Coldplay (Music Group)

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares139 Views

    Is This Massive Attack Concert the Gold Standard for a Green Gig?

    by

    Coldplay and Billie Eilish have tried to drive down carbon emissions while touring, but the British band Massive Attack has tried to take the efforts even further.When the British band Massive Attack was halfway through a West Coast tour in 2019, flying from show to show, the rapper and singer Robert Del Naja had a moment of crisis. Given all the carbon emitted by moving the band and its equipment around, he recalled wondering: Can I justify this anymore?Not long afterward, the band made a decision. It would work with climate scientists to develop a model for touring that made as little climate impact as possible.On Sunday, Massive Attack staged a daylong 35,000-person festival in the band’s home city of Bristol, England, to showcase the carbon-cutting measures it has developed with the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, a British organization, and A Greener Future, a nonprofit focused on lowering the music industry’s emissions.The concert on Sunday was powered by batteries charged from wind and solar energy.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesFans were encouraged to travel to the show by walking, cycling or using public transportation.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesWhereas other bands, including Coldplay, have staged attention-grabbing stunts to draw awareness to the industry’s climate impacts, they have sometimes ignored the main sources of emissions from gigs, such as audience travel and venues’ power supplies. With its show on Sunday, Massive Attack wanted to show how to tackle all of the polluting parts of a show.In an interview a few days before the event, Del Naja said that previous music industry efforts to cut emissions had not been in line with the United Nations-agreed goal to stop average temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      10 Outstanding Brian Eno Productions

      by

      Inspired by an ever-changing new documentary about the musician and producer, listen to songs he helped construct by David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and more.Just four versions of Brian Eno.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesDear listeners,This week, I saw Gary Hustwit’s lively documentary “Eno,” about the musician, artist and producer Brian Eno. I’d recommend it to you — but it’s highly unlikely that you will see the same version of the film that I did.Formally inspired by Eno’s longtime fascination with generative art, “Eno” is essentially created anew each time it’s screened. A computer program called Brain One (a playful anagram of “Brian Eno”) selects from 30 hours of interviews with Eno that Hustwit conducted and 500 hours of archival footage, fitting it into a structure that lasts about 90 minutes. According to the Brain One programmer Brendan Dawes, 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie exist. I did not even know, before seeing this film, that “52 quintillion” was a real number.Some of my favorite parts of the version of “Eno” that I saw concerned his work as a producer. He’s certainly been a prolific one, working with traditional rock bands (Coldplay, U2), avant-garde composers (Harold Budd) and a whole lot of legends in between (David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads). Eno is neither a classically trained musician nor a conventional technician, and his role in the studio can be hard to define — maddeningly so, to certain record-label executives over the years. Admitted Bowie, in a clip from the film I saw, “I don’t really know what he does.” He meant that as a compliment.The most interesting parts of “Eno,” for me, shed a little more light on that elusive “what.” As a producer, he is equal parts agitator and sage. When he and Bowie were hitting a wall during the making of Bowie’s 1977 landmark “‘Heroes,’” they each pulled cards from Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies cards, which provide creative jumping-off points; the result was the hypnotic ambient composition “Moss Garden.” When Bono was struggling to complete a soon-to-be classic U2 track, Eno showed patience. When Talking Heads were looking for a new musical direction before making “Remain in Light,” Eno played them one of his all-time favorite musicians, Fela Kuti. The rest — in so many clips of Eno in the studio — is history.Inspired by “Eno,” today’s playlist is a collection of songs produced by the man himself. Eno the Producer is merely one side of this multifaceted artist, but I appreciated that the sense of multiplicity baked into the structure of “Eno” speaks to how difficult it is to define him with a single identity. There are probably nearly 52 quintillion possible Brian Eno playlists I could have made — Jon Pareles made another in 2020, selecting 15 of Eno’s best ambient compositions — but here is the one I chose. It flows well from start to finish, but if you’re feeling inspired by Hustwit’s generative approach, you’re certainly welcome to put it on shuffle.Line my eyes and call me pretty,LindsayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More