Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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The Boston Phoenix NOVEMBER 2, 2010 - by Daniel Brockman

BRIAN ENO: SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA

Brian Eno is a man, flesh and bone, who talks and farts and sleeps and listens to things and presses buttons. But long after he's interred in the ground, Eno the brand will live on, as a set of aesthetic rules that take the chaos of modern life and distill it to sounds that will forever attempt to make sense of the human experience. Turning randomness into music, turning music into a series of solvable dilemmas: this is Eno's contribution to modern culture. Said to have been built on throwaways from his soundtrack work for the much-maligned film The Lovely Bones, his latest finds him collaborating with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams on a series of wordless musical vignettes that vacillate between airy emptiness and hyper-rhythmic tension in a way that screams, "Movie soundtrack!" Like everything Eno touches, the album is riddled with baffling and stimulating forays into unexpected territories, whether it's the scraping post-punk of 2 Forms Of Anger or the way Dust Shuffle and Paleosonic sound like cavemen discovering rave music. At some point, all we'll have left is the brand. Until then, it's still a treat to hear more from Eno the human and his continued vague creations.