Brian Eno

The figure that best summarizes a significant part of English avant-garde music of the 1970s is Brian Peter George St John Le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, born in 1948 in Woodbridge, Sussex. The retrospective importance of his work has grown year by year. Not only did Eno bring revolutionary innovations in the way rock songs are conceived and produced, but by the mid-1970s he also invented ambient music, destined to become one of the main genres of the 1990s. Through his albums and writings, Eno theorized a new way of making and experiencing music. It is likely, in fact, that it will take decades before music fully absorbs his insights.

In the 1960s, after leaving the Catholic convent where he received his secondary education, Eno studied visual arts in Ipswich and, as a cellar musician, experimental music in Winchester; he learned the radical techniques of concrete, aleatoric, gestural, minimal, and electronic music (he even invented a sound machine using rainwater and recorded a piece for metal lamp percussion).

It was in 1968 that he condensed these experiences in the manifesto book Music For Non-Musicians, in which he advocated the figure of the "non-musician," technically entirely incompetent but endowed with creative genius. The artwork should be composed in three phases: conception of the piece, performance by individual instrumentalists (competent ones, that is), and final manipulation of the tapes by the author. Eno was primarily interested in the third phase.

After earning a degree in Fine Arts (1969), Eno made a living working as a graphic designer for a London newspaper while simultaneously offering his services as a sound engineer to the rock band Roxy Music. Soon the second activity prevailed over the first, and the sound engineer was promoted to synthesizer, an instrument through which Eno injected disorienting electronic effects into the group's songs.

After leaving Roxy Music following their second album, Eno spent the next two years engaged in countless collaborations, both as a musician and as a producer. His creative debut unfolded gradually, but from the very beginning Eno moved along two parallel tracks. On one side was the technological approach, which allowed the non-musician to make music and transformed the composer into a programmer of sophisticated equipment (synthesizers, equalizers, echo units, delay units, tape recorders, and monitors). On the other side was the operation of the rock musicologist, reflecting on rock itself, recycling styles and déjà-vu themes in a way that was appropriately recoded according to a typically post-modern practice.

On one hand, this led to tape experiments in collaboration with Robert Fripp, while on the other, Eno revolutionized rock music with the tetralogy of Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, Another Green World, and Before And After Science, later collected in the box set Vocal (Virgin, 1993).

No Pussyfooting (EG, 1973), the first album with Fripp, is an album of "types of sound," meaning fragments of sound mentally associated with instruments or familiar forms, even though the fragments themselves are not inherently musical. The "Frippertronics" technique (a mix of tape loops and feedback, an Eno idea though commonly associated with Fripp's guitar) debuted on The Heavenly Music Corporation. Both this album and the subsequent Evening Star (EG, 1975), which includes An Index of Metals, layer Fripp's guitar arabesques over Eno's electronic figures, employing for the first time Philip Glass's pulsing minimalism. While the concept pointed toward important developments, these works remain unresolved, repetitive, pedantic, and at most atmospheric. The latter album shows Eno's touch most prominently. Essential Fripp & Eno (Gyroscope, 1994) is an anthology of the two albums.

Here Come The Warm Jets (Island, 1973) is primarily a vocal tour de force that culminates in the rollicking, psychedelic, Native American-rhythmed anthem Baby's On Fire (featuring another phenomenal Fripp solo). The intellectualized form of absurdity is adhered to in the chants of On Some Faraway Beach, Paw Paw Nero Blowtorch, and Driving My Backwards, stripped of the caustic bite of music hall and instead immersed in a cold harmonic rationality - erudite abstractions of the eccentric and the absurd. The production is still rough and naïve, with Fripp and Manzanera's electronically altered guitars often disrupting rather than decorating, and the collection feels somewhat scattered, as if it were simply a notebook of sketches accumulated over the years.

Eno perfects the idea with Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (Island, 1974), bolstered by Robert Wyatt on percussion and Phil Manzanera on guitars. It is brilliant both as a desolate parody (with the detached irony of the dandy) and as a postmodern essay, a disordered fresco without head or tail, a superb castle of malodorous refuse, an indecipherable puzzle of futile gestures and neurotic outbursts, a monument to the abnormal intelligence of the everyday. By completely eliminating what had been the weak point of his debut, the album takes full advantage of top-notch arrangements, establishing a standard for the sound of the 1970s.
Conceived as music for a revolutionary Chinese ballet, the album offers not one but three ingenious revisions of traditional ways of making music: a method of giving an intellectual guise to music-hall tunes, the idea of blending ethnic sounds with Western song arrangements, and the insight that new studio techniques can breathe fresh life into the novelty genre.
The ragtag vaudeville gags are the last tie to rock, yet even the martial waltz of Back In Judy's Jungle (with electronic accordion simulation, a whistle choir, and hysterical street-organ chimes) and the pub-ready roar of the title track betray an academic loftiness, situating them in a less playful dimension.
The album also teems with timbres and rhythms from the Far East. Fat Lady Of Limbourg, Great Pretender, and China My China are experiments in how a Japanese lullaby, a gong, Chinese sticks or castanets, and, more generally, the vast heritage of ethnic music from around the world, can be mixed with rock instruments.
Ultimately, the highlights are the first masterpieces of what became this period's specialty: the hammering nursery-rhyme, a neurotic and schizoid form of "singalong." Mother Whale Eyeless and Burning Airlines are built on an obsessive, crescendoing repetition of the chorus, sung with an android-like nonchalance, over which Manzanera's guitar soars incendiary. The structure arises from a rococo layering of effects. In True Wheel, one thing follows another at breakneck speed: schizoid synthesizer and rock-and-roll rhythm, didactic cabaret-style declamation and revolutionary chorus, pulsating guitar solo and double-time for the grand finale. These tracks epitomize the idea of rock that is no longer rock, respecting rock's harmonic rules but having lost its emotional content.
Eno camouflages the music. He strips the song of its engine, leaving only the body. He organically enacts a process of demolishing reality that precedes the assembly of abstractions. In the contest between creativity and spectacle, Eno traces his "oblique strategy," championing a daring fusion of avant-garde methods and banal decadence, pivoting on a cynical rhetoric of ambiguity.

Another Green World (Island, 1975) continues the discourse with greater awareness, advancing along three parallel planes: the quality of the sound, which becomes ever more crystalline; the assimilation of electronics, now on par with traditional instruments; and the "estrangement" of the atmosphere, which transforms every song into an increasingly complex abstraction. In a sense, these three planes feed each other: as Eno's attention and familiarity with studio equipment increase, the emotionality of the music he produces with those tools decreases.
The first logical consequence of this process is that the voice loses its leading role, gradually giving way to the concept of music along ideological lines that is purely instrumental. Even the dramatic development of a song diminishes in importance, so much so that the instrumental pieces tend to be kept as concise as possible.
The instruments (Fripp's guitar, Phil Collins' drums, John Cale's viola) are measured to ignite the imagination to the fullest, transforming the most innocent cues into metaphysical deliriums. Whether catchy choruses like Golden Hours, harmonic oddities like Sky Saw, impossible cadences like St Elmo's Fire (with a galactic Fripp solo), or kitschy exotica like I'll Come Running (with a brief but clever Fripp solo) and Everything Merges With The Night, the "songs" shine with reflected light.
Even more hallucinatory are the tracks (instrumental) that Eno performs alone, entrenched behind walls of keyboards, in a titanic search for the sonic aphorism capable of condensing the deepest sensations into a few notes. The metallurgical industrial clang of In Dark Trees, the epic and cosmic mantra of The Big Ship, the African ballet of Sombre Reptiles, the celestial ecstasy of Becalmed, the sinister suspense of Zawinul Lava, and the desolate lament of Spirits Drifting create a mosaic of landscapes (both natural and mental) that extends far beyond the boundaries of rock music.
Possible references are scattered across a vast front: Fauve ballets, Dadaist avant-garde, supermarket muzak, Hollywood soundtracks, and above all psychedelic rock. Distilled and filtered, the music of Tiger reduces to sketches of "manners," a mosaic of "unfinished pieces," a collection to follow.
Eno now entrusts much of the orchestra to the synthesizer, which may be the true voice of the album. He reinvents the role of the instrument, giving it a prominence and freedom from a leading role that only guitar and organ had previously enjoyed in rock.

