“The Scottish Oils”

Under my Celltab nom-de-noise (which I use for non-song sounds), I’ve released an Eno-inspired ambient number called “The Scottish Oils.” This is an effort to create an ambient track in an Eno mode but with a bit more harmonic variety. Every 100 beats (or 1 minute and 40 seconds), the harmonic content of the previous section changes. Each section has five notes, and from one section to the next, one note changes, by a half or whole step. The idea was to move from a C-based chord (C, E-flat, F, G, B natural) to an F#-based chord (F#, A#, B, C#, E#), which is about as far away as you can get. Every chord (this is an accident) contains an F, and all but the last one also contains an E-flat.

The title embeds an amusing coincidence, which I was not aware of when I came up with it. The name of this track came from a product I saw at a drugstore. It was a brand of cod liver oil called Emulsión de Escocia. Given the plaid packaging design, I guessed the latter word must be Spanish for Scottish…which it kinda-sorta is. The phrase “Scottish Oil,” though, was too reminiscent of North Sea oil politics, so I pluralized it, and there’s yr title.

Okay, so I’m wondering, what’s “Scottish” about cod liver oil? The actual product here has a history: specifically, that it was initially marketed as “Scott’s Emulsion” back in 1873 and produced by a firm known as Scott & Bowne.

The amusing part is this: that company was later, in turn, merged with a concern founded in 1852 that produced fruit salts, popular among sailors to reduce seasickness…a firm founded by and named after one James Crossley Eno. (Uh-oh…does this mean I need to write another verse for “The Wrong Eno”?) The merger formed a company known as Eno-Scott & Bowne.

Turns out there was always an Eno lurking within the history of the title of this Eno-inspired number!

Some documentation: that company’s assets were, along with dozens of other companies, eventually swallowed and transmogrified and are now held by a megacorp called “Haleon”…the info above comes mostly from a history on this page.

And, searching on this page for “Eno” as a whole word, we find an entry from 1953 in which the Eno-Scott & Bowne concern sold its facility in Bloomfield, NJ to the Schering Corp. to move to Clifton, NJ.