Brian Eno: Reflection

BRIAN ENO: REFLECTION (2017)

1) Reflection.

It has been a long while since Eno last went totally hardcore on us — or, at the very least, most of his «hardcore ambient» output tended to be written for art installations rather than the regular LP market. Reflection takes no such compromises: released on CD and vinyl from the start, it is in­tended as a purely musical piece, and with its rigid minimalism embodied in a single 54-minute track, the obvious and inevitable comparison is to Thursday Afternoon, and the obvious and inevitable reaction is, «oh no! not again! why????...»

Well, first of all, the older Monseigneur de la Salle gets, the more likely he probably will be to return to his meditative, introspective, reflective side than to try and compete with the acid elec­tronic buzz of today (let alone any accompanying pop inspirations). And with so many of his friends and colleagues dropping dead around him, the more inclined he will be, naturally, to contemplate his own physical mortality / spiritual immortality. Eno himself describes the record as a "psychological space that encourages internal conversation", and he's not bullshitting you with this one — except, I think, that it may have been vice versa: as the title itself suggests, Reflection may have been a reflection of an internal conversation that the artist happened to have with himself during one of the days of the much troubled year of 2016.

And since everything is always understood better in comparison, it is only natural to go back to Thursday Afternoon and trace the differences between the two. The 1986 exercise was, above all, an affair of The Light — the perfect soundtrack of finding yourself slightly under the surface of the water with your eyes wide open and experiencing the rays of sunlight penetrating that surface, here and there, out of a skyline beset with rapidly, but gently moving white clouds. It had this caressing, floating ambience of whiteness and purity to it that could have served to illustrate any miraculous experience, from the resurrection of Jesus to losing your virginity. The textures of Reflection, in comparison, are also gentle and soothing, but deeper and darker, as if an invisible hand has firmly pushed you way down below the surface, and any sources of light that you now have access to have to come from the bottom of the sea — or, perhaps, from the depths of your imagination — rather than from the top.

Here, too, there are two layers to the sound: a basic rhythmic «hum», though less polyphonic in texture than the one on Thursday Afternoon, across which minimalistic bits of keyboard melo­dies vary in pitch and timbre — cold and emotionally detached, though, and you are probably not expected to experience any basic human feelings over them; you are simply expected to revel in the mystery, be it on your own microcosmic level or on the macrocosmic one — you decide if the music of Reflection is more about Outer or Inner Space. I would probably opt for the latter one, because I think Eno is more interested in what goes on within his own head now than whatever it is happening to the universe at large.

Of course, as of 2017, there is nothing particularly innovative about the concept, except for, may­be, the fact that the project comes equipped with its own multimedia application, and apparently, there is a «generative» plugin for this thing that allows the listener to tweak the settings and mo­dify the textures depending on the time of day and other factors — something I do not really have the time to explore, although, perhaps, this is where the real money value of Reflection actually lies. Yet, strange enough, as I briefly rewind my recollections of Brian's various ambient projects, there is nothing there that sounds exactly like Reflection — they are either too dynamic and me­lo­dic (yes, the ʽ1/1ʼ part of Music For Airports is like Beethoven compared to this), or, on the contrary, even more radically minimalistic (like Neroli), or, as I said, create a completely diffe­rent atmosphere (Thursday Afternoon). It's like you always saw this sort of record coming from Eno's meditative mind, yet it still took him almost fifty years to achieve it.

I mean, I can understand him when he seems to speak so proudly of this achievement — I'd never describe it myself as a «culmination» or «catharsis» record, but it seems very much... like him, something like a perfectly faithful sonogram of his internal state of mind, where most of his previous ambient exercises sounded more like musical reimaginations of various things outside of that mind, be it little fishes jumping in the water or the faraway craters of the Moon. And since, after all, Brian Eno is only a man, it may well be so that your internal state of mind is not that far different from his — particularly if you, too, experience these strange periods of «worried tran­quility» where nervousness emanates from complete calm and dissolves back into it. That's kind of what Reflection is for me, and it makes a fine, healthy addition to the man's ambient catalog, even if I am probably never going to listen to it again — not until my dying bed, at least.

Brian Eno: The Ship

BRIAN ENO: THE SHIP (2016)

1) The Ship; 2) Fickle Sun (I); 3) Fickle Sun (II): The Hour Is Thin; 4) Fickle Sun (III): I'm Set Free.

Back to solo territory, and to (almost) pure ambience again. The major difference being that this is the first of Eno's ambient albums where his own voice serves as one of the ambient instruments: the original plan was to simply have the whole thing as another «installation», but then, as Brian told Rolling Stone, he suddenly discovered that he was able to sing the lowest notes of the piece due to the aging of his voice — and this impressed him so much that he decided to add vocal support for the whole piece. Which certainly does not make it «poppier» or more accessible — merely adds another layer of sonic support to the picture.

ʽThe Shipʼ in question is the Titanic, of course — the idea is that of a conceptual piece that is probably focused on the adventures of the broken Titanic underwater (where «adventure» is to be understood philosophically — in a sense, if nothing whatsoever happens to you, this is by itself quite an adventure). The «lyrics» to the piece were not written by Eno himself, but rather selected by him from a string of sentences randomly generated by a Markov chain algorithm from a data pool that included a passenger's account of the sinking of the boat, plus some translations of dirty French songs from World War I for a change (although that last detail might be a hoot — don't see any particularly dirty tidbits in the lyrics; perhaps the algorithm included a modesty clause); fun, but ultimately pointless, in my opinion — although, come to think of it, quite consistent with Eno's general fatalism, belief in luck, and fascination for stuff like Tarot cards (and maybe help­ful in some way — he did rant, for instance, about the greatness of the line "the hour is thin" that was totally computer-generated, and, uh, he just might have something there...).

Anyway, what's really good about The Ship is that its ambience is of a stern, metallic character, with elements of the industrial style consistently incorporated throughout — for ʽThe Shipʼ, you really do get the impression of being placed underwater and watching the huge metal monster groan and moan while tiny currents and occasional biological organisms swish and swoosh past the metallic covering. Ropes and seams are creaking and straining, little gas bursts escaping, and multiple vocal overdubs sound like a mix of ghost apparitions and aural hallucinations. After twenty minutes of completely static ambience, the first part of ʽFickle Sunʼ comes on in a much more dynamic manner — as a slow anthem of death, with almost Gothic overtunes, gradually gaining in intensity, with grinding feedback waves and quasi-orchestral pomp (reminiscent of classic Coil, really) — and then, again, somewhat randomly, the same «suite» continues as ʽPart 2ʼ (with a professional, but boring voiceover by Peter Serafinowicz over a simple ambient piano melody) and as ʽPart 3ʼ, which, out of the blue, is a very 1970s-sounding cover of The Velvet Underground's ʽI'm Set Freeʼ, beautifully sung by Eno and once again featuring Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins on additional instruments.

Fans of Eno's melodicity will most definitely want the album for that cover — it is quite prover­bially gorgeous, stripping away all the lo-fi «ugliness» of the original and replacing it with a paradisiac atmosphere: violins, violas, layers of keyboards, and, above all else, the semblance of a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed, who, upon finally being «set free», certainly does deserve an ange­lic tribute from the man who, after all, forty years back, raised the «angelic standard» to nearly unreach­able heights: this is a fascinating cross-breed of Velvet Underground values with Eno values, even if I still struggle to see its relationship with the bulk of the album. But as for the bulk of the album, well, it's not generic Eno by all means, but it is neither the beautiful ambient Eno nor the dark and mysterious out-there-in-space ambient Eno, and I am not sure I am capable of squeezing yet another ambient Eno in my storage room — I'd just say that the album is sufficient­ly atmospheric to be a curious listen, but I can't say it really gave me a whole new perspective on what it would be like to spend 100 years in incorporeal form at the bottom of the ocean.

Brian Eno (w. Karl Hyde): High Life

BRIAN ENO: HIGH LIFE (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)

1) Return; 2) DBF; 3) Time To Waste It; 4) Lilac; 5) Moulded Life; 6) Cells & Bells.

Usually, when an artist releases a quick follow-up to a recent project, stating that the point is to "extend some of the ideas we'd started" (in Eno's own words), what you think of is a collection of outtakes that weren't good enough for the main record — a collector's item for the way too deeply impressed individuals. This is definitely not the case with High Life. It does extend some of the ideas they'd started, sometimes almost literally so (ʽDBFʼ sounds like a longer, funkier, slightly more developed version of ʽBrazil 3ʼ, for instance), and it did come out just one month later than Someday World, but it has a very different spirit. If you merged them together as one release in one 2-CD package, it would be like... well, like the difference between the first two LPs and the Apple Jam segment of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

Of course, that is a mediocre analogy, because Apple Jam had no conceptual purpose, was com­pletely spontaneous and was only valuable inasmuch as some stellar musicianship was involved. But it did place the magic of the groove over the magic of pre-meditated composition; and like­wise, High Life is also all about the groove, where Someday World was more about the spiri­tual-beautiful aspects of music-making. Basically, it's like this: we have said all we wanted to say about our vision 2.0 for the future, so now let's just drink to it and be merry. And dance, provided you share our perspective on certain dance moves for the future.

Personally, I do, and I particularly welcome the lengthy running times it takes these guys to ex­pand their grooves to full strength. There are vocals here occasionally, but they do not mean much next to the instrumental pastures, where Hyde supplies the simplistic guitar drone and Eno dresses it up in select rainbow colors. ʽReturnʼ and ʽLilacʼ are the best examples. On the former, Hyde strums two guitar chords like a slightly more robotic shadow of Lou Reed for nine minutes (well, most of it is probably tape-looped anyway), with happy electronic bells and whistles, as well as Arcade Fire-style schoolboy-choir harmonies surrounding him — the effect is that of a speedy, monotonous train ride through a hustlin'-bustlin' Elysium. ʽLilacʼ is far more focused on the guitars, with two (or more?) rapidly droning parts superimposed and only slightly attenuated by electronics: the sound reaches its loudness peak around the fifth minute, and from then on it's four more minutes of smooth, repetitive, trance-inducing funkiness. It should be boring, but there's something so mysteriously daring and teasing about the whole thing that you just get caught up. Maybe they are slowly shifting volume levels in the mix, because somehow it gives you the feel of an inescapable crescendo wave without there actually being a real crescendo. In any case, it's absolutely infectious in its measured rush.

Two shorter tracks, ʽDBFʼ and ʽMoulded Lifeʼ, are even more funky, with more sexy syncopation going on than seen on any Eno album from the past several decades — if not for all the tape ma­nipulation, you could easily mistake it for a special King Crimson experience. ʽMoulded Lifeʼ, however, also has industrial overtones on top of the funkiness, plus some Eastern phrasing in the synthesizer passages, plus psychedelic harmonies, and I must state that it works much better with Hyde's guitar as the foundation than if it were simply a 100% electronic track (a subtle cue for all you IDM fans out there). At the same time, ʽTime To Waste Itʼ has a notable reggae influence in the rhythm, and although it is yet another example of treated electronic vocals spoiling the cake (I will probably never get used to this idea of vivisectioning the human voice, of which Eno has be­come a major fan lately), on the whole it is also quite celebratory and life-asserting.

Finally, ʽCells & Bellsʼ is a far more typical and convincing finale than the prog-balladeering at the end of Someday World — a textbook example of a transcendental Eno mantra. The crazy rhythms fade away, we find ourselves stranded in an odd electronic swamp, with duralloy frogs croaking and titanium trees swaying and silicic acid dropping from the skies and The Master him­self reciting some distantly futuristic form of The Lord's Prayer, with the line "cells and bells and flesh skins build a new career" replacing the traditional Amen. Well, I suppose that cells and bells may have actually built a new career for Eno, but I don't even want to know what he means by "flesh skins". And, as is often the case, the conclusion is neither optimistic nor pessimistic in it­self — like the best tracks on Before And After Science, this is a meditation whose extreme emotionality comes from being fully detached of any emotions.

I will conclude by re-stating: despite the short time gap and the obvious similarities, High Life is a completely autonomous piece of work, and it may very well be that you can get bored by one of the Eno/Hyde collaborations — any one, depending on whether you're in the mood for a song or in the mood for a groove — and get thrilled by the other. I am glad to find myself delighted by both, in two different ways, and also to find that they perfectly complement each other. Given Eno's usual promiscuity, it is not very likely that Brian and Karl will ever go for a third one, but most likely this is as close to perfect as it is ever going to get with them, anyway. Thumbs up for what turns out to be one of the most successful team projects for the man ever, well on par with his work with Fripp, Byrne, and Cluster: no mean feat for an artist past sixty-five, I'd say.

Brian Eno (w. Karl Hyde): Someday World

BRIAN ENO: SOMEDAY WORLD (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)

1) The Satellites; 2) Daddy's Car; 3) Man Wakes Up; 4) Witness; 5) Strip It Down; 6) Mother Of A Dog; 7) Who Rings The Bell; 8) When I Built This World; 9) To Us All; 10) Big Band Song; 11) Brazil 3; 12) Celebration; 13) Titian Bekh.

Still another addition to the already seemingly endless list of Eno's collaborators, this time in the form of Karl Hyde, one of the founding fathers of the electronic band Underworld and, since 2013, also a solo artist. In other words, this is the first time since the Peter Schwalm collaboration that Brian enlists another electronic musician as equal partner; and considering how frequently the old guru gets in creative trouble when trying to saddle more modern styles of electronica, the setup suggests disaster from the get-go — once again, the master of soft nuance will try to con­vince us that he's just as good at techno-trance as the youngsters? (Let alone the fact that Karl Hyde himself is only nine years younger than Eno himself).

Surprisingly, the suggestion is screwed: not only is this not a disaster, but Someday World is, in fact, one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive, record to come from the Eno printing press in the 21st century. Its basic denomination is pop — most of the tunes feature vocals, repe­titive structures, hooks, choruses — but the individual styles, mostly furnished with electronic arrangements, are quite varied, ranging from Eno's classic upbeat style of the 1970s to dance music styles that rather reflect the «Hyde generation» of the late Eighties / early Nineties than anything considered «modern» in the 2010s. Which is a good thing — the two gentlemen are doing here what they do best, without necessarily attempting to sound in line with the times.

There are a lot of synthesized horns here, although, since there are also real horn players (in­clu­ding none other than Roxy Music's Andy Mackay on alto saxophone), it is not always easy to tell digital brass from analog brass with digital treatment; on ʽThe Satellitesʼ, for instance, real and «fake» horns often play off each other, creating a wildly polyphonic, dense sound. Sometimes they go into overdrive: ʽDaddy's Carʼ plays out like a cross be­tween some wild Latin dance and classic Stone Roses, with the addition of a wall of background harmonies and maniacal funky per­cussion. Sometimes you get echoes of Talking Heads and King Crimson (ʽMan Wakes Upʼ; the short instrumental ʽBrazil 3ʼ, whose throbbing electronic theme sounds like they're quoting the beginning to ʽBurning Down The Houseʼ). More often, though, they are being quiet, subtle, and vaguely creepy, with lulling sweet vocals over threatening bass lines — even if the absolute majority of the songs here are «beat-conscious», as they say.

Mostly, though, it's the hooks, and the almost unbelievable ease with which they produce an at­mosphere of solemnity that is quite reminiscent of the glory days. Check ʽTo Us Allʼ — taking two minutes to build up some tension, then finally exploding in an anthemic vocal sermon, a prayer in the face of the whole universe, well represented by a few beautiful guitar and keyboard parts. The eerie ʽMother Of A Dogʼ is one of the best Radiohead songs that Radiohead never wrote (actually, there's quite a few of these, isn't there?), with so many peacefully conflicting overdubs in the background that you'd easily get lost if not for the "I was raised by the son of the mother of a dog, I was raised by the mother of a dog" mantra that glues it all together (and no, the verses will not make it any easier to understand what they mean — it is up to you, in this as well as all other cases, to come up with your own interpretation). Eventually, they just run out of words and either put their strength in simple vocalizing (ʽBig Band Songʼ) or dispense with vo­cals altogether (ʽCelebrationʼ), but the musical themes are sufficiently interesting and/or pretty to agree with that decision (although Hyde, who takes the lion's share of the vocals, is a fairly good singer).

Despite all the moments of darkness, though, Someday World is basically a happy, optimistic album — I mean, come to think of it, Eno never made a truly depressing record (although some of his ambient opera may come across as scary or alienating), and the older he gets, the more hopeful he seems to become of humanity as a whole (bless his trusting old heart). There is one song here on which they have the nerve to speak for God himself — ʽWhen I Built This Worldʼ — but despite all the unpleasant things the Lord says of us in an uncomfortably auto-tuned voice, and despite the upsettingly funky-paranoid interlude that immediately follows the declaration, the se­cond part of the song sounds carnivalesque and oddly uplifting. Well, nice to know we don't have to expect the next great flood anytime soon.

I could probably live without the lengthy acoustic ballad that ends the album (and sounds like something Greg Lake might have contributed to an ELP record in one of his «I'm so romantic, I could just die» moments), but it has its legitimate place there — as a stripped-down, intimate coda to an overall «lush» experience — and if you couldn't quite guess the overall friendly and courteous mood of the album while the electronic pieces were playing, the coda lets you do this in «old school mode», so let it stay. On the whole, it's just nice to know that the man can still realize a visionary project like this — a little bit of complex intellectual naïveté never hurt anyone anyway; and since this is ultimately a modern pop album, not a confusedly ambient one, I have no difficulty giving it a major thumbs up.

Brian Eno: Lux

BRIAN ENO: LUX (2012)

1) Lux 1; 2) Lux 2; 3) Lux 3; 4) Lux 4.

With all these collaborations and new ideas and attempts to conquer the world of body-oriented electronic pulses, we'd almost forgotten Eno's primary function in the world of instrumental elec­tronic music — as provider of heavenly ambient soundscapes. Ever since Thursday Afternoon made a, ahem, definitive statement on that, «heavenly ambience» became largely reserved for scattered installations and Windows themes; I think that The Shutov Assembly was really the last album tagged as simply «solo», whereas purely ambient releases from later years were all supposed to go along with the installations.

Actually, Lux, too, was originally commissioned as a soundtrack to an art gallery (and, prior to that, was exposed at airport terminals), but it counts as an artistic work in its own rights — not to be specifically associated with any particular space, time, or n-th dimension. Consisting of four tracks that run for about 18-19 minutes each, it returns us to the good old days when Mr. Eno was trying to make us understand and slowly savor the inherent beauty in one single piano note before moving on to another one — a nostalgic trip, if you wish, to the times of Music For Airports and On Land, when the world was so young and unspoiled and Man had plenty of time to relax and chill out after unloading all the fresh kill and waiting for Woman to cook his supper.

These days, we've all advanced to a new level of conscience — and preoccupation — that pro­bably will not let you get in the 100% proper mood to enjoy this new musical painting. For what it is worth, though, I find it every bit as well-developed and beautiful as anything he'd ever done in the genre. All four tracks sound very much alike, with relatively minor nuances responsible for minor mood shifts, so, in a way, it is sort of like a somewhat busier, more involving Thursday Afternoon, where the point is no longer to infuriate you with its subtle arrogance, but to honestly entertain you with visions of yet another glass castle... or tropical aquarium, whichever way your imagination takes you, provided you have one and it includes hardware support for Enotronics.

The specific catch is that, in addition to Eno, Lux also features the contributions of Leo Abra­hams on «Moog guitar», and of Neil Catchpole on viola and violin: I do not even remember when was the last time, if there even was a last time, that Brian recruited string players for his purely ambient projects, and these textures make a lot of difference. Usually it is just a single note, of course, bowed smoothly and steadily somewhere in the background, fading in and out ever so slightly, but in combination with the slowly tinkling keyboards this can have an even stronger hypnotizing effect than bare keyboards (unless the wheezy sound happens to irritate you; if so, better shut off and reboot your ears in safe mode before continuing).

Most of the positive responses to Lux, I think, came from people who never realised before how seriously tired they were of all the information overload and all the frantic activity (or frantic si­mulated activity) of modern music (particularly electronic) — probably putting it in the same category as all those «slow reading clubs» and other feats of deceleration and downshifting — so it is quite possible that this was Eno's intention all the way: for him, to release Lux in 2012 is pretty much the same as it would be for a major former disco star to put out a canonical disco record. Just to see if it still holds up, you know. From that point of view, Lux is a total success: critics liked it, fans seemed pleased, and yes, the man can still put you to healthy sleep after all these years. And, as I have always insisted, there's nothing wrong with music that puts you to sleep if its original intention is to put you to sleep. The nagging question is: if you pay full price for a ticket to one of those galleries where they play this, are you offered a complementary pil­low and blanket, or do those cost extra?

Brian Eno: Drums Between The Bells

BRIAN ENO: DRUMS BETWEEN THE BELLS (2011)

1) Bless This Space; 2) Glitch; 3) Dreambirds; 4) Pour It Out; 5) Seedpods; 6) The Real; 7) The Airman; 8) Fierce Aisles Of Light; 9) As If Your Eyes Were Partly Closed...; 10) A Title; 11) Sounds Alien; 12) Dow; 13) Multimedia; 14) Cloud 4; 15) Silence; 16) Breath Of Crows.

So apparently this guy Rick Holland is a «poet and independent artist», as Wikipedia tells us (but really, isn't «independent artist» sort of a pleonasm? I always thought that the more «dependent» you are, the less you are of an artist), and his first book, Story The Flowers (how deliciously de­lightfully ungrammatical!), was published in 2010 and was constructed in the tradition of psycho­geography. Up to now, I thought «psychogeography» meant getting naked, taking acid, and wrapping yourself in a world map, but oh boy was I ever wrong about that.

Knowing what we know of Eno, it was only a matter of time before he'd enter into a collaboration with an expert on psychogeography — besides, he'd had joint albums with all sorts of musicians before, and written music for all sorts of artistic installations, but this is the first time that he tried out a symbiosis between ambient music and recited poetry, and if anything, the album was at least instrumental in introducing yet another word to the oversaturated English language: poet­ronica, the ingenious art of hybridizing verbal textures with digital sounds and breathing new life into two established forms of artistic expression.

Immediate disclaimer: I am almost totally desensitized to any form of modern poetry — conser­vative, innovative, English, Russian, whatever — and leave it to you, much more sensitive or much more pretentious reader, to decide for yourself whether the words of Rick Holland elevate you to a new level of consciousness or degrade you to the state of thinking really bad thoughts about people. One sample, I believe, is enough: "Bless this space / In sound and rhyme / As we suspend it / Arrested from the race / For meaning / By these slices / Of cityscapes / Each one / To the site of a thousand Londoners / The reburied and reborn / Brought together / In one life". Per­sonally, I think the word ʽLondonersʼ does not belong, but then I'm not an editor or anything.

However, somewhere deep inside I nurture a hope that Eno did not really choose Holland as a collaborator for the unfathomable beauty or deeply hidden meaning of his words — but rather just because the rhythmic basis of that poetry was eccentric and diverse enough for him to ex­periment with various ways of not only setting it to music, but also of playing around with the words themselves. Besides himself and The Poet, there are five extra ladies and one extra gentle­man delivering the words in a variety of silver-and-gold vocal tones, to which Eno may or may not add psychodigital processing, depending on his mood, the weather, and stock market values. And it works! Some people have said that they liked the completely instrumental version of this album better (it is available as a separate CD in the Deluxe Psychogeography Edition), but I dis­agree — the music here is not jaw-dropping on its own, but is made more fun and less predictable by the addition of this varied set of vocal overdubs.

The record begins in «clubby» mode, with a couple rhythmic tracks (ʽGlitchʼ, in particular, comes close to acid house, and has the most robotic-sounding vocals on the album), but then switches over to a more comfortable ambient mode, with recitations accompanied by minimalistic piano (ʽDreambirdsʼ), Lanois-style guitars (ʽPour It Outʼ), cloudy synth hum (ʽThe Realʼ), industrial grumble (ʽFierce Aisles Of Lightʼ), and... well, suffice it so say that, amazingly, no two tracks here sound the same — there's 15 of them here, and each one is a separate autonomous part of the sonic kaleidoscope. In a way, it is almost as if Brian took this concept as a pretext to run a con­densed retrospective of everything he made so far — you will find echoes of Thursday After­noon, of Apollo, of the Budd collaborations, even of Brian's vocal pop glories (ʽDowʼ, where his merry listing of Holland's groups of objects somehow reminds me of ʽKurt's Rejoinderʼ). So even if the album does not have a specific point to make, at least it's never truly boring.

Two of the tracks, ʽThe Realʼ (near the middle) and ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ (the finale), take nearly seven minutes to wind down to a close, but there's got to be something on an Eno album to put you in trance, right? A bit too much Autotune on ʽThe Realʼ for my tastes, making the lady singer sound like a chromium clone of Björk, but ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ is a fine, stately conclusion, all chimes and deep bass vocals, like a mourning song without dread/desperation or a last lullaby before the inevitable apocalypse. The sort of stuff you'd expect from a Dead Can Dance on a dark day, or from Current '93 on a bright day.

I do urge you, even if it runs against your modernistic / futuristic / nihilistic attitude to A-R-T, to ask the question «what the hell does this whole thing mean?» every once in a while, if only for psychological sanity reasons. The album title, actually, does sound meaningful to me — remin­ding me of The Bell And The Drum, a classic monograph on ancient Chinese poetry with which Brian may very well have been acquainted and whose major point was to seek out the origins of the poetic form in ritual music and dance; and what we have here is a reverse merger of the poetic form with ritual music, so that's hardly a coincidence. Let's be real stupid, then, and say that Eno's major purpose here is to generate magic through the marriage of spoken word and played sound. Whether he succeeds in that or no depends on whether, upon playing this record in its entirety, you are able to uncover a hidden portal in your wardrobe. If you're not, this probably means that your faith was insufficient, so go on and do it once more, this time with feeling. But if you are not floating in space third time around, Rick Holland will be happy to return your money and go back to coal mining, panhandling, and ghostwriting for Dr. Seuss.

Brian Eno: Small Craft On A Milk Sea

BRIAN ENO: SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA (2010)

1) Emerald And Lime; 2) Complex Heaven; 3) Small Craft On A Milk Sea; 4) Flint March; 5) Horse; 6) 2 Forms Of Anger; 7) Bone Jump; 8) Dust Shuffle; 9) Paleosonic; 10) Slow Ice, Old Moon; 11) Lesser Heaven; 12) Calcium Needles; 13) Emerald And Stone; 14) Written, Forgotten; 15) Late Anthropocene; 16) Invisible.

Chocolate milk sea, that is, if there is any significance in the album sleeve; but perhaps Eno thought that an extra word like that would make the whole thing seem too childish, particularly for an album that marked his formal entrance into the world of Warp Records — the sanctuary of Aphex Twin and other IDM geniuses. Not that Eno hadn't tried (mostly unsuccesfully) to tread on that turf for years now: he'd capitulated before the army of Modern Electronics as early as 1992, with Nerve Net, and there was hardly any reason to expect that, since he was now with Warp, this would somehow enable him to put out product that would be totally on the level.

Then again, in 2010, who the hell can tell what's on the level when it comes to electronica? It's more of a fluctuating fashion thing now than of anything having to do with indisputable break­throughs, and this works fine for Brian — where those Nerve Net-era pieces sounded tentative and half-hearted against contemporary cutting edge artists, in 2010 he already knows this stuff on the same level as decade-old formerly-cutting edge artists, and these albums seem far more self-assured and reasonably meaningful. And above all, Eno is still Eno, an artist with a love for well-organized beauty, rather than flashiness and coolness.

On this record, Brian is assisted by Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins (co-credited for all the tunes), the former mostly contributing guitar parts, the latter more commonly responsible for piano; this does not mean that this is not primarily an electronic record, but it is very «naturally textured» on plenty of the tracks, sometimes hearkening back to the days of collaboration with Harold Budd and sometimes to Daniel Lanois. The compositions themselves are split between «soft / atmos­pheric / ambient» and «hard / groove-based / IDM-ish», the latter mostly concentrated in the middle of the record, so that the whole milk sea journey seems to consist of three complex move­ments — the serene set-up, the shaky-stormy climax, and the dark-mystical denouement; this promises more spiritual excitement than you've had in years.

The opening pieces, in fact, feature quite a few lovely passages — ʽEmerald And Limeʼ is more like a 19th century romantic piano ballad with floating electronic overtones than mere sonic wall­paper; ʽComplex Heavenʼ places Heaven at an intersection between serenely Budd-ian minima­listic piano chords and an echoey stairway of acoustic guitar notes, while Eno's synth clouds and winds occupy all empty space; and the title track has probably the most chime-dependent imper­sonation of a milk sea that you've ever heard (not that it sounds much like a craft crossing a sea, but perhaps milk seas behave in their own milky ways?).

Once the synthesized drums kick in and we find ourselves in techno / house territory, though, things get predictably less seductive — this is not Eno's forte, and his collaborators aren't exactly making much of a mark on such rump-shaking tracks as ʽBone Jumpʼ or ʽDust Shuffleʼ, either. It's all just one forgettable IDM panorama after another. ʽPaleosonicʼ tries to make a difference by throwing in bits of finger-flashing jazz-fusion guitar solos (!), but it's more like a «let's be dif­ferent» post-modern trick than a sincere, well-placed tribute to Alan Holdsworth.

