Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Uncut NOVEMBER 2022 - by Wyndham Wallace

BRIAN ENO: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

It's the end of the world as we know it... Eno returns to the vocal booth

The first public taste of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE could hardly have transpired in more extraordinary circumstances. As Brian Eno sang menacingly of "rock and fire" and "gas and dust" amid an ominously swelling storm of distorted synths, smoke lingered in the nighttime air and ash rained down from the heavens. He was standing on the ancient stage of Athens' Odeon of Herodes Atticus, in the shadow of the Acropolis, and these were not special effects. Wildfires were ravaging the Greek countryside, and when he cautioned that "these billion years will end", his voice dropped in a potent mix of angry admonition and desperate resignation. The song felt like a warning from the gods.

The occasion was the inaugural live performance last summer by Brian and younger brother Roger, in celebration of their debut full-length collaboration, Mixing Colours. Its timely release in March 2020, as the UK's initial Covid lockdown began, allowed its gentle solo piano instrumentals to recast our sudden, alien emptiness as a welcome opportunity for a breather. That premiere a year later of Garden Of Stars - and There Were Bells, which engages with similar themes - occurred in no less serendipitous circumstances, albeit, given their concerns, in an appropriately less soothing manner. "Here we are," Brian commented from the stage, "at the birthplace of civilisation, watching the end of it."

FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE's recorded versions stay, like the album's subject matter, loyal to the sound of that night. Garden Of Stars again finds Leo Abrahams on guitar, Pete Chilvers on keyboards, and Roger on accordion - plus the latter's daughter, Cecily, adding her voice - and its furious midsection flaunts the kind of visceral sound design favoured by sombre, supernatural Netflix dramas. There Were Bells, meanwhile, begins with birdsong and cosmic gong-like synths, Brian plaintively describing a summer's day on which "the sky revolved a pink to golden blue" before his somnolent mood slowly darkens. With a rumbling in the background, he conjures up "horns as loud as war that tore apart the sky", turning to biblical imagery of Noah's flood before gloomily concluding, "In the end they all went the same way". The lack of an apocalyptic backdrop does nothing to lessen either song's impact.

In just the span of a pandemic, Brian appears to have renounced Mixing Colours' escapist tendencies, his agenda now not only more pressing but also grounded in reality. This isn't without precedent: at points, 2005's Another Day On Earth tackled terrorism and 2016's The Ship addressed war, and with their emphasis on vocals, those albums also arguably represent this new work's most obvious musical forerunners. But the man sometimes known as Brain One has now, if maybe grudgingly, accepted that a compassionate, intimate, less cerebral approach may be more effective at urgently conveying the dismal ramifications of the climate emergency to which many of us, some wilfully, seem oblivious. FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE therefore makes little attempt to refashion the world in either a flattering or reassuring light, instead documenting a thoughtful, candid response to our environment's increasingly rapid disintegration. He calls this "an exploration of his feelings", and any influence he seeks is emotional. Avoiding sentimentality, this quality unexpectedly turns out to be vital to the album's success.

At times, like Mixing Colours, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE invites us to revel warmheartedly in the magic surrounding us, whether in broad brushstrokes, recalling the "last light from that old sun", a possibly nostalgic allusion to Frankie Laine's Lucky Old Sun on the sparse, subdued, jazz-inflected Sherry, or zooming in with wonder on nematodes early in Who Gives A Thought. As he puts it at the start of We Let It In, a brooding but beautiful lullaby whose synths breathe and growl like living creatures, "The soul of it is running gay / With open arms through golden fields".

This awe at nature isn't only lyrically conveyed. Perhaps the most powerful weapon Eno now possesses is his still- underrated voice, which he employs here admirably to communicate the feelings at FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE's heart. These aren't the playful, sometimes processed, chameleon-esque strains of Before And After Science, though voices are occasionally treated, including his daughter Darla's on I'm Hardly Me and his own on Garden Of Stars, where its faintly robotic character advances an already unsettling tone. Mostly his register, deepened by age, is luxuriously lugubrious, as it was on The Ship. Sometimes he's light and consoling (Sherry, Icarus Or Blériot), at others almost choral (We Let It In, the hymnal These Small Noises with Jon Hopkins). On the introductory Who Gives A Thought and the nebulous I'm Hardly Me he even makes a convincing Ratpack crooner.

