Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

New Musical Express January 21, 1984 - by Chris Bohn

HERE COME THE BOXED SETS

Eleven records from the life of a hard-boiled egghead - Chris Bohn takes an Eno beano by strategy

WORKING BACKWARDS (1983-1973): contains Apollo, On Land, Music For Airports, Music For Films, Before And After Science, Discreet Music, Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain, Here Come The Warm Jets plus Music For Films Volume II, Rarities EP

How to freefall through the boxed works of Eno? With no convenient nutshell theory to hand I consult his Oblique Strategies, a set of instructive cards containing one ways and more out of messy dilemmas. Devised by him and artist Peter Schmidt, "they can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation." I take the latter line. "In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear." So be it.

Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them. Let's set both ends burning: would the Eno of '83 - gentleman theoretician, furniture music designer, a filler of space with blank, friendly inertia - be seen dead in the company of '73's featherboaed Eno, fresh out of Roxy Music, greasepaint scarcely dry, whose hectic, hilarious word associations and random rearrangements of rock's rich tapestry (Velvet Underground, velveteen vocal groups, The Beach Boys) anticipated many screechy excitements to come?

To work backwards through Eno is to get the worst over with first. It is to progress through a set of ambient musics deliberately drained of colour, bleached of any character, to the triple peaks of Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain and Here Come The Warm Jets.

Give way to your worst impulse. You bulbous brained pompous parasitical insect twat Eno, why the fuck did you let your go get up and leave? Sorry...

Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame. I am being unfair. Eno's Ambient and Discreet Musics aren't intended as action pieces so much as an edifying background hum and should be so approached. Devoid of any life impulses such as rhythm, they are often singular strands of melody slowed down to the point where they are no longer recognisable as tunes. He chanced upon the idea, according to the sleevenote of Discreet Music, while lying in hospital listening to a faulty hifi barely playing at the threshold of audibility through one channel only. It was developed through the Ambient Series (Music For Airports, On Land) as a response to Muzak Inc's muzzled mix of canned light music. "Whereas their intention is to 'brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it... Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and space to think," he writes on Music For Airports. "It must accomodate many levels of listening without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

Certainly ignorable, it is rarely interesting. At least not when played in the home; and noting Muzak Inc's monopoly of piped public outlets it is hardly likely to be heard in its designated environment. Unlike Satie's furniture music, Eno's will not stop conversation. Should it therefore be judged more successful? No, because when listened to more attentively, the music is scarcely more noticeable than mildly polluted air.

Only when Eno has complete control of his environment does his ambient music properly function. In conjunction with his video installations - he has devised a video form as far removed from action as his ambient sound - it can usefully suspend time to create a new sense of space in which onE can relax, think, talk without audio visual aids ever rudely intruding. His Music For Films - now into its second volume of short amoebic atmospheric pieces - also operate superbly with a variety of images.

Perhaps this all adds up to Eno having outgrown the medium of recording.

Idiot glee (?) Gosh, it seems so long since Eno made a record that was fun to listen to! His collaborations with Talking Heads, Bowie and Fripp aside (none of which are included in this boxed set, thereby unbalancing it, colouring the latter half of it impossibly arid), the last recorded hint of humour in Eno's work is King's Lead Hat (anagram) on Before And After Science. But by this stage he had begun to work personality and vocal colour out of his recordings.

If its predecessor Another Green World is a music for reptiles, Before And After Science is a music for amphibians. Apparently influenced by Charles Laughton's Night Of The Hunter, its best moments recall the almost surreal quality of the film's river scenes, in which the fears of two fugitive children on the run from Robert Mitchum's maniac southern preacher are suspended by the beauty of the riverbank at night, its silence only disturbed by the noise of the creatures watching their boat glide by.

Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency. Nothing Eno did after Another Green World really advanced on it. The perfect summation of his adventures as a non-musician - an inspired amateur unhindered by musical conventions; which, of course, doesn't preclude being trapped later, in conventions of one's own. Oblique Strategies was devised as a method of escape from such situations - it not only contained the seeds of everything to come, but also laid down a valuable blueprint for most every other practitioner of pop electronics.

Each piece proposes a single idea, which it unhurriedly unfurls without fuss or frills. Soundsketches to his later soundscapes, they consist of bold vigorous brushstrokes overlaid with pastel shades, all executed with the striking simplicity of an oriental painting. Perhaps this is the quality that appealed to Japan, who made a career out of the fretless bass/liquid electronics combination devised here by Eno and bass player Percy Jones.

As a catalogue of possibilities Another Green World is far from exhausted.

Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap). Memory has it that when Jean Luc Godard, needing to cut his debut film Breathless by half, approached master thriller maker Jean Pierre Melville, for advice as to how he should do it, he was told to cut anything that might interfere with the narrative flow. Instead, he applied more random jumpcuts, which gave the film its marvellous bracing rhythm. Eno's first two LPs, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Here Come The Warm Jets, feel as though they might have been similarly edited. Like Godard's first movie they began as homages - to the noise/repetition experiments of The Velvet Underground, the harmony of American vocal groups - but by the time they'd filtered through the bends and U-turns of Eno's imagination and subjected to whichever random factor he was then applying, only their highly potent essences remained.

The rapid cuts throw up extraordinary, often hilarious collisions, both musical and lyrical. A surprise awaits at every turn, be it the reversed piano riff fuelling Driving Me Backwards or Eno's taut tarty-shrill vocal of Baby's On Fire (both Here Come The Warm Jets); the quite phenomenal intercutting of Chinese revolutionary opera and a John Wayne/Errol Flynn war movie - complete with brace whistling in the face of danger! - of Back In Judy's Jungle or the stunned sense of mission accomplished that is Taking Tiger Mountain's closing glory: The Beach Boys in Red Army Choir territory!

A long march behind him, a longer march ahead. In those days though none of us felt tired walking behind Eno.

Is there something missing? Here I should remind you of the joys of Eno's party piece - the ridiculous, remarkable yodelling on Seven Deadly Finns. It is included, along with his other difficult-to-get single The Lion Sleeps Tonight and three unfinished pieces, on the collection's Rarities EP. Like Music For Films Volume II, it is only available as part of the boxed set. Unless, of course, you are a film director, in which case you'll be getting one of the latter through your letterbox.

Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate. It is an unfortunate but not always inappropriate coincidence that the serial prefix to most of Eno's later records reads EG'ED.