On the other hand, if you think of that 12-minute sequence as a slightly overextended bookmark, separating the warm atmospherics of the album's start from the cold atmospherics of its finish, then it's not that bad — beginning with ʽSlow Ice, Old Moonʼ, we enter familiar, but still haun­ting territory, where spirits of black nights, cold winds, subterranean caverns, and aquatic depths come back to do their, you know, spiritual schtick. Our small craft makes it through the calm, but subtly threatening zephyrs of ʽLesser Heavenʼ, wobbles through the weird wind-and-bone rattle of ʽCalcium Needlesʼ, and eventually ends up in the age of ʽLate Anthropoceneʼ, which, accor­ding to Eno's musical philosophy of humanity, sounds like subtle organic processes within a well-isolated cocoon — I'm not sure if Eugene Stoermer, who allegedly invented the term, would agree with this futuristic interpretation, but we'll just have to come back in a couple thousand years and see whether Eno was right after all.

On the whole, this might just be the best instrumental Eno album since Apollo — not as «shock-oriented» as Thursday Afternoon or Neroli, not as catch-up-with-the-times-oriented as Nerve Net, not as static as Shutov Assembly, not as filler-clogged as Drawn From Life, etc. It is not, and probably could not be, formally «innovative», but it is still a fresh update on Eno's concep­tion of the musical form, and it's got enough pure loveliness to just enjoy it out of any particular context. The journey continues, even if you have to invent yourself a milk sea to keep it challen­ging and imaginative.

Brian Eno (w. David Byrne): Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

BRIAN ENO: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (w. David Byrne) (2008)

1) Home; 2) My Big Nurse; 3) I Feel My Stuff; 4) Everything That Happens; 5) Life Is Long; 6) The River; 7) Strange Overtones; 8) Wanted For Life; 9) One Fine Day; 10) Poor Boy; 11) The Lighthouse.

Everything that happens once in Eno's life eventually happens once again — you just have to be patient enough, sometimes for twenty-seven years, which is the timespan that separates this re­cord from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. However, this album sounds nothing like it. Maybe it would be improper to say that Eno and Byrne have mellowed out with age — but some of their sides definitely have, and it is these sides that are facing each other now. The Wandering Knight of Electronic Havoc and The Roving Shaman of Spastic Rock cast off their armor, pack up their rituals, and quietly settle down on the porch of the house that occupies the front sleeve. Not exact­ly a hobbit-like design, but a fairly hobbit-like atmosphere all the same.

Since all the songs here feature vocals and are quite Byrne-like in spirit, I was not altogether sure whether this should have been included in Brian Eno's section — but as it turns out, most of the music here actually belongs to Eno, who gave a bunch of his half-finished demos to David and urged him to add his own vocal melodies. Interestingly, Eno himself plays not just the keyboards here, but guitars, bass, electric drums, and even some brass parts, although this is not really a one-man (or two-man) affair: quite a few additional musicians were drafted to complete the procee­dings, most importantly, Leo Abrahams on guitars and Seb Rochford on drums.

In other words, this is not a «poppified ambient» record; Eno specifically selected those of his demos that had a sharper pronounced rhythmic/dynamic flair to them, then proceeded to convert them to full-fledged song status — and made one of the finest decisions in his 21st century career to engage Byrne. Because one of the things that actually didn't work well with Another Day On Earth were the vocals: that whole «impersonal» approach to singing, which worked well when he was young and creepy, seems to have gotten a bit bland once he got older. Byrne, on the other hand, has lost none of the strident charm of his youth even as his hair got all white, and his singing adds a lot of personality and style to Eno's melodies.

Not that this is a great record — it is, intentionally and purposefully, a laid-back record, an exer­cise in leisurely contemplating life in all of its beauty and ugliness, in the face of a troubled past, a shaky present, and an uncertain future, and somehow it seems even more poignant and helpful in 2015, when I am writing this review, than it was in 2008. It totally works, yes, because Eno's melodies sound as if they were conceived in a hammock on a hot, lazy summer day, and Byrne here is the good old Byrne of ʽThis Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)ʼ, if you remember that cozy, comfy coda to Speaking In Tongues. A few of the tunes have jerky rhythm tracks, and a couple plunge into disturbingly dark electro-funk (ʽPoor Boyʼ), but on the whole, this is a very peaceful, though by no means rose-colored, affair. Byrne takes all sorts of stuff for lyrical inspi­ration — but even something like ʽThe Riverʼ, allegedly inspired by the Hurricane Katrina disas­ter, is a friendly, slow-rolling, sentimental ballad in execution. And even if few songs are catchy or heartbreaking, Byrne makes it all worthwhile by being as seductive as possible — sometimes, when he rises all the way to falsetto, he almost comes across as A-Ha's Morten Harket with a less cheap sense of taste and more intellectual experience. It's... odd, but good.

Some descriptions, following Eno's and Byrne's own interviews, pin this album down as «elec­tronic gospel», and there might indeed be a certain influence — primarily mood-wise, in its de­termination to rejoice against all odds; but even such tracks as the closing ʽLighthouseʼ could hardly be categorized as gospel, since they lack the energy and straightforward passion of the average gospel epic (not to mention a good old choir of black singers in the background). I would rather take this description as tongue-in-cheek — a joking, but meaningful metaphor; and use it as a ʽLighthouseʼ for those who are weary and desperate, maybe equally disillusioned with the old world and afraid of the new one, but refusing to wallow in dead-end pessimism, because "Everything that happens will happen today / And nothing has changed but nothing's the same" in the long run, and I guess this applies equally well to this album's music (heck, to music in gene­ral) as it does to life in general. And this album kind of sucks, but it sort of rules, and it gets a thumbs down but what you see is a thumbs up.

Brian Eno (w. Robert Fripp): Beyond Even

BRIAN ENO: BEYOND EVEN (1992-2006) (w. Robert Fripp) (2007)

1) Ringing Beat; 2) Gasp; 3) Sneering Loop; 4) Tripoli 2020; 5) Behold The Child; 6) Timean Sparkles; 7) Dirt Loop; 8) The Idea Of Decline; 9) Deep Indian Long; 10) Hopeful Timean; 11) Glass Structure; 12) Voices; 13) Cross Crisis In Lust Storm.

More Fripp & Eno for those who prefer their ambient spicy and with extra feedback on top. This album, too, has had a rather strange release history: originally made available only as a digital download, under the odd title of The Cotswold Gnomes, it was later released on CD as Beyond Even (1992-2006) in two versions: a single-CD package and a double-CD edition where you could either listen to all the compositions separately or segued together by means of rather un­sophisticated fade-ins and fade-outs. Additionally, discographies tell me that at least one limited edition print of the CD (Japanese, I think) came under the title Unreleased Works Of Startling Genius — which, I assume, may be a title inspired by the form term «Area Of Outstanding National Beauty», which is actually applied to Cotswolds, referenced in the original name. But enough with this detective crap, or it may begin to look as if I'm actively interested in this or something.

As the title (one of the titles) tells us, these are indeed collaborative works with Fripp, many, if not most, of them being outtakes from the Equatorial Stars sessions. Since, however, there is no intended conceptual unity here (which sort of makes you question the necessity of making that special segued version), the tracks are more variegated in texture, mood, and arrangements: some are rhythmic, some purely atmospheric, some dark (more often), some light (more rarely), and at least one where a lisping (or Japanese) lady whispers "behold the child" in a multi-layered loop — good choice if you want to make your Christmas celebration as modernistically psychedelic as possible, although I might be misreading the artists' lofty spiritual goals here.