His velvet pipes and gracious harmonies, however, can't hide how, befitting its themes of imminent catastrophe, this is frequently uneasy listening. We Let It In's "golden fields" end "in gorgeous flame" and, for all its glorification of creation, Who Gives A Thought encapsulates the contrasting melancholy in which the album's drenched. "There isn't time these days for microscopic worms", Brian continues forlornly of those nematodes, his melody descending like a sigh, "or for unstudied germs of no commercial worth". If he begins by humming his notes as though lying in a hot bath, lavish swathes of synths and Abrahams' hazy guitars are soon disturbed by a random, percussive knocking - like water slapping the side of a creaking, sinking boat - and snatches of unearthly radio signals. By the time a wistful solo trumpet punctures this mournful ocean of sound, the song's undeniable elegance has been holed by regret beneath the water line.

Something comparable could be said of Icarus Or Blériot, whose title, nodding to the mythical Greek who flew too close to the sun and the French aviator who was first to cross the Channel, extends a philosophical question posed insistently, and more directly: "Who are we?" and, later, pointedly, "Who were we?" Though its pulsing synths sound like distant planes and Abrahams' guitars might suit today's ambient Americana, any prettiness is undermined by unresolved tension and a scattering of brief bursts of dissonance. Admittedly it's among the more peaceful tracks, and not the only one loosely indebted to his earlier ambient excursions. Most of these "songs" are amorphous, devoid of rhythm, held together by Eno's melodies, and each side closes with an instrumental (of sorts). The celestial Inclusion ebbs and flows on a current of Roxy associateMarinaMoore's strings, and Making Gardens Out Of Silence is an eight-minute piece of generative music commissioned for the Serpentine Gallery's ongoing Back To Earth project, its distorted, pitch-shifted voices echoing through one of his more traditional soundscapes. It's less a finale than a swansong.

This, surely, is by design. That FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE's Greek harbingers were chilling offered little comfort beneath the country's sweltering skies, and a year later the album's troubling sentiments have only become more indispensable. Brian could have chosen to hector us, but instead reminds us of all we stand to lose while offering a flavour of our inevitably forthcoming grief. Certainly, the atmosphere's unnerving, almost bleak, but it's even more inspiring, and most of all poignant. If this turns out to be our planet's bittersweet requiem, we'll have only ourselves to blame. At least we'll go down singing these strange, haunting elegies. Foreverandever? Amen.

SLEEVE NOTES

Who Gives A Thought / We Let It In / Icarus Or Blériot / Garden Of Stars / Inclusion / There Were Bells / Sherry / I'm Hardly Me / These Small Noises / Making Gardens Out Of Silence

Produced by Brian Eno
Post-produced by Leo Abrahams
Recorded at Eno's studio
All instruments played by Brian Eno except Leo Abrahams (guitar), Darla Eno (voice), Cecily Eno (voice), Roger Eno (accordion), Peter Chilvers (keyboards), Marina Moore (violin and viola), Clodagh Simonds (voice), Jon Hopkins (keyboard), Kyoko Inatome (voice)

THE BEST OF ENO'S 21ST-CENTURY VOCAL CATALOGUE

BRIAN ENO: ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH - Eno's first album with his vocals upfront in fifteen years was nonetheless often restrained, whether he was singing softly on Caught Between, processing his voice on the hypnotically sweet Bottomliners, or silently casting a shimmering, ambient spell on A Long Way Down. Opener This, though, paired mellifluous harmonies with insistent rhythms, while Just Another Day's pacific groove showcased his growing vocal strengths.

DAVID BYRNE & BRIAN ENO: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY - Less radical than its predecessor, Eno's reunion with Byrne was provoked by a 2006 reissue of 1981's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, when chat about unfinished tracks led Eno to invite the ex-Talking Head to his studio. With Eno mainly on backing vocals, their voices mesh on yearning opener Home and the leisurely title track, while the gospel-inspired Strange Overtones is a highlight.

BRIAN ENO: THE SHIP - This conceptual suite's spooky, 21-minute title track combines Eno's revelatory lower vocal tones with an eerie ambience of bells and synths. If that's disconcerting, Fickle Sun's three parts begin with an even ghostlier setting disturbed by muffled cymbals and, later, sudden stabs of horn-like synths, before dropping anchor with an almost sacred reading of The Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free.

Q&A

Brian Eno: "Feelings change us, change what we desire and what we reject"

What do you remember about that night at the Acropolis?

