Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Wire FEBRUARY 1994 - by Louise Gray

BRIAN ENO - I: VOCAL / II: INSTRUMENTAL

Two handsome box sets housing six discs, containing some eight hours of Super Bit Mapped Eno. Box I contains a selection of instrumental Ambient (but of course) music taken from solo albums as well as collaborative efforts with Davids Bowie and Byrne, Robert Fripp, Jo(h)ns Hassell and Cale, Harold Budd and Cluster. On Box II, a 'vocal' collection, there are large chunks of Here Come The Warm Jets, Another Green World, and Before And After Science. Journalist and erstwhile collaborator David Toop has contributed an intelligent and intuitive booklet to accompany Box I, while Paul Morley has provided notes to Box II. The handful of singles are here, too: with Seven Deadly Finns Eno unleashed his studied monotone vocals into the nether regions of the pop charts; and if you ever wanted to hear Wimoweh in a different light to that cast by Miriam Makeba (or even Tight Fit), that's here too. Excerpts from Eno's unreleased 1993 album for Warners, My Squelchy Life, and some rarities first included on Working Backwards 1983-1973, a long-deleted ten-album box set, form the exceptions to the heard-it-already rule.

It is hard to fight off waves of sweeping enthusiasm about Eno boxed. It's equally hard to curb, when faced with any such retrospective, a trainspotter's pedantry: where's Miss Shapiro, a song Eno contributed to his Roxy Music pal Phil Manzanera and the Diamond Head album? Or Two Soldiers, one of the better bits from the Byrne/Tharp Catherine Wheel dance collaboration? Where's anything from No Pussyfooting? They're not here, but their exclusion doesn't mean that these boxes should be burnt on bonfires. The Super Mapping process, which makes CD sound even more CD-ish, has brought out a rich strangeness in the music only hitherto suspected: there is so much more to hear now. Listen to the cricket chorus from The Great Pretender and if you don't call up the borough pest control department, then your neighbours certainly will.

There is some old Eastern adage to the effect that the same river never runs past twice. Which is to say, the same person never hears the same tune twice. To welcome this is to embrace the Cageian liability that lies at the conceptual heart of all Eno's work. It is to this heart that Toop's scholarly notes address themselves. Drawing parallels between a Japanese Zen garden and Eno's Ambient music, he writes that the "environment has been artfully designed to draw this state of mind into becoming." Both "can open perceptual doors to the territory described by the new school of Complexity scientists as the edge of chaos."

All this, and pop music too. Morley rightfully attends to the strangeness quota present in Eno's vocal works: "It's all babble, and it's all exact, and it's mayhem and it's deliberate. It's all haphazard and it's all design." He could be writing about lyrics like "As the empty moon enamels / Monica, with spoons and candles..." (The Great Pretender), themselves characteristic of Eno's "tossed word salads", all of them suggestive like a string of dream displacements. The sleeve to Toop's booklet is illustrated with a detail from an Eno oil painting entitled Map II. Its series of floating shapes are vaguely cubist in their fluttering and mutations. Placed alongside the music, they warn against fixed perspective.

The logic of these discs is to play them, sing along with them, cherish them. But regard them as a means to something else and their influence will last a lifetime.