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.
Fripp has been doing this sort of ambient, dubbed 'Soundscapes,' since the mid-90s. An evolution from 'Frippertronics.'
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