Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Musician NOVEMBER 1980 - by Rafi Zabor

JON HASSELL/BRIAN ENO: POSSIBLE MUSICS / HAROLD BUDD/BRIAN ENO: THE PLATEAUX OF MIRROR / LARAAJI: DAY OF RADIANCE

Breathes there a musician who does not envy Brian Eno's chic? All he has to do is produce three albums for them to be referred to as the new Enos and be accorded respect, attention, and superstitious awe. In an age in which publicity can devour entire lifetimes in a matter of months or minutes, Eno has even contrived to remain mysterious. Partly it's because he's ambiguous, subtle and intelligent, but mostly it's because nobody's really sure what, on any given album, he actually does. If Eno's produced a date , or collaborated on it, does it mean he's played an instrument, sonically altered what someone else has played or merely beamed his intelligence into the studio? This vagueness is puzzling only because it's uncommon; as listeners we demand the facts, ma'am, and an ego to attach the music to but the facts don't help us know anything but themselves, and an ego is an arbitrary and unnecessary intrusion.

Trumpeter Jon Hassell's album has picked up some good press so far, and I like it too. It doesn't sound much like a trumpet album. It sounds like the music of some very subtle stone age tribe that happened upon a synthesizer in the forest one day and put out an album ten years later. The trumpet comes out soft and chordal, rhythms move like satiated pythons through light and shade and the air is rather humid. In fact, it sounds a bit like some of Henry Mancini's more effective excursions for alto flutes and rhythm, no offense intended. Eno plays a few instruments, but the one cut on which he does not appear does not sound substantially different, so this is Hassell's album, a big advance over his previous Earthquake Island on Tomato, and clearly an original statement from an artist from whom we can reasonably expect a great deal in the future. Doesn't knock me out, though. The Plateaux Of Mirror, Eno's collaboration with pianist Harold Budd, is the most rigorously ambient of the three albums in the sense that it would probably function best as an installation in an airport, laundromat, supermarket, or other muzak site. So employed it might occasionally prove revelatory, a sudden lake of consciousness in an unexpected place, an alternative and more motionless world. At home, Budd's few, pretty, repeated chords and Eno's sighing transistors do not sustain real interest for very long. Neither do they supply a very luminous background.

Laraaji's Day Of Radiance is the real stunner of the three, partly because of the sound of its unaccompanied hammered dulcimer, one of the world's most beautiful instruments. The dulcimer occurs in some form in most of the world's cultures; for its American use, seek out an album called simply Trapezoid; in the middle east it's called a kanun, it's something else in the Balkans and elsewhere. It sounds like the sparkle the world once had. I don't know who Laraaji is or where he comes from, but he's found some new uses for the instrument, most of them fairly obvious, but no less appealing for all that. On side one, with some discreet overdubs, he repeats himself as rigorously as Philip Glass. On side two, altered, echoed, delayed and otherwise interefered with by (I presume) the otherworldly evanescence of Eno, he provides continuous cascades of lovely sound. It would be hard to convey, short of playing you the album, how unboring this turns out to be. I especially like the album's several false endings, the music fading away and then drifting back in for no reason except that life's like that. There's also a moment near the end when the volume is turned up for a few seconds; I've never heard an easy effect made to mean so much before. The piece is called Meditation. Most recent Western "meditation" and "trance" music has been a superficial and mechanistic travesty of the possibilities of meditation and a poor second to the older, more spiritually precise musics of the world. Day Of Radiance comes through as something real. Side one, entitled Dance, renders Philip Glass' recent compositions of the same name a mite academic (I still like 'em fine though; they're on Tomato 8029, and the first side is a charmer).

I imagine the critical backlash on Eno will start soon enough, as bored critics revenge themselves on their own fantasies. Me, I don't care about ambient music one way or the other. Categories don't count; anything really good transcends them. What counts is that you're unaccountably roused from your slumbers and feel compelled, like Dr. Frankenstein, to remark, "Igor, it's alive!"