That day the temperature reached 45° degrees. It was pretty terrifying. We stood on stage doing a soundcheck with huge electric fans all around us stirring the hot air. It settled down to about 36° degrees for the concert itself, which was just about tolerable. As we played, flakes of ash were drifting down onto the stage: the forests were on fire about ten miles from where we stood.

In 2020, you said one thing we want from art is "the chance to be in a different world, or in a different version of this world". FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE places us firmly in the real world. Have you revised your earlier opinion?

I still think that's what art can do for us: offer alternatives we can explore and have feelings about. When you read a novel, you voluntarily engage with a world different from the one you're in and experience the feelings that arise from it. Those feelings change us, change what we desire and what we reject. When you read Orwell's 1984 you enter a world of oppression and surveillance, and then, when you've had enough, you shut the book and return to this world. That's why art is important: because it's safe. But you can still know something about the fictional world you've entered and how it feels.

The album's title confronts our assumptions about perpetuity. How pessimistic are you about the planet's future?

The issue is this particular point is more radically different than any others in our lifetimes, and possibly in any lifetimes. There's a book, All We Can Save, by a number of female authors. It starts from the assumption we have irretrievably lost, or are in the process of losing, so many aspects of the world we have built our civilisations around that the question is not "How can we get back to the way things used to be?" - we can't - but "Which parts can we still save?" Fortunately, we are in the middle of the biggest social movement in human history, but it is mostly being generated from the bottom up - in local politics, NGOs, protest movements, citizens' assemblies - so the media fail to report it. It doesn't bleed so it doesn't lead. It's often slow and unspectacular, but we are building the infrastructure of a possible future.

You've said "these aren't propaganda songs to tell you what to believe", suggesting you're wary of asserting your views explicitly. Why's that?

Good question. I think it's because I feel that surrounding a preformed message with the emotionality art c an produce is a bit dishonest. It first of all assumes that you, the maker, already know the answer, and I certainly don't. Then it assumes it's OK to sell your answer to somebody else by dramatising it with emotional packaging so it will seem convincing. I don't have a programme that I want people to follow: I just want people to come to a different place and see what it means to them.

The album title confounds Christian expectations, exchanging the "Amen" of The Lord's Prayer for "no more", and there's biblical imagery in these lyrics, too: There Were Bells references the story of Noah, These Small Noises warns of imminent hell. Is the once "evangelical atheist" having doubts?

My atheism has become less evangelical as I've become more aware of the positive aspects of religion. There's a brilliant film by Sophie Fiennes called Hoover Street Revival, about a church of that name in South Central LA. That film changed my mind quite a lot. I saw how this church - and now I know, many other churches - created a place where people could belong to something and be bound together by a sense of fellow-feeling. I was ready for it, having been along-term fan of gospel music while always asking myself the question "Why do I love this music so much when I don't believe the fundamental premise on which it is based?" What I saw in that film is that religion is a way of making communities of shared values, a way of pulling people together, and offering them a place where kindness could flourish. Of course I haven't forgotten the downsides - the rabid Christian evangelists who wish to control our bodies and thoughts - and all the other horrors of fundamentalism, but I am now more alert to the upsides. Religious people at their best are thinking about a long-term project that isn't to do with making money or finding status through consumption, the two pursuits that are killing the planet. I'm still an atheist but 1 don't know if it matters anymore. I don't believe in God, but I sort of believe in religion.

This album's about sharing your emotional response to contemporary environmental worries, and suggests you're torn between celebrating our surroundings and lamenting their disintegration. Is this your daily mood, and how do you counter it?

I don't counter it: I spend most of my time in a schizoid state, laughing through the tears. I've come to believe that some of the best and most important artists we have in UK are our comedians - they're often doing the same thing. I think art is a way of digesting where we are and what is around us. Science discovers, but art digests. And the art of comedy makes us aware how nutty we really are.

In many ways, this record feels like a natural successor to The Ship, which showcased how your voice has matured over the years. Do you enjoy your newfound ability to, ahem, croon?

I'm comfortable with my new voice - it suits the phases of my life I'm in.

"Eno-esque" remains to many people predominantly indicative of ambient music. Does this frustrate you, or can you see those principles at play In more song-based material like this?

That was the idea: to make landscapes, but this time with humans in them. It took me a bloody long time to get there.