Friday Morning

More music. I've always had a soft spot for Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon. It's a 60-minute-long ambient composition from 1986, released on compact disc only because it was too long to fit on a vinyl record. Why is it called Thursday Afternoon? Because there was an accompanying video album that was videotaped on a Thursday afternoon, that's why.

What does Thursday Afternoon sound like? Imagine you are exploring a metal jungle on a planet populated by robot animals, while electronic wind disturbs the leaves of silicon trees high above your head. It's not so much an album as a vista, a place that you can visit for a while. It's complex, but simple. Ultra-high-tech, but elegant. Baroque, but minimal. Surprisingly timeless for an electronic music album that came out in 1986.

On a whim, and because England has had a spell of cold weather, I decided to make my own Thursday Afternoon. There comes a time in every person's life when they have a hankering to make an hour-long ambient composition, and this is my time.

Do you want to know something spooky? As a joke I was going to pretend that I couldn't think of a name, so I asked ChatGPT to come up with something - and after fifteen hours of processing it suggested Friday Morning. The joke is that it's a really obvious name for a piece of music inspired by Thursday Afternoon. Imagine asking a supercomputer to come up with a name for a sequel to The Expendables 2, and after days of effort it comes up with The Expendables 3. The humour comes from the fact that it's a perfectly decent name, but an incredibly prosaic one.

Here's the spooky thing. This is where it gets spooky. Are you ready for this. Just to see what would happen I actually did ask ChatGPT for a name. "Can you suggest a good name for a sequel to Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon"?", I asked. And, lo and behold, it really did suggest Friday Morning. That was the top suggestion.

Followed by Twilight Hours, Silent Horizon, Endless Echoes, Eternal Afternoon, Between Moments, Shifting Light, Solitude's Song, and Unfolding Stillness, most of which would be perfectly viable albeit slightly naff ambient album titles.

Back in 1986 Brian Eno recorded Thursday with a 24-track tape machine and a bunch of digital reverbs, delays, and pitch-shifters, costing tens of thousands of pounds in all. Here in 2025 I used Logic Pro, which is £199.99. What instruments did he use? At the time Eno was a big fan of the Yamaha DX7, but my impression is that he used his instruments as raw material for a battery of studio effects, which were then fed back into themselves to create a distinctive shimmery wall of sound. The studio was his instrument.

In contrast I used Pascal Gauthier's Dexed, a free emulation of the Yamaha DX7, but in keeping with the theme I used the simplest, most sine wavey FM patches I could make. I also used Giulio Zausa's RDPiano, a free emulation of Roland's mid-80s sample-based MKS-20 and MKS-80 digital pianos, which in theory should sound badly dated but have a charm of their own. Plus some of Logic's own plugins - the background drone is a patch from Alchemy - and some simple patches made with my modular synthesiser. For each track I recorded a note, or a run of notes, but instead of using loops I copied and pasted the regions more or less randomly:

Thursday Afternoon was recorded with digital instruments and digital effects, but it has a surprisingly organic sound. It was recorded to tape, and all the layers of effects and compression amplified the noise. I tried to emulate that by using a simple outboard effects chain that consisted of my modest Alesis NanoCompressor, plus a pair of Strymon pedals:

The chain was El Capistan tape delay simulator ->; NanoCompressor ->; BigSky reverb, which had the effect of amplifying the noise from the tape delay simulation, and then smoothing it out with the reverb. With Logic I then added a compressor at the end plus a tape saturation effect, and some EQ to tone down the bass. The result is bassier, more boxy, less spacey, less subtle than Thursday Afternoon. Of course, it's a lot easier to copy an idea than come up with a new idea, and I have a renewed respect for Eno. At any point in 1986 he might have thrown up his hands and said "this is stupid", and the world would have carried out, but he persisted.

As of 2025 there is the spectre of AI. Back in the 1980s Brian Eno experimented with chance processes and self-assembling musical compositions using the audio equivalent of an analogue computer - a mixing desk loaded with tape loops - to create ever-evolving music. In the 1990s he adopted a piece of software called Koan Pro that could algorithmically generate music, but as far as I can tell he didn't wholly embrace computerised composition, although I have to admit I'm not all that familiar with his 21st century output.

But still, there was a time when generative music was the hip new thing, and it's still a fascinating field. The idea that human beings might be taken out of the musical equation isn't necessary a bad thing. Birdsong and the crash of waves and the sound of wind in the trees are all pleasing to the ear, and they were not created by human beings. Conversely an awful lot of noise pollution is the result of human activity, so perhaps human beings are the enemy after all. But I can't help but think that the brilliant minds who devised generative music software imagined that other brilliant minds like themselves would use it, whereas in reality the widespread deployment of AI has inevitably led to piles of low-effort slop created by people who just don't care.

Which raises all kinds of issues of class and snobbishness. I have the impression that whenever a new medium is invented - whether radio, or television, or the internet - the creators imagine that future audiences will be just like them. University-educated hipsters with curious minds and impeccable taste, and not for example kids who just want to listen to rock and roll. And yet without rock and roll Brian Eno would not have had the money to make Thursday Afternoon, so what is right and what is wrong.

Ultimately you and I are an elite, and if the masses are happy with their toys, let them. We have each other.