Phillips, Tom / Gavin Bryars / Fred Orton

Between 1975 and 1978, Brian Eno’s Obscure imprint produced ten LPs to document the work of virtually unknown composers at the time. These records continue to inspire both practitioners and fans of experimental, ambient and modern classical music.

Irma—Obscure No. 9, the label’s penultimate release—might be considered an outlier in its catalogue, given that the album is presented (nominally) as an “opera,” complete with libretto by art historian Fred Orton. Yet when one considers that Eno included within the label’s small discography the works of Harold Budd, Michael Nyman, John Cage and Plenguin Cafe Orchestra, Irma begins to feel less conspicuous.

Conceived by visual artist Tom Phillips—whose painting graces the cover of Another Green World—Irma is constructed from phrases from Phillips’ book A Humument, itself a postmodern up-cycling of a Victorian novel that Phillips had found in a second-hand shop. These textual fragments were the basis for a graphical score, and Gavin Bryars was tasked with orchestrating the work. Each time the piece is performed, as Bryars states in the liner notes, “Irma needs to be re-composed rather than realised.”

While on the surface this may seem to be one of the more accessible Obscure titles, Irma resonates as complex as anything in the label’s daring and original roster, utilizing clusters of cycling notes and Cageian strategies of indeterminacy to make a record that is profoundly and unexpectedly beautiful. The overall effect is a grand tour through several centuries of symphonic music—from Joseph Haydn to Morton Feldman.