Friday, June 24, 2011

Brian Eno


No Friday Night Video this week. Instead, I offer three new cuts from Brian Eno's forthcoming album, Drums Between the Bells.

Eno has been hugely influential on me, from his initial glam-rock days with Roxy Music in the early 1970s to the later ambient music experiments, from his collaborations with Robert Fripp to his solo albums.  I think that after coming of age, as it were, listening to albums like No Pussyfooting and Another Green World, to Here Come the Warm Jets and Music for Airports, my mind and my ears were prepared for everything else that followed musically over the next many decades. He challenged and altered my ideas of what a musician was, what music could be, and most significantly, the ways in which the listener relates to the music, the art of perception.

In fact, my current obsession with new music is probably a direct result of the seeds Eno planted way back in 1973.  And in case you're wondering, here are some samples of what his output sounds like now, 40 years later.

Brian Eno - pour it out (taken from Drums Between The Bells) by Warp Records

Brian Eno - bless this space (taken from Drums Between The Bells) by Warp Records

Brian Eno - glitch (taken from Drums Between The Bells) by Warp Records

Drums Between The Bells is a collaboration between Eno and Rick Holland.  They apparently first started making music together in 2003, and since those initial sessions they met infrequently to work on new compositions. In early 2011, following the release of Small Craft on a Milk Sea, the pair resolved to finish the project. The piano and sustained guitar on Pour It Out sound to me as though they were lost outtakes from Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) remixed into a 21st Century post-rock, post-music, post-everything track.  But come to think of it, Eno's music has always sounded like something from the future, and even his older recordings still sound startlingly new and relevant.

The future, apparently, has been around for a while.

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