Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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High Times JUNE 1978 - by Antonio Huneeus

ENO: BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE

Brian Eno is the kind of comic jokster who had to have a nurse pry his hands away from his bloody forehead after he had been run over by a taxi because, as he told her, he was keeping my head together, man. Eno got famous playing synthesizer with Roxy Music until lead singer Bryan Ferry fired him from the group because the audiences kept yelling Eno! even during Ferry's singing parts; Ferry, according to Eno, got progressively more pissed off. Since then, Eno has successfully collaborated at various times with King Crimson's Robert Fripp, The Velvet Underground's John Cale, former Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera and David Bowie; he has recorded three previous solo albums and is currently producing the punk bands Andy Mackay and Devo.

On Eno's latest solo album Before And After Science his vibrant lyrics conjure mystical landscapes, but the star is once again Eno's rhythmically pulsating synthesizer, which can simulate the familiar lub-dub of open heart surgery as easily as sonar blips, Sputnik messages, the religious tones of a cathedral organ, beach-blanket Blondie-style keyboards or West Coast laid-back Eagles-like tinkling guitar. The spacey wizardry of Eno's synthesizer creates sounds that ricochet and boomerang like a taut rubber band, while the blazing guitars of Manzanera and Fred Frith ally with the sizzling bass lines of Percy Jones. On Before And After Science Eno shows he's still the premier Renaissance man of avant-garde rock and the transcendental master of moog.