Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Wire NEW YEAR 1993 - by Jonathan Romney

BRIAN ENO: THE SHUTOV ASSEMBLY

Eno's recorded output over the last twenty years mostly leaves me cold. The notion of ambient music, so enticing when first articulated, has cast a deathly pall over the development of instrumental abstraction, encouraging musicians to wax vaporous under the pretext that there's a conceptual backbone to their procedures. I'd give Eno's entire output as a maker of mood swings-for-greenhouses in exchange for one song with the wit and mystery of The Fat Lady of Limbourg. On his song albums, he was doing something really risky - creating a pop equivalent of Raymond Roussel's crossword-like novels, cross-stitching the variables of language and coming up with (as that song put it) "the subtleties a spectrograph would miss".

The subtleties of The Shutov Assembly and its ilk are all too obvious, and too self-effacing. This collection gives a literal twist to Eno's now-canonic notion of curatorship - they were conceived for Moscow painter Sergei Shutov, who had previously been working to the accompaniment of Eno's records. I haven't seen the paintings, but I'd hate to think they were as non-commital as this. There's nothing on these pieces that ambient Eno hasn't given us before, except perhaps the muted throb of Markgraph.

Eno's aesthetic of the supplementary seems to have run its course. In his universe, nothing now seems to stand on its own (except TVs, which stand on their sides). Everything supplements something else - a lecture on perfume accompanies the back projections accompany the music accompany the lecture... The music on Assembly is about itself, in the way that abstraction inevitably is, but it's also the opposite of self-referential; it's saying, "pay no attention to this, look at that (in this case absent) object over there." The obliqueness and diffuseness of Nerve Net were passable, but this is more like the muzak for corporate lifts that Eno used to speculate about years ago. Then, of course, he meant it as a joke - didn't he?