Bette A. and Brian Eno :: Slow Stories: A Collaboration of Storytelling, Music, and Art (Unnamed Press)

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Where story, sound, and image meet at an unhurried pace, Slow Stories feels like a quiet return to the ancient art of remembering.

Stories that refuse to rush

Music and stories have always held a shared space. Media has sometimes separated the two, but here they find themselves cozying up to each other again. Bring in visual art and you have a balanced triangular ternary of aesthetic forces. These three artistic powers, joined together, have the force of endurance. Like the stones that make up our mountains and riverbeds they exist on a different plane of time.

Human memory has atrophied under the influence of viral media that burns out after just a few infectious days. The news cycles is disorienting not just because of its vapidity, but from its rapid repetition. Our memories should be generational if not longer. The cultural technology of stories has ensured we will lose it all down the swirling drain of our phone enhanced collective dementia.

Easing into Slow Stories by Bette A. and Brian Eno is a way to reclaim a traditional pacing of life. Even if the stories and music here move faster than the geologic time shaping our shared planet, this collaboration does much in asking us why we are so hurried.

When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire? When was the last time you went over to an aunts house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart?

That is the experience I have when I listen to Bette A. It’s like I’ve gone to see this storyteller who has things inside of her she needs to share, and that I need to know. These stories seem to come straight from the dreamworld and carry me to a place beyond material reality.

Listening to Bette A.’s voice and the soft ambience from Eno, I feel safe, in a cacoon. It is this primal feeling I get, of having a mother or an aunt or a sister read to me while in bed. It’s so primal. It’s so timeless, as we are taken into the world of story.

The quality of Bette’s voice is such that it fills me with emotion. It is this feeling of being read to, slowly, softly. I realize I haven’t experienced this in so long, that I am overwhelmed with a grief I did not know I had, grief for something I did not know I was missing. I listen to audiobooks sometimes but those don’t really count. Podcasts can be even worse. Poetry readings are good, but there every poet wants to be heard. When was the last time someone told you a tale and you really slowed down enough to listen and take it, be absorbed into it, be absorbed by and saturated by the story?

The fact that they are slow makes them better. This isn’t an audiobook you are rushing to listen to because you need to fill up your information gathering quota. Information isn’t knowledge. These are stories and there is wisdom inside them. The information highway sped things up, this is an analog off ramp inviting us to slow down.

When they started to record the stories in this multimedia project, Brian’s only instruction to Bette was to read her tale “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.”

It seems to me that “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow” should be a new Oblique Strategy.

The audio portion of this release approaches the aesthetic of ASMR. That is, the Autonomous Senory Meridian Response, which is induced by very specific kinds of audio and visual stimulation. ASMR videos on YouTube have become incredibly popular because of the reaction of this response: tingling sensations, relaxation, a release of tension. Often it is whispering, sometimes other sounds like water, trains, rubbing of surfaces, crinkling of paper, oil sizzling in a pan. Tension is endemic in the accelerated pace of life and ASMR art flourishes.

It would be nice to hear it combined with stories and sounds like these. I am put into such a state of grace with the story of the village and of the endless house. It’s like a dream world I want to return to again and again.

Eno’s music is so soft and gently transforming. I am not sure if he is using the generative techniques he is so fond of here, or something else. The changes in the ambience happen over greater lengths of time while keeping attention held inside the grace of the drone.

The second side of this record puts me in mind of the village Palomar in the comic series Love and Rockets. There are all these people and things happening in the village, and they just go on and on. It’s a village that exists in the mind of its creator Gilbert Hernandez. It can be called an imaginary village. Bette A. also has an imaginary village inside her head. But now she has transferred it to me, just like Hernandez has transferred the village of Palomar into the heads of their readers.

Where time loosens its grip ::

This is how these imaginary villages can grow and become a part of our lives, how we can read books from inside imaginary libraries, and how we can check out those books from the inner library and bring them into the material world to share with others.

As for the stories in the book, they are also filled with mysterious phenomena recalling the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and yes, the magical realism found in Gilbert’s side of the Love and Rockets stories. “A box appears at the edge of town and silently demands to be filled with meaning. A skinny little man trudges in from the desert refusing to put down the massive rock he carries on his back. And when a girl is born inside a poor one-bedroom house, a new door appears, leading to a new room, leading to another. –The additions to the house are impossible to enter and made of an unbreakable mirrored glass, reflecting the growing rage and confusion of the villagers. Naturally, people must respond.”

Reading these stories somehow felt similar to going to other towns and cities to hear what the aunts and sisters and mothers there had to say.

I am grateful that Bette A. is so attuned to the lives of the people living inside the vast expanse of her imagination.

Slow Stories is an exquisite limited release, that includes a hardcover book, a vinyl record, and 20×20 cm hand painted panel. The visual, the literary and the auditory combine to create tingling sensations and urge us to take our time, so slip down into the long now.

The paintings create a shared visual world as their imaginations leak into one another, depicting “birch forests with graffiti, lunar mountain ranges, floating eggs, geometric colour fields.” Like any good painting, they deserve time spent sitting with, which is why they have benches in museums.

The artist’s proceeds of the sale of the bundle will go to their charities; The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette, and Earth Percent, a charity that channels funds from the music industry to organizations that do the most impactful work around the climate emergency, co-founded by Brian.

The project follows their 2024 book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (Faber).

Slow Stories: A Collaboration of Storytelling, Music, and Art is available on Unnamed Press.