Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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New York Times OCTOBER 13, 2022 - by Jon Pareles

ON 'FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE,' BRIAN ENO SINGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

When you're expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That's what Brian Eno has done on ForeverAndEverNoMore, a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity's self-immolation in what he calls "the climate emergency."

"These billion years will end / They end in me," he intones in Garden Of Stars, as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It's a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life - "How then could it be that we appear at all? / In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust," he sings - while envisioning its cessation.

ForeverAndEverNoMore (Verve/UMC) is decades and decisions removed from Eno's 1970s song albums. At seventy-four, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno's most recent song-centered album, Another Day On Earth, in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.

On ForeverAndEverNoMore, Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chant-like phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions - with guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as "post-producer" - open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he's already staring into the void.

The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep-breathing sets the rhythm of We Let It In, as Eno sings, "We open to the blinding sky" to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla quietly repeats the words "deep sun." In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.

There Were Bells has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: "In the end they all went the same way," it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno's voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.

There's little comfort on ForeverAndEverNoMore. In These Small Noises, set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost - "Make us into land / Land of soil we owe our fathers" - but ends with a curse: "Go to hell / in hell to burn." The album's two instrumentals, Making Gardens Out Of Silence (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries' exhibition Back to Earth) and Inclusion, return to Eno's ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they're anticipating a post-human eternity.

Perhaps the planet's surviving species will appreciate the music.