Brian's voice

Reviews 04.11.2022

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

One fine day, Brian Eno stopped making records. Not that his instrumental music had become impersonal, on the contrary, even if the "neutrality" - or rather, malleability - inherent in "furniture" music was precisely what it was all about. Quite simply, from the moment he inventedambient music, Brian Eno virtually ceased to be a singer, even though until then he'd been quite assertive as one. Not the least of Eno's ambiguities is the undeniably cerebral image he has had for several decades, that of a man (consciously) in love with systems, when compared with the outrageous persona he embodied in the first half of the 1970s, a glam-rock figure so flamboyant he overshadowed Bryan Ferry. To this arty "non-musician" figure, who after perverting the rather classic rock of Roxy Music (listen toThe Bogus Manon 1973's For Your Pleasure ), delivered a handful of albums that seemed to synthesize and sometimes even prefigure the major musical trends of his era, from punk(Third Uncle, on 1974's Here Like The Warmjets ) to krautrock (the second half of 1977's Before And After Science).

The man of a thousand paths

So it was in 1979, with the release of the cult album Ambient 1: Music For Airports, the birth certificate of ambient music. Prior to this, there had been (quasi-) instrumental escapades with guitarist Robert Fripp - (No Pussyfooting), 1973 - and with the first cousins of Cluster and Harmonia, as well as the album Discreet Music in 1975. There was also the creation of the Obscure Records label, whose 10 releases between 1975 and 1978 (Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, David Toop, John Cage, Michael Nyman, Penguin Café Orchestra, Harold Budd!) speak volumes about the man's sagacity. 

It's no coincidence that, in 1974, Brian Eno was asked to write the foreword to Michael Nyman's (fascinating) book Experimental Music. Having played (as did Nyman) in the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, orchestras open to non-musicians initiated by Cornelius Cardew and Gavin Bryars respectively , and a child of John Cage like many others, Brian Eno had long had one foot in both worlds. And he seemed to have decided to live his pop-star life by proxy, as a chic producer giving Devo or David Bowie records (before Talking Heads, U2, James, Slowdive or Coldplay) an experimental color. Or a "curator" before his time, with the No New York compilation concocted in 1978 following a stay in Manhattan, which gave its name to no-wave. An authentic éminence grise, Brian Eno is the ideal person to play "six degrees of separation". And a very rare and exemplary case, 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 often magical machines and sound manipulations, and with his conceptual preoccupations, he became diluted in his music. 

"Ambient music must be able to accommodate many degrees of auditory attention without favoring any one in particular; it must be able to go 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. As the voice is an instrument that is all too prone to grabbing attention, it was only natural that it should withdraw. This did nothing to detract from the organic density of Eno's music. 

Brian Eno has always shied away from the image of the artist as "architect", the demiurge with an absolutely clear vision of the final work, preferring to promote the idea of the artist as "gardener", planting seeds which may then blossom and live their own lives. Don't forget that in 1975, together with artist Peter Schmidt (many of whose images adorn his covers), he also published Stratégies obliques (Oblique Strategies), a card game intended to help musicians lacking inspiration, by guiding them at random in unknown directions. His atmospheric music is less utilitarian than ecological. Another Green World

For several decades, Eno devoted himself to the beneficial virtues ofambient, regularly working 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 in no small measure to his return to favor. There have also been sound installations for art galleries and airports, self-generating musical creations that push the boundaries of "furnishing" music, and ringtones for telephone companies... Always with one foot between worlds.

The planet of sages

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

Eno's voice is rather high-pitched, and for a long time it was also 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. It's precisely this that gives songs like By This River and (with Harmonia) Luneburg Heath their magic, their hypnotic content, and that can be heard in the way backing vocals are handled on the Talking Heads' album Remain In Light, for example; this way of singing has influenced many... We were happy to find this voice again on the 2005 album Another Day On Earth, on the (almost) title trackJust 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 unrecognizability. Not to mention his unreleased 1992 "pop" album, My Squelchy Life, eventually replaced by an instrumental disc (but reappearing in bits and pieces on some later anthologies).Could Eno have been nothing more than a thwarted singer?

With ForeverAndEverNoMore, his 22nd album (it seems) released this autumn, we were in any case pleasantly surprised to find Eno back as a "committed" singer. In the physical sense of the word. In addition to the patina of years, which gives the sixty-something's voice an unprecedented grain, thickness and vibrato, Brian Eno vocalizes, almost psalmodizes on tracks that are much more open, much more abstract, even ambient (Garden Of Stars) than the pop-songs he had rarely gone beyond. Or maybe it's the extended, sprawling, distorted, malleable pop-songs such as There Were Bell (with Roger Eno on accordion). What's most striking, and most moving, is the extent to which Brian Eno's voice, even in "duet" with his daughter Darla(We Let it In, I'm Hardly Me), is so forward, embodied, an organ now as much as matter. It's the voice of a wise old man that we feel we're hearing here, in the foreground. The sound treatments are always present, but what emerges first is a new sense of humanity. This is undoubtedly linked to the humanist content of the lyrics, which give 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 experience of choral singing in an ensemble founded with friends, cited a Scandinavian study arguing that the three pillars of a happy life were camping, dancing and singing, and extolled the physical and psychological benefits of singing. This text only adds to the value of ForeverAndEverNoMore, 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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