Brian's voice

Reviews 04.11.2022

With the album ForeverAndEverNoMore, Brian Eno publishes an album (almost) entirely sung for the first time since Before And After Science, 45 years ago. In which he asserts himself above all as an authentic singer, enriching his vocal palette with new colors and textures.

One fine day, Brian Eno left his records. Not that his music, instrumental, became impersonal, quite the contrary, even if the "neutrality" - or rather the malleability - proper to "furniture" music was precisely his basic purpose. Simply, from the moment he inventedambient music, Brian Eno almost ceased to be a singer, even though he had previously asserted himself as such. This is not the least of the ambiguities linked to the figure of Eno, the undeniably cerebral image that has been his for several decades, that of a man (knowingly) in love with systems, if we compare it to the outrageous character he embodied during the first half of the 1970s, a glam-rock figure flamboyant to the point of overshadowing a Bryan Ferry. To this figure of arty "non-musician", who after having perverted the rather classic rock of Roxy Music (listen toThe Bogus Manon the album for Your Pleasure of 1973), had delivered a handful of albums that seemed to synthesize and sometimes even prefigure the great musical tendencies of his time, from punk(Third Uncle, on the album Here Like The Warmjets in 1974) to krautrock (the second part of the album Before And After Science, 1977).

The man of a thousand ways

So it was in 1979, with the release of the very cult album Ambient 1: Music For Airports, the birth of ambient music. Before that, there had been (almost) instrumental escapades with the guitarist Robert Fripp - (No Pussyfooting), 1973 - and with the first cousins of Cluster and Harmonia, or the album Discreet Music in 1975. There was also the creation of the label Obscure Records, whose 10 references published between 1975 and 1978 (Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, David Toop, John Cage, Michael Nyman, Penguin Café Orchestra, Harold Budd!) say enough the sagacity of the man. 

For it is no coincidence that in 1974 Brian Eno signed the preface to Michael Nyman's (fascinating) book, Experimental Music. Having played (as Nyman did) in the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, orchestras open to non-musicians, initiated respectively by Cornelius Cardew and Gavin Bryars, and a child of John Cage like many others, Brian Eno had long had a foot in both worlds. And he seemed to have decided to live his life as a pop star by proxy, as a chic producer giving Devo or David Bowie's records (before Talking Heads, U2, James, Slowdive or Coldplay) an experimental color. Or of "curator" before the letter, with for example this compilation No New York concocted in 1978 following a stay in Manhattan, which was going to give its name to the no-wave. Genuine eminence grise, Brian Eno is the perfect person to play "six degrees of separation". And a very rare and exemplary case, at not even thirty years old, of hybridization between "learned" and "popular" music. In short, in 1979, Brian Eno was everywhere. But, too busy with his machines and sound manipulations, often magical it is true, and with his conceptual preoccupations, he was diluted in his music. 

"Ambient music must be able to accommodate many degrees of auditory attention without privileging any one in particular, it must be able to pass unnoticed as well as be interesting", wrote Eno to accompany Music For Airports. In other words, it must be as relevant to hear in the background as it is to listen to at full blast, in exclusive listening mode. Since the voice is an instrument that is all too prone to draw attention, it was natural that it would be removed. This did not take anything away from the organic density of Eno's music. 

Brian Eno has always challenged the image of the "architect" artist, a demiurge with an absolutely clear vision of the final work, and prefers to promote the idea of the artist as a "gardener", planting seeds that may later bloom and live their lives. Don't forget that in 1975, he also published, with the artist Peter Schmidt (many of whose images adorn his covers), the Oblique Strategies, a card game that is supposed to help musicians in need of inspiration, by guiding them randomly towards unknown directions. His atmospheric music is less utilitarian than ecological. Another Green World

Thus Eno has, for several decades, given himself to the beneficial virtues ofambient, regularly with others - his brother Roger, Harold Budd, Laraaji, Jon Hassell, Laurie Anderson, John Cale, Daniel Lanois... A sort of "Who's Who" of the Fourth World, whose posterity is immense - the confinements of 2020-21 having contributed to his return to grace. There were also sound installations for art galleries or airports, self-generating musical creations, pushing further the reflection on "furnishing" music, ringtones for telephone companies... Always a foot between worlds.

The planet of the wise

However, the voice has never completely deserted Brian Eno's music; far from it. The very amniotic Drawn For Life (with Peter Schwalm, 2001), or the songs composed with David Byrne (Talking Heads) or Karl Hyde (Underworld) are examples. And sometimes, it was even his.

Eno's voice is rather high-pitched, it has long been in the background, a little distanced, almost white, and often doubled, demultiplied. A sound texture before being an organ. An instrumental line that blends in with the others, a melody, a gimmick. This is precisely what gives all their magic, all their hypnotic content to songs such as By This River or (with Harmonia) Luneburg Heath, and that you can hear in the way of treating the choirs on the album Remain In Light of the Talking Heads for example; this way of singing influenced more than one... We were happy to find it again, this voice, in 2005 on the album Another Day On Earth, on the (almost) title track, Just Another Day, or on the track Return composed with Karl Hyde in 2014. Elsewhere in the form of a chorus or robotic ersatz, vocoded to the point of being unrecognizable. Not to mention his unreleased 1992 "pop" album, My Squelchy Life, eventually replaced by an instrumental record (but replayed in bits and pieces on some later anthologies).Would Eno have been just a thwarted singer?

With ForeverAndEverNoMore, 22nd album (it seems) released this fall, we had the happy surprise to find Eno as a "committed" singer. In the physical sense of the term. In addition to the patina of years, which confers to the voice of the sixty-year-old a grain, a thickness, a vibrato never heard before, Brian Eno vocalizes, almost chants on tracks much more open, much more "abstract" or even ambient (Garden Of Stars) than the pop-songs which he had rarely gone beyond the framework. Or else they are extended, spread out, distorted, malleable pop-songs, such as There Were Bell (with Roger Eno on accordion). Because what strikes above all, and moves, is how much Brian Eno's voice, even in "duet" with his daughter Darla(We Let it In, I'm Hardly Me), is at this point in front, embodied, organ now as much as matter. It is the voice of a wise old man that one has the feeling to hear here, in the foreground. The sound treatments are always present, but what comes out first is a new feeling of humanity. Linked without doubt also to the humanistic content of the words, which gives to the whole an almost disillusioned, if not testamentary resonance.

In 2008, Brian Eno wrote a column for the American National Public Radio entitled: "Singing, the secret of longevity". In it, he recounted his practice of choral singing within an ensemble founded with friends, quoted a Scandinavian study arguing that the three pillars of a happy life were camping, dancing and singing, and praised the physical and psychological benefits of singing. This text only makes ForeverAndEverNoMore more valuable, and sheds new light on the trajectory of this decidedly elusive musician. Brian Eno, human above all.

David Sanson

Photo © Thomas Daskalakis, Acropolis

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