Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [111]
Of course, artists in all media have been dicking around with variants of this approach for years, and no matter how assiduously Eno applies it through endless retakes (Before and After Science, his new album of songs, took two years and 120 tracks to complete) it still seems to bespeak a certain yearning for passivity, a desire to let some nameless Other take creative control and dictate the resultant piece through its own mysterious processes.
I’m not putting Eno's methods down, though. They’re boring as shit to talk about at much length and probably unnecessarily complicated, but they’ve given us some of the most amazing albums of the decade: Here Come the Warm Jets’ “Baby's On Fire” alone surpasses anything by Roxy Music in conceptual audacity and feral force, and his second sonic collage, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was endlessly intricate, teeming with so many unheard-of inspirations that it may be another 10 years before the rest of rock catches up. (And the last time I made so fulsome with the superlatives I was reviewing Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, so listen before you laugh!)
Another Green World—his first solo experiment with what he called “unengaging” music—certainly had its fans, though I found much of it a bit too, well, “Becalmed,” as one of its precisely programmatic titles declared. Those little pools of sound on the outskirts of silence seemed to me the logical consequence of letting the processes and technology share your conceptual burden—twilight music perfectly suited to the passivity Eno's approach cultivates. It's certainly relaxing—I even know people who do yoga to it—and at its extremes it produces lovely sonic wallpaper, like the two Fripp and Eno albums, the lulling Discreet Music, or the new German import, Cluster and Eno, an ECMical instrumental meditation with two German keyboardists who make music so placid you realize how much heavy-metal edge Fripp's feedback pastorales had all along.
Me, I’m a modern guy, but not so modern I don’t still like music with real heavily defined content that you can actively listen to in the foreground. That's why I’m pleased to say that, while I still don’t think it matches Taking Tiger Mountain, Before and After Science is an inspired and inspiring album. And, as usual, Eno says his mouthful about which way his muses are blowing; he claims that this album is “ocean music,” as opposed to the “sky music” of Another Green World. Shamelessly, he even employs the kind of effects—bells, synthesizers, etc.— that a good movie soundtrack composer would use to suggest the slow-motion world of undersea, and nautical references keep cropping up in the lyrics.
Side two seems to drift on currents with a logic of their own which, interestingly enough, lead his melodies very close to the spawning ground of lullabies (maybe that's where flirtation with the Other leads: regression). I bet small children wouldn’t need any involved techni-conceptual explanations to relate to this music. They might even be able to explain the lyrics of “Here He Comes,” a song about a boy whose “sad blue eyes… fill the deep blue sky,” better than I ever could. Eno says he gets lyrics purely by association and is not particularly interested in what they might actually mean, which leaves the listener to impose his own scenarios on even the most specific songs. “Julie with …” could be a murderer's ruminations, or simply a lovers’ retreat… or Julie could be three years old. Anyway, in this song, which contains not a wasted note or word, a perfect little world is realized. Like all the songs on Before and After Science and its predecessors, it's program music but, as always, the listener is ultimately left to complete the picture himself.
On the other side of the album a variety of musicians permutated from track to track cook in a way that makes you forget all about Eno's theorems, and suggests