Additionally, where on Equatorial Stars Fripp would largely dissolve his solos in the surroun­ding atmosphere, adopting a quiet minimalistic mode as if he were Brian's humble disciple in the art of staying invisible (and inaudible), here there is a bit of the good old Frippertronics in the air, and some mighty devilish Crimsonian soloing from time to time, which comes greatly in handy when you want to shut your mind off, get all conservative as heck and just enjoy the old man getting all pissed off and volcanic on his guitar. For these purposes, I'd especially recommend ʽSnee­ring Loopʼ (which is indeed a loop, and a fairly sneering one), parts of ʽRinging Beatʼ (al­though the wildest guitar parts there are locked inside a near-soundproof sarcophagus), and... and... okay, looks like I went over a top a bit. Oh no, there's actually some more on ʽThe Idea Of Declineʼ, bu that's about it.

Perhaps I was misled by the frequent presence of fellow Crimsonian Trey Gunn on a lot of these tracks — hugging the band's famous «Chapman Stick» that communicates a ferocious bass groove to most of them and greatly enhances the overall feeling of darkness by itself, so that Fripp can just sit back and modulate nonchalant cosmic rays with his six-string. That's how it goes on ʽTripoli 2020ʼ (the equivalent of cool jazz for the electronic age) and on most of ʽRinging Beatʼ. Elsewhere, the grooves are just replaced by impressionism (ʽGlass Structureʼ, which makes you feel trapped inside one, desperately trying to get out), exorcism (ʽVoicesʼ, taking you away to Ghostland), and try-your-patience minimalism (ʽDeep Indian Longʼ, which is like one bass note stretched out to five minutes — even a drone would drop dead from this drone).

On the whole, it's okay — definitely more «entertaining» than Equatorial Stars, but it also feels like these guys are long, long past the peaks of their creativity, because the tracks that remind of their early work are inferior to that work, and the tracks that try to take them into the future or at least keep them suspended in the now are most likely useless to fans of Aphex Twin or any other major IDM hero that was younger than fifty years old when he first began dabbling in IDM. On the other hand, you can't also get around the issue of professionalism and experience, or from the philosophical intrigue of what actually separates «a young man's ambient» from «an old man's ambient» — with rockers, as they age, the differences usually become clear, but what about wizards of atmosphere and technology? Seems like there's no proper dividing line here... or is there? Maybe that is the only credible reason why we still keep listening to these new Eno albums when we really should not be doing that.

Brian Eno: Another Day On Earth

BRIAN ENO: ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH (2005)

1) This; 2) And Then So Clear; 3) A Long Way Down; 4) Going Unconscious; 5) Caught Between; 6) Passing Over; 7) How Many Worlds; 8) Bottomliners; 9) Just Another Day; 10) Under; 11) Bone Bomb.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it; if it done got broke — for goodness' sake, just replace it already. All of Eno's half-hearted attempts to make bits of vocal pop music past the Seventies, be it with Cale, Schwalm, or anybody else, were incomparable in quality to the classic era; so why, after all this time, once again return to the vocal format, and this time, for an entire album? This attempt was simply bound to be half-hearted again, and it is.

Tucking some modern rhythms behind his belt, enlisting the help of some proverbially progres­sive stars, and alternating between sung, spoken, mumbled, and jumbled vocals, Brian here gives us an album that is both ambient and pop at the same time — or, rather, one that is neither am­bient nor pop. Essentially, it's a platter of moody mush that presents itself as something much more deep than it really is, and also contains some really bad sonic decisions, such as the frequent use of Autotune to transform Eno's normally handsome vocals into the last sounds of a rapidly melting Wicked Robot of the West.

Saddest of all, Another Day On Earth shows that Eno totally lost the capacity to amaze — now, when he is generating pop music, he is just generating pop music. It's not as if ʽThisʼ were a bad song, but it just sounds like any other semi-decent New Wave and later art-pop song. The drum machines are openly crappy (oh, where are those happy days when studio technology and organic Phil Collins could join in bliss and ecstasy on an opening track?), but much worse is the hidden crap effect, when the song is over and you realize that you don't remember anything about it ex­cept that, uh, it was... kind of happy-sounding and peaceful.

Or maybe this entire album is just a bit too happy-sounding and peaceful. See, when you combine faint pop hooks with friendly ambient soundscapes and meditative disposition, there's always a danger of losing focus, of drifting apart in your own mellowness. It's one thing when you are directly producing a stereotypical ambient album — it's totally another when you are using ambi­ence as a support for a «song», because then you get something like ʽA Long Way Downʼ, which is neither here nor there: as an ambient piece, it is let down by the inclusion of vocals, but as a vocal piece, it suffers from melodic minimalism. Like, would those Harold Budd collaborations have been better if Eno thought they needed vocal overdubs? Probably not, or he would have added those overdubs. Then why make that mistake here?

In the middle of the album, we unexpectedly get an almost upbeat, McCartney-esque pop ballad (ʽHow Many Worldsʼ), riding on a simple acoustic guitar riff and sporting unusually pathetic lyrics for Eno; I would have thought that lines like "our little world turning in the blue" would be way below his usual level of acceptance, but there you go — actually, the credits state that the lyrics were co-written with Michel Faber, the Dutch writer, and I sure hope he writes better no­vels than he does poetry. Anyway, it's kind of pretty, but it's also kind of childish: where in the past Eno had this knack for finding minimalist melodies that sounded like they were telling you The Lost Chord Truth of the universe, ʽHow Many Worldsʼ seems poised for a Sesame Street soundtrack. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but then offer it for a Sesame Street soundtrack, goddammit, not your long-awaited «pop comeback».

ʽJust Another Dayʼ, arriving near the end of the album, tries to somehow summarize it all and pre­sent a stately finale, and it's decent — with Brian using his imposing lower range on a basic vocal hook that, in a typical Eno manner, tries to marry the macrocosmically grand with the ut­most in simplicity. Decent, but not devastating: just like the song tries to convince us that "that was just another day on Earth", so is the song itself "just another song", celebrating Eno's gift for serenity and bliss in a routinely manner. After all, the music behind all this is just another mix of humming electronic textures, isn't it? And the percussion is dreadful.

The one really weird song on the album is ʽBone Bombʼ, serving here as a totally unexpected afterthought-style appendix — a series of bass and keyboard pulses, over which a vocally desen­sitized lady with a Laurie Anderson flair (not Laurie Anderson, though) piles up strings of free-form poetry, as if from the point of view of a suicidal terrorist ("bone bomb" is apparently a technical term for a suicide bomber whose own bones serve as lethal projectiles). Predictably, it's kind of creepy, although the subject matter is masked well enough for most people not to take notice. And even though the track is not pop at all, and even though I am not generally a fan of this kind of pretentious pseudo-shocking Relevant Art, I find myself strangely wishing that Ano­ther Day On Earth contained more of the same, instead of generally relying on that safe, cuddly, no longer all that interesting sound.

The sad truth is that the days on which Eno released albums like Another Green World and Before And After Science were not «just another day on Earth» kind of days — they were really special days with special musical events. We may, of course, simply agree with the artist that these days are gone for ever, and now every new day is just another day, regardless of whether you find a new Brian Eno record waiting for you or not. But if so, I don't think I want to be expli­citly told about it; I sort of know it already, you know. Disappointing.

Brian Eno (w. Robert Fripp): The Equatorial Stars

BRIAN ENO: THE EQUATORIAL STARS (w. Robert Fripp) (2004)

1) Meissa; 2) Lyra; 3) Tarazed; 4) Lupus; 5) Ankaa; 6) Altair; 7) Terebellum.

Long time no see! The last «Fripp & Eno» album had been released almost thirty years ago, even though, technically, the two sonic wizards still managed to cross creative paths every now and then. Lots of water under the bridge, too, and while the title of this third full-scale collaboration also happens to have the word star in it, the album has very little in common with Evening Star, or, in fact, with anything that you'd normally associate with Robert Fripp.

Genre-wise, this here is not «noise», or «drone»: The Equatorial Stars, a record dedicated to the still, visibly immanent beauty and mystery of those little lighted dots above our heads, is a 100% ambient record, focusing on static atmosphere much more than on any sort of musical develop­ment. And old man Robert seems perfectly content here to stick to a quiet, inobtrusive, repetitive style of playing, without any dynamic pre-planning of where a particular guitar melody is sup­posed to go or how it could gradually and subtly gain in intensity. In other words, a perfect setup is made for one of the most boring albums ever released — a record in which Robert Fripp, the demon hero of ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ, signs a contract with your local airport.

Strangely, though, the setup works, and scrolling up to see which was the previous Brian Eno ambient album that I liked to a comparable degree, I stopped at Apollo, which was hardly sur­prising — it's like The Equatorial Stars simply forgets about everything Eno did in between 1983 and 2004, and acts as a logical sequel to that mini-masterpiece. Only instead of grizzly Canadian bear Daniel Lanois you get clean-cut English gentleman Robert Fripp, who never forgets to wear a freshly starched collar under that space suit. Do they offer five o'clock tea on Meissa? Probably not, which is why they had to visit all the other stars as well.

Actually, Fripp as a contributor to the frozen field of ambient turns out to be surprisingly efficient. On ʽMeissaʼ, set against Brian's twinkle-twinkle-little-star droplets of electronic keyboards, he plays a minimalistic bass-heavy humming solo, which often sounds as if someone were really slowly bowing a cracked old cello with just one string on it — and the two parts merge together blissfully, as if Eno's high-pitched sounds were «life», Fripp's low-grumbling solo were «death», and everything else was trapped in between. Or if you think that's pretty far-fetched, you can just return to the usual idea of various types of aliens roaming the galaxy. Small, hasty, fussy ones engineered by Eno and large, slow, grumbly ones manipulated by Fripp.

The formula is repeated in a number of similar, but slightly different ways throughout the record, and it's not as if every track here has its own face: in fact, your conscience will probably only be slightly altered with ʽAltairʼ, where we have some programmed percussion and a surprisingly funky, though very faintly mixed, rhythm track — hello from the age of Nerve Net? — that might just as well not be present. Maybe they got it from a reliable source in the astrological com­munity that the population on Altair is particularly fond of nightclubbing, but more likely, they just had this rhythm track lying around by accident and they thought that it would be a nice inci­dental way to confound some people's expectations. Because it doesn't really matter — what matters are those little whistling flushes and flusters of guitar-like keyboards and keyboard-like guitars, probably representing the careless (and purposeless) spirits of all your dead ancestors who were seduced by low rent costs on Altair over the millennia. The rhythm track is just an echo of the irritating boombox that one of the brothers forgot to turn off.

Anyway, to me it all seems like a decent return to ambient form by Eno, and a startling side pro­ject for Fripp — unlike those two early albums, Equatorial Stars may not lay any claim to any sort of innovation, but it is still a somewhat different project, and it actually makes an even colder, an even more dangerous and impenetrable place out of open space than Apollo ever did. It seems too busy to get everything possible out of just one type of atmospheric texture to be really com­parable to Apollo — but it does achieve what it set out to do. Probably the best way to experience it, though, would be by blasting it at full volume into the sky on a particularly clear and starry night while lying on your back in the grass and trying to remember as many constellation names as your memory allows you to carry. This will bring you one step closer to rupturing the space­time continuum, I'm sure, and you'll never want to worry about the little things again.

Brian Eno: Drawn From Life

BRIAN ENO: DRAWN FROM LIFE (w. J. Peter Schwalm) (2001)

1) From This Moment; 2) Persis; 3) Like Pictures, Pt. 1; 4) Like Pictures, Pt. 2; 5) Night Traffic; 6) Rising Dust; 7) Intenser; 8) More Dust; 9) Bloom; 10) Two Voices; 11) Bloom (instrumental).

Definitely an improvement here. Apparently, J. Peter Schwalm is a German experimental musi­cian and composer, primarily a drummer and later on a human synthesizer, combining elements of jazz and electronica to produce some of that sweet music of the future. And considering how much Eno was moving in that direction himself, first with Jah Wobble and then on his own on The Drop, the two guys were probably destined to work together. Or, to put it more accurately, one of those days Eno was destined to work with an electro-jazz guy from Germany — the fact that this guy was J. Peter Schwalm we will ascribe, however, to historic incident.

The pair collaborated first on an esoteric project — an «image album» for a manga (Music For Onmyo-Ji) where the first disc was allocated to a Japanese gagaku ensemble, and the second one featured six Eno/Schwalm compositions. The partners having apparently taken a liking to each other, they decided upon a «proper» follow-up that would be in a position to make more waves, and not only did they carry it through, but they even went as far as to tour in support of the al­bum, which, if I am not mistaken, was Eno's first tour since the faraway days of Roxy Music (although he did have occasional sporadic concert appearances, such as with 801, from time to time) — in­teresting how a totally unknown Peter Schwalm succeeded in dragging him out, where neither Robert Fripp nor David Byrne could do the trick.

In any case, the product of their collaboration is arguably the most... eventful record, let's put it that way, to come out of the Eno camp since at least Wrong Way Up. Formally, it continues his obsession with «unwelcome jazz», but the compositions seem more inspired, meaningful, and dynamic than ever before — not all of them, perhaps, but enough to bring back a little bit of faith in the man, unless it is really Schwalm who's doing all the composing here. Memorable themes, diverse atmospheres, suspenseful build-ups, and, most importantly, that old feeling of getting lost in a surreal, but totally realistic musical world, it's all here to some degree, and without any hints of either forced nostalgia or forced modernization.

The most impressive compositions are arguably the ones that bookmark the album (discounting the brief intro and outro sections) — ʽPersisʼ and ʽBloomʼ. The former, a juxtaposition of Peter's drum'n'bass tracks and Eno's synthesizer textures, is a great example of «suspenseful ambient», as you keep waiting for these chimes and drips to resolve into something creepy, and eventually there is some sort of «intermediate» resolution, when an ominous string riff appears out of no­where and heightens the suspense — dark clouds on the horizon, approaching at an alarming rate, that sort of thing. Of course, the storm itself never comes, but that would be too much to ask for from a guy who is only interested in premonitions.

ʽBloomʼ, on the other hand, is a far more calm, gently-wobbling, trip-hop-influenced track, a careful musical rocking horse with bubbly percussion and a two-note cuckoo-clock-style synth rhythm, somewhere behind which you can distinguish (though hardly understand) the merry pat­ter of a little kid. As a bonus track, the album also adds a purely instrumental version of the same track, but, curiously, it works better with the kid — the contrast, or, rather, the perfect synthesis between the serenity of the lightly orchestrated musical track and the child's cute little noises is endearing without being cloying, and also helps remind us of this charming humanity that infests the best of Eno's works, despite all of their technophilia.

In between the two, there's all sorts of stuff, good and bad: extremely ugly and dated vocal effects on ʽRising Dustʼ, which sounds like somebody having too much fun with Autotune and not min­ding the consequences is something I could easily do without, but ʽNight Trafficʼ is another case of Brian's solemn organ-like keyboard parts and Schwalm's stern, doom-laden basslines well com­plementing each other, and ʽMore Dustʼ has a pretty, if not downright beautiful, minimalistic guitar/keyboard pattern that slowly «drips» on the listener and is much more evocative than any­thing on The Drop (or maybe it is just because in reality, I am charmed out by the equally mini­malistic bass «zoops» that have an entrancing quality to them).

In short, if we are ever to move away from «minimal minimalism» and closer to a world that requires a rhythm section and some musical development, the direction of Drawn From Life is a promising one — it's as if we have Brian slowly awakening from a slump here, correcting the mistakes he'd been guilty of ever since Nerve Net led him closer to the «techno world» and made him forget about his own identity and his own strongest sides. I am not sure if, given the strange strange strange musical standards of ambient, New Age, and all these next-level-of-conscience musical genres of the modern world, this record could be objectively called a «comeback», but in my perso­nal ledger at least, nobody could deny me such a record, or the prerogative of recom­mending the album to all of those people who'd lost their faith in St. Brian ever since the attempt to forgive him for Thursday Afternoon ran into translational difficulties. (That said, if you hap­pened to lose your faith in the man right after Before And After Science, the recommendation still does not apply — intelli-pop music this ain't).

Brian Eno: The Drop

BRIAN ENO: THE DROP (1997)

1) Slip, Dip; 2) But If; 3) Belgian Drop; 4) Cornered; 5) Block Drop; 6) Out Out; 7) Swanky; 8) Coasters; 9) Blissed; 10) M. C. Organ; 11) Boomcubist; 12) Hazard; 13) Rayonism; 14) Dutch Blur; 15) Back Clack; 16) Dear World; 17) Iced World.

True to its name, I believe that all of this album, except for the last track, is about «the drop». Since gravity causes different effects depending on the nature of the object subjected to gravity, things, you know, tend to drop at different rates with different sonic repercussions, and this is exactly the subject that Brian Eno explores on this album. And if you think the subject is slight, well, think again — can you even imagine a world without dropping? It's not every second, mind you, that a starving child dies in Africa — but every second, millions and billions of objects around the world effectuate The Drop. And has anyone in the history of music ever made a work of art about that? Absolutely nobody, not even The Fall.

On the down side, when you dig deep into the art of dropping, it shows little potential for fasci­nation. If you emphasize it and make tricky electronic interlocking patterns, like Autechre, it can have some crazy appeal — but if you treat it minimalistically, like Brian does here, it doesn't do all that much. Sixteen short tracks — snippets, really — that range from rhythm-less atmospheric textures to (theoretically) danceable tracks with drum-'n'-bass support, and most of them just float by without awakening any unusual thoughts or feelings. There is little here that wasn't already done better on Nerve Net or Spinner, and those, too, weren't exactly huge artistic successes. At best, this music feels like a collection of moody intros to potentially gripping songs — some mildly intriguing groove is set up, you subconsciously expect it to develop / transition into some­thing more exciting, it never does, and you walk away... dissatisfied. Maybe you will get an idea of what a ʽBelgian Dropʼ really is, but how exactly is that going to help you develop your spiri­tuality and keep in touch with The Eternal?

Since the tracks are so frustratingly non-descript, I believe that the only thing that remains is to point out that the last track, called ʽIced Worldʼ and stretching out for more than thirty minutes, is actually just an extended version of the second part of the last track from Spinner, and that nothing particularly different happens in those 25 minutes of it that were not included on Spinner. I do wonder if there's a skyscraper high enough anywhere in the world that would require a 32-minute ride with ʽIced Worldʼ as the soundtrack. If there is, they should be waiting for you with a straitjacket at the top, just for the purpose of extra security — or, at the very least, you might never ever want to hear a piano again as long as you live.

It is so ironic, of course, that the worst of Eno's ambient albums seem to be those on which some­thing actually happens — at least Music For Airports, with its Zen-Spartan poise, entrances you with its superficially humble arrogance, but this «unwelcome jazz» thing that Brian got going in the late Nineties is just yawn-inducing. Never even mind that these albums put him at a total dis­advantage with all the experimentation and innovation that was happening at the same time on the electronic scene — it's just a bunch of bland sonic collages by itself, in and out of any context. I can understand that the man was bored, but rubbing your boredom off on others is simply im­polite, especially for such a great artist.

Brian Eno (with Jah Wobble): Spinner

BRIAN ENO: SPINNER (w. Jah Wobble) (1995)

1) Where We Lived; 2) Like Organza; 3) Steam; 4) Garden Recalled; 5) Marine Radio; 6) Unusual Balance; 7) Space Diary 1; 8) Spinner; 9) Transmitter And Trumpet; 10) Left Where It Fell.

As most of those people who are supposed to generally know stuff about people named «Jah Wobble» already know, but those people who find names like «Jah Wobble» kinda funny probably may not know, Jah Wobble was an old friend of the Sex Pistols' John Lydon, and to­gether they originally formed PiL, where he played bass guitar before he got bored and moved on to an even more experimental/avantgarde solo career. That a guy like that would eventually attract Brian Eno's attention was quite probable, but it is important to keep in mind that Spinner was not really a «collaboration» as such.

Instead, what happened is that Eno simply sent Wobble a bunch of his tapes that were originally recorded for the soundtrack to one of Derek Jarman's experimental movies — just, you know, because what do you do with a bunch of tapes left over from a soundtrack? Why, you send them to Jah Wobble! Like, what could be more natural and predictable? Remember, Jah Wobble is always there behind your back to make good use of your leftovers (provided your skill level is at least 20 points, which makes you eligible for co-operation).

The results are not particularly thrilling, though. Wobble decided not to disrupt the steady ambient flow of Eno's tapes — instead, he just made them more bass-heavy, added some rhythm (in places), and emphasized the dark / mystical / ominous aspects, but all very gently, even on those of the tracks that also received a volume boost from percussion and electric guitar overdubs (some of the percussion was handled by Can's own Jaki Liebezeit, which is particularly notice­able on the title track with its fussy, overspilling drum track). What emerges is a mix of ambient, industrial, and even dub compositions that are never too intrusive, not very illuminating, and mainly just keep returning you to those dark sonic caverns that you have probably already ex­plored in depth on earlier Eno albums.

It's not bad, and not even meaningless, but none of this inspires any creative writing: the beats sound normal, the synth and bass tones are nothing special, the «acid jazz» overtones that some­times arise out of nowhere are fairly routine, and the last track, which goes on for 15 minutes, according to Brian himself, was not liked by anyone, so he called this style, self-ironically, «un­welcome jazz», which it is: starting out like a limping jazz-fusion shuffle with Eastern overtones and wildly wobbling volume levels, it is then transformed into something that sounds like an intro to a soothing smooth jazz instrumental, only looped to eternity. Yes, it's moody, but so is every­thing Eno ever did.

Overall, it is weird: there is actually much more happening on this record than is usual for Eno's ambient projects, but in the end you are left with the feeling that you got much less than you bar­gained for. Apparently, Enoisms and Wobblisms just do not make good partners — the ambient soundscapes are not in agreement with the bass grooves, and the end product is a disappointment somewhat on the same grounds as Neroli: an attempt to sound harshly modern that still relies on old-fashioned ideas of beauty — a conflict of interests that remains unresolved. But I guess that the very manner in which the record was produced automatically precluded it from potential mas­terpiece status. It's not as if Eno cannot work in a dynamic environment — his work with Talking Heads and David Byrne is best proof that he can — it is simply that here, there was no dynamic environment to begin with, just a bit of quick fiddling about by correspondence. Definitely not essential for fans of either Eno or PiL, I'd say.