Brian Eno's enough

Crashing down the barricades of pop

by Ted Drozdowski

Nearly a quarter-century before Beck had two turntables and a microphone, Brian Eno had two tape decks and an attitude. Actually, they share the attitude: a desire to combine myriad sounds and styles, to realize musical change as a kind of Zen evolution.

Perhaps Beck will enter rock history as the father of slacker trip-hop. For now it's Eno -- who has just released another typically intriguing solo CD called The Drop (Thirsty Ear) -- whose place in the pantheon is assured.

Granted, Eno's no superstar. In fact, at 48, he's a reserved man whose baldness accents the roundness of his passive face. But his catalogue of quietly subversive compositions and productions traces the path of one of rock's most creative careers. And the breadth and detail of his sonic embrace has had the same impact on the character of modern rock that Phil Spector's Wall of Sound had on '60s pop.

"Brian didn't originate many of the techniques he employs, by himself or with those he produces. But he was one of the first to bring them into the pop-music area," observes David Byrne. Eno produced two albums for Byrne's former band Talking Heads, and he and Byrne collaborated on 1979's prescient world-music exploration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

"Brian loves both the popular and the obscure arty shit," Byrne continues. "He can dig a bass line from a completely commercial disco tune and mix it, attitude-wise, with compositional ideas from Cornelius Cardew, a fairly obscure British experimental composer. Like others from Sonic Youth to Caetano Veloso to Underworld to the Velvets, he sees no difference between the disposable, trashy popular culture and the rarefied realms of isolated artists relegated to financial and popular obscurity."

But it's not just Eno's consumption and reconstructed regurgitation of the seemingly disparate that's made him a postmodern pioneer. His work is more than a pastiche of influences. In particular, his development of what's become known as ambient music -- whether in solo works like Music for Airports and Thursday Afternoon, or woven into his cinemascopic productions of albums like Talking Heads' Remain in Light and U2's Joshua Tree -- has been groundbreaking. Through creating instrumental pieces that don't necessarily demand attention via volume or lyrics or dynamic chord or melody progressions, Eno has sought to change the way we listen. Perhaps not only to music, but to the rhythm of our lives.

The son of a postman, Eno grew up to the soundtrack of everyday life in '60s England: classical, music hall, pop, rock, soul, folk, the Beatles. At Ipswich Art College he was taken with the classical avant-garde, inhaling the ideas and sonic expressions of John Cage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, and Philip Glass -- a bevy of conceptualists and minimalists whose pull on him can still be felt in The Drop. But art student Eno was equally smitten with the otherworldly soundmixes of Jamaican dub master Lee "Scratch" Perry and the noisy barrages of the Velvet Underground.

In his first post-graduate rock band, Roxy Music, Eno spat his wilder influences back as tape manipulations, blocks of dissonance, primitive melodies, and effects-drenched treatments of conventional instruments. A fly in Roxy Music's slickening ointment, he buzzed off after two albums. Eno next marshaled his pop sensibilities into the solo efforts Here Come the Warm Jets ('73) and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy ('74). His singing is clipped but engaging, the songs are crude and brief, save for the fiery signifier of his future "Baby's on Fire," and the sonic and lyric mix blend campy nonsense with derring-do. Later in the decade these albums became touchstones for sophisticated punks out to slay arena rock's bombast with humor and sonic curveballs -- in particular, Devo and Talking Heads.

But with his pioneering ambient work, Eno was also responsible for clearing the aural territories now inhabited by reality tweakers from the Cocteau Twins to Spiritualized, Tricky, and the Orb. Even as he launched his solo pop career, Eno was exploring the concepts of Cage and the '60s minimalists in instrumental recordings. He and guitarist Robert Fripp developed a process of creating music via tape loops. In the albums No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star ('74), they recorded sounds, manipulated them with effects and varying playback speeds, and improvised over that. The otherworldly results still echo in the programmed beats of digital-age dance music. It's no stretch to say that elements Eno used in the '70s -- repeated melodies, found sounds, looped vocal and instrument samples -- have become stock-in-trade for everyone from Public Enemy to Prodigy. It's also safe to assume those influences weren't combed so much from Eno's solo work as from his higher-profile productions: the loops, sound collages, and unpredictable treatments in David Bowie's 1977 albums Low and Heroes (both also featuring Fripp), U2's Joshua Tree in '87 and Achtung Baby in '91.

But it's in the cool, meditative eddies of 1975's Discreet Music, 1978's Music for Films, and the next year's Music for Airports that Eno's most important work as a conceptualist stands. They are the sound of vapor, transparent and yet beautiful and busy as a lightly blown, sun-tinted forest mist. Discreet Music lays the groundwork, moving the tape-loop experiments into the realm of Eno's classical influence. In the piece "Discreet Music," Eno created tones and just-breathing melodies on a programmable synthesizer, and he used the synth and his tape decks to repeat those sounds. The melodies and textures are similar to those of Riley and Glass, but mellowed to a slow heartbeat. Also on that album is "Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel," in which Eno instructed three groups of performers to start simultaneously playing at different points in the score, overlapping them.

Music for Films was less precious. It's a collection of 18 short instrumental pieces that were either composed for soundtracks or orphaned from earlier recordings, featuring synthesizer, bass, guitar, trumpet, viola (via John Cale), and percussion. But Music for Airports perfected Eno's concept, setting the course for his later ambient recordings, including collaborations with LA composer Harold Budd, Daniel Lanois, and his steel-guitarist brother Roger Eno. Airports' four pieces for synthesizer, piano, tape loops, and electronics shimmer as they almost imperceptibly float by. It's very soft music, tranquil and slow as a mountain spring. And unlike the full blast of a rock band or orchestra, it's seductive or utterly ignorable -- depending on the listener's whim.

Eno metaphorically explains his ambient designs in the liner notes to his 1993 three-CD box set, Instrumental. "I'm sitting here looking out the window now," he tells David Toop, who wrote the notes. "There's a red maple tree in front of the window here, and as that moves in the wind, the color of the leaves changes as the sun moves through them. There's enough variety in that to keep me looking for quite a long time. But it never settles down either. I identify a little shape that I like and it changes again. So it's that transience and not-quite-repeating feeling that I like."

And in the notes to Music for Airports, he wrote: "Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular: it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

That aspect of ambient music is traceable to John Cage's notorious 4' 33", which compels the audience to interpret or ignore surrounding events as its players remain silent. In the notes to Instrumental, Eno tells Toop that "a lot of it came from Cage . . . the idea of making things without intentionality. Making things that were just part of the world and didn't make any claims to being special or different from it. . . . Here is an occasion for you to play the role of being an art perceiver. Here is an occasion for you to enter a different state of mind. I think that was the important shift of emphasis, away from the idea of the artist who puts something finished into the world, to the artist who creates a context within which something happens. The audience is a creative member of it as well."

In addition to his ambient work, Eno began dabbling with cross-pollinations of African and other Third World musics with rock, jazz, and classical in 1980 -- six years before Paul Simon recorded Graceland. And he's kept a foot in good old-fashioned pop, too, adding duo CDs with John Cale and bassist Jah Wobble to his stream of solo material.

Eno's new The Drop dances between the ambient and pop worlds. He's taken the gently shifting colors found on albums like Music for Airports and Apollo and condensed them into song-length instrumentals. Save for the wit of his better lyrics, every element of Eno can be found in its 17 cuts. Some, like "Block Drop," have the zinging digital effects of techno; others, like the piano contemplation "Cornered," have their roots in the Eastern European classical tradition. And there are synthetic soundscapes like the opening "Slip, Dip."

These sapling songs from the red maple of Eno's career offer the pleasing essence of an artist with no boundaries: manna for fans, a gateway for newcomers. Pay as much or as little attention as you like. He'd want it that way.