Before And After Science (Island, 1977) seals the season of this "meta-rock," merging the achievements of the previous two albums into an exaggerated formalism. Eno's sonic biology dissects and reassembles cells of contemporary rock, and in this realm his hand is now that of a virtuoso. Largely conceived in Germany, where he stayed with Fripp and David Bowie and formed a friendship with Cluster, the album proclaims on its cover the debt owed to the "oblique strategies" developed with the designer Peter Schmidt and benefits from an impressive array of collaborators, from Fripp to Fred Frith, from Manzanera to the Clusters themselves.
Eno advances both in the realm of techno-exotic danceability (the disorienting syncopations and Caribbean cadences of No One Receiving and Kurt's Rejoinder) and in rock-and-roll chant: in Backwater he hits one of his most catchy singalongs, one of the most demented cadences, and one of the most driving synth accompaniments, and in King's Lead Head he repeats the feat with breathtaking rock and roll, clapped rhythms, dissonant piano, a high-speed railway of sound with whimsical synth touches.
Eno delivers with reason and restoration-mania psychotic nursery rhymes chewed to nausea by a mechanical singer, rhythmically paranoid, stuffed with sophisticated arrangements, and underpinned by the metaphysical tones of electronic keyboards. The catalog of instrumental miniatures is enriched by two brilliant pieces: Julie With, liquid, tender, and crystalline, and the lyrical pastoral impulse of Through Hollow Lands. The album closes with the psychedelic and cosmic psalm of Spider And I.
With this third masterpiece, the meta-rock trilogy is complete. Eno has forever changed the history of popular music. First of all, he understood that the way music is produced has changed: the artist no longer enters the studio merely to capture the song performed live; the artist enters the studio as a painter enters his studio: to paint (with sounds). Brian Eno simply confers artistic stature on the role of the producer, which from the early '70s had often taken precedence over that of the songwriter.

With this trilogy, Eno also carries out a subtle operation on the "protagonist" of music. Instrumental popular music had existed for as long as popular music itself, but in Eno's hands it becomes something different: traditionally, an instrumental track was simply a song without vocals. Yet it was still fundamentally a song. Eno begins by subjecting the song format to a process of progressive depersonalization: on one hand, he accentuates the complexity of the instrumental "background" over which the vocals move, and on the other, he diminishes the interest of the vocals by using a childlike, slightly robotic singing style. In practice, he makes the sung part of a song increasingly less interesting and the instrumental part increasingly more compelling - the part he calls, with another painterly analogy, the "landscape" of a song.

The next step is to eliminate the vocals entirely, now superfluous, leaving only that "landscape" in all its complexity. The songwriter dies, and the sound painter is born. The instrumental track acquires meaning beyond the chorus, simply by being an interesting (sonic) landscape.

Overall, one gets the impression of a work of revolutionary scope, but not of a monumental work; of a notebook of brilliant ideas, but not of a single great masterpiece. Even here, Eno's belonging to the decadent generation is evident - one that has rejected the monolithic opus in favor of the fragment.

The issue may also be that Eno now has other things on his mind. In the meantime, he founded the label Obscure, around which he gathered some talents from the avant-garde. To launch its ambitious program, he personally experimented with creating Discreet Music (Obscure, 1975).
This work consists of a long, programmed piece that flows slowly and seductively, with only minimal interventions by the performer corresponding to tiny variations in the sound; music that unfolds in velvety touches, endless reverberations, and overlapping interferences; music that can be listened to and at the same time "ignored," a "cultivated" form of muzak in which the composer plays a rather passive role. It is an intensification of the work he had done with the Cluster. The album also contains three variations or "remixes" of Johann Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major."

Eno seeks minimal, slow, and gradual structures - humble and solemn, free of emotional swings. The static music of LaMonte Young and Ligeti's continuums are its best-known predecessors, but Eno's point is more radical: he emphasizes the "uselessness" of music.

The music the listener experiences is not necessarily the music the composer creates: other sounds can be overlaid, or simply the ambient noises around the listener, and the listener's own mood can in turn alter the original effect. The takeaway: it's just as well to let a weak, monotonous pattern drift. This way, the influence of external elements becomes more evident. At the extreme, this "discreet" music serves to highlight sounds that weren't recorded (ambient sounds) and those that don't exist (the listener's predisposition).

On the rock front, Eno takes the final decisive step with Music For Films (Polydor, 1978). This is a collage of purely instrumental fragments, ideally bridging the miniaturism of Another Green World with the broader insights of his discrete music. Each of the eighteen miniatures that make up the album pulses with its own life, aiming to create a sonic identity rather than a precise image. Films marks the transition from the surreal gags of his early work to a contemplative, almost religious impressionism.
It would be followed by Music For Films 2 (EG, 1983) and Music For Films vol 3 (Opal, 1988), later collected in the box set Instrumental (Virgin, 1994).

More Music For Films (Virgin, 2005) collects Music For Films 2 (1983) and a promotional CD originally intended solely for directors.

The new musical language is made of suspended atmospheres, quiet supernatural tones, dreamlike transparencies, metaphysical mists, galactic vortices, and imperceptible tremors, all dominated by a terrifying sense of emptiness. A universal melancholy presides over the slