded like longing and consolation together, extended into emptiness, a shot of warmth coming out of a void.

Oddly, listening to Toto’s “Africa” in a mall seems to trigger some fundamental human emotion … hearing a song you love when it’s playing from elsewhere is a reassuring, isolating experience: you feel solitary and cared for at the same time.

Recall that Brian Eno conceived of what he termed ‘ambient music’ after being forced to listen to a harp recording at low volume, accompanied by the natural sound of rain outside his window. Eno probably never heard a harp mixed with outdoor rainfall before, so there wasn’t a past emotional reference that affected him. It was the context of where the music existed in his mind, inspired by factors like environment, volume, reverb (natural or otherwise), and sonic quality (the frequencies that were accented or muffled). Just the same, I’m not sure if the author of the New Yorker article experienced “Africa” at a shopping mall in her childhood. But the combination of imagined context (a shopping mall, where she spent time in her youth) and a beloved song from the era triggered an emotion from a memory that probably never happened.

The YouTube clip shows a photo of a shopping mall interior, located in Everytown, USA, and the parenthetical subtitle “playing in an empty shopping centre.” This description in itself is odd, as the poster’s US origin makes me expect “center.” Perhaps he’s fittingly an anglophilic victim of the ‘80s British Invasion? But I digress – my point is that the recording would not have the same effect without the photo of the mall or the subtitle planting the seed in our heads. Instead, the picture could be of an aircraft hanger, subtitled “playing in an empty aircraft hanger.” Would retired airplane mechanics suddenly get all swoony?

Probably not. The shopping mall is powerful for contextualizing as we’ve all heard music blaring through similar retail compounds. It’s doubtful an airplane mechanic regularly heard music blasting through a hanger. The potency is in connecting two parts of the brain that agree on a possible spatial and temporal environment for a song. This song sounds different — that’s because we’ve been told it’s playing in a shopping mall. Our experience allows an understanding of this context, and now we’re feeling twice as nostalgic.

This experiment is insightful. I’ve always felt that, as a music producer, creating make-believe settings for songs can accentuate the song’s ability to connect with listeners. By constructing a world that the song takes place in – whether a particular room, or a landscape, and/or a different time – and allowing this to influence production decisions like reverb, stereo placement, equalization, and extraneous sounds, the song has the potential to open the listener’s imagination. However, there’s no reason to state that you’ve set the song in a shopping mall or any other imagined territory. By following through on intention and delivering context, the song becomes more of a living thing and cinematic, with the listener encouraged to create his or her story.

This idea isn’t original. There are a number of songs and albums inspired by fictional places. But, if you haven’t considered this creative game, then I recommend it. And I’m asking you to fabricate the whole story, look, and feel of the place. Is it rocky or is it soft? Is it high up or underground? Are you there alone or are people, plants, or animals with you? Does this place have a name?

Early in my recording career, I met producer Howie B., and he gave me this advice: “Invent a mental movie scene and record the soundtrack.” Howie meant this in terms of an imaginary film dictating the builds and turns of a song, but the movie’s setting would naturally influence the sonic characteristics. Even without action, a scene set in outer space gets scored differently than one occurring on the Amalfi Coast. And, to emphasize this point, no one has to know the location or plot of your mind-movie. Keep it your secret – that will encourage you to stretch, go to places that you might be embarrassed to reveal, places from your memory, or even appropriated scenes from movies that exist in the real world.

I’m simply proposing a creative exercise to give your muse some extra juice. Unless you’re making music that Eno would define as ‘ambient’ — that is, background music meant to be listened to alongside its environment – you shouldn’t use a fantastic imaginary setting to compensate for a half-written song. And subtlety is key. Overdoing your ‘sailing through the Grand Canyon’ tune with heaps of reverb and bird noises will probably be more distracting than affecting. But contextualizing music, as an occasional practice, might guide the producer toward fascinating discovery and, like Toto in a shopping mall, give the listener an unexpected jolt of emotion and haunting familiarity.

Hitting the Links: Grace Jones, Italian Futurists, and the Radical Politics of Love

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For your weekend, I present five intriguing missives from across the digital cosmos:

Stevie Wonder and the Radical Politics of Love

Here are three songs, from three albums recorded in three consecutive years, all from the Nixon era. Each year, the lyrics get more pointed, more obvious in their contempt. But it’s a contempt mingled with understanding, and grounded in a deep, deep love for the people most affected by political failure.



Brian Eno’s Latest Isn’t An Album – It’s A Process

The price point corroborates that, asking for the worth not of an album but of a piece of software. But even then, it poses challenges. We expect a certain amount of utility for our buck; I own one other app that costs $40, for example, and it is a cloud-based productivity suite, which is about as utilitarian as it gets. You don’t do anything with Reflection, and it doesn’t do anything for you. What sort of software is that?



Partying With Grace Jones

On May 19, 1978, Jamaican-born model and singer Grace Jones turned 30. On June 7, she released her second studio album, Fame. Five days later, she celebrated with a combination birthday/album release extravaganza at LaFarfelle Disco in New York. The fun and debauchery were captured on film by notorious paparazzo Ron Galella, who was famous in his own way for relentlessly pursuing celebrities and getting his teeth knocked out by Marlon Brando.



20 Dynamic Paintings From The Italian Futurists

Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism when he published his Futurist Manifesto in Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20th February 1909. Futurism was a key artistic and social development in 20th Century art history, originating and most active within Italy, but also a movement whose ideas spread to Russia, England and beyond.



Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction — and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction — between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

2017: ‘The Start of Something Big’

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Brian Eno:

This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve taken for granted – some semblance of truth in reporting, for example – can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education, not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens. And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely charismatic ones.



Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we’re starting to.



There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.

Eno Achieves the Endless

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Brian Eno:

“Recordings – whether vinyl, cassette or CD – are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. ‘Reflection’ in its album form – on vinyl or CD – is like this. But the app by which ‘Reflection’ is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music”.



Complete Music Update:

Brian Eno has revealed that his new album, ‘Reflection’, will see him achieve a long held goal to create an ambient record that does not end.



As well as releases in time-limited standard formats, the album will be available through apps for iOS and Apple TV on which the music on the record will play endlessly until the sun explodes and destroys all evidence of the human race having ever existed. Either that or until you get bored and turn it off. Whichever comes first.



Reflection is released on January 1. In the meantime, this video from Pitchfork spotlights a previously time-constrained Eno: