Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Trouser Press APRIL/MAY 1976 - by Scott Isler

FRIPP & ENO: EVENING STAR

In 1973 Robert Fripp and Brian Eno pooled their talent and came up with No Pussyfooting, an album much indebted to the kind of music Terry Riley was making three years earlier. Now, two and a half years after No Pussyfooting, Bob and Brian have once again labored mightily and come up with... an album much indebted to the kind of music Terry Riley was making six years earlier. What gives, guys?

Evening Star raises some basic questions about why records are made. Were Fripp and Eno pushed into recording this album by money-hungry Island executives? Like its predecessor, Evening Star is released on Island's budget HELP series so no one stands to make a pile of dough off of it. The assumption, therefore, is that F&E were burning to cut a new album (two and a half years being a respectable wait between releases) and, regardless of the fact that it broke no new musical ground, Island released it, counting on Fripp and Eno's rep and a nice cover to sell old music in a new package.

Ignoring (temporarily) the ethics of such a practice, let's look at the record: side one lists four titles - that's different than No Pussyfooting's one-title-per-side policy. Wind On Water is obvious tone painting, a Debussian ebb and flow of sound through the use of tape loops that fades into the title cut: a fingerpicked guitar part punctuated with ringing harmonics is used (again, via tape loop) as background for lead guitar noodling, occasionally double-tracked against a guitar drone, and piano doodling (from Eno?). As in No Pussyfooting Fripp uses a wide sustain on guitar which makes anything sound nice and he pretty much lets the guitar play itself. Evensong and Wind On Wind are two shorter pieces that exploit the technique of the accumulation of tracks added successively on a tape loop, the earlier tracks gradually becoming indistinct under the newer ones. All the music on this side is extremely similar in style and content to The Heavenly Music Corporation on the earlier Fripp and Eno album which is no surprise considering that the ideas and techniques are identical on both records.

Side two of Evening Star consist of one long (almost thirty minutes) piece, An Index Of Metals. Starting from silence, a note of shifting overtones appears and acts as a drone behind Fripp's guitar, again on a loop. Points of interest here are the introduction of some bass frequencies from the synthesizer about three-fourths of the way through and another new sound, an organ, also towards the end. Not very exciting but it's not meant to be; peaceful, relaxing, even soporific are the applicable adjectives depending on how you feel about this sort of thing.

The larger issue here, though, is one of artistic growth. How many people will buy this album on the strength of No Pussyfooting only to find that they might as well have two copies of the same record? Is this considered a ripoff? It is worth noting that Terry Riley himself, having defined this genre on his A Rainbow In Curved Air album, has since moved on to other concerns and refinements. Minimalist music is, after all, a limited field. By neither using a new bag of stylistic tricks nor developing their musical aesthetic, Fripp and Eno have cheated the consumer and revealed their own impoverishment of ideas.