Brian Eno and the words of Rick Holland: Drums Between the Bells

"Mr. Eno enthusiastically discussed evolution ... Jorge Luis Borges ... And, not least, he explained his thinking behind 'Drums Between the Bells,' a collaboration with Rick Holland, a young British poet, that is a kind of test of the limitations for interpreting the human voice. To make it, Mr. Eno gathered various acquaintances with striking speaking voices — a graphic designer, an employee at his health club — and had them recite Mr. Holland’s lines, which express cosmic wonderment and artistic ambition in emphatic, Twitter-length phrases ('invent new colors that fly'). Then Mr. Eno stretched and tweaked those recordings to bring out quirks in the speakers’ enunciation and tone, and, pushing the songs further into a realm of artificiality, added a glitchy electronic soundtrack. The effect, in tracks like 'Bless This Space' and 'The Real,' is a disembodied sing-speak that recalls both Brechtian Sprechstimme and those robotically stitched-together announcements in the subway" (Ben Sisario, "Pushing Back the Limits of Speech and Music," New York Times, 7/4/11).
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