INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES
Musician JUNE 1994 - by Thomas Anderson
BRIAN ENO - I: INSTRUMENTAL / II: VOCAL
Blaming Brian Eno for New Age music is like blaming Kohoutek for the comet. All Eno did was make beautiful and innovative records, some superficial aspects of which were latched onto by the tofu lawn-party set. The guy has had a hand in some of the most thought-provoking albums by Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads, James and U2, while virtually reinventing the role of synthesizers in popular music. These immaculately remastered three-CD boxes not only unveil the quality of his solo efforts, but the scope of a vision that, in its consciously subtle way, has changed music as much as Phil Spector or Jimi Hendrix.
Box I, helpfully subtitled Instrumental, collects an impressive breadth of material from the compact song-shards of Another Green World to the expansive electronic mantras of Thursday Afternoon and Discreet Music. (One also notices interesting connections like Eno's recycling of No One Receiving's rhythm track on M386 - he didn't just redo the part, it's the actual track treated and used to radically different effect.) Though it boasts no previously unreleased tracks, a lot of the material here hasn't been heard since the Eno anthology Working Backwards, which disappeared about a decade back.
The Vocal box collects nearly everything from Eno's classic post-Roxy Music rock albums Here Come The Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain, then charts his ground-breaking journey into world music via Before And After Science through last year's Nerve Net. Included are a number of tracks from My Squelchy Life - sort of a Nerve Net Mark I - which are surprisingly more direct than those on the released album. As with the instrumental material, the high-resolution remastering is so great it's like hearing these songs for the first time. If records ever sound much better than this, I'll be surprised.
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