Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector CHRISTMAS 2013 - by Inky Tuscadero

CHRISTOPHER SCOATES - BRIAN ENO: VISUAL MUSIC

SOUND AND VISION

From his brief tenure with Roxy Music, creating art-pop musical assaults while dressed in ostrich feathers, to his 2006 software project 77 Million Paintings, the audio and visual have been inseparable in Brian Eno's work. Enter Visual Music, then: a hefty hardback designed to be read while listening to CAM (Canada, Amsterdam, Milan), a previously unreleased 1983-84 Eno composition (download included).

Author Scoates has penned four of the eight essays in here, the remainder comprising of an interview with Eno circa 77 Million Paintings, excerpts from Eno's July 20, 1992 lecture at Sadler's Wells, Steve Dietz's essay, Learning From Eno, and Brian Dillon's Gone To Earth, a study of landscape in Eno's music. Scoates himself writes on Brain One's art-making processes, and there are a number of related galleries (the famed Oblique Strategies cards, video stills and excerpts from notebooks).

Truly, it's an in-depth study on the man and his work. How compelled you are to wade through it all will depend on your capacity for such academia. You might find taking tiger mountain by strategy a bit easier.