Brian Eno hates the “arsehole chord” – but what exactly is it?
Eno says James Blake used the “disappointing” chord during the creation of his track Retrograde.
Credit: Cecily Eno
Ambient pioneer and David Bowie collaborator Brian Eno has revealed his distaste for a certain chord, which he calls the “arsehole chord”.
Musicians often are tempted into ending a sequence with this chord, he says in a recent YouTube-based discussion with James Blake, who apparently did so on one of his most popular tracks to date, Retrograde.
“You once accused me of using the ‘arsehole chord”. Could you explain what the arsehole chord is?” Asks Blake.
“There’s a way of resolving things in songs which always disappoints me,” Eno responds. “You know, you have a sort of set-up, and then you think, ‘Don’t go to that one, don’t go to that one.’ And it goes to that one and you think, ‘Oh, God.’”
“That was in my most popular song, Retrograde,” Blake says.
“So it starts with a G major chord which is the nice chord. The bottom G in the right hand, I moved up to an A flat, just to see what that does, and that made it a kind of diminished over a G bass. That was when your head cocked, like a dog listening to a high pitch, and you said ‘That’s the arsehole chord’.”
The two go on to joke about how the awkward moment “impacted” Blake, with the Retrograde producer claiming it cost him a fictional “20k” in therapy fees before Eno explains further his distaste for the chord.
“For songwriters,” Eno says, “I really think they often think, ‘Oh, it’s all majors. I better put in a minor’. Fucking why? You don’t have to put sugar in everything you cook. I used to say, ‘Ban all minor chords,’ just to annoy people – just to make them think differently about what they were doing.”
Check out James Blake’s new album, Playing Robots Into Heaven, via jamesblake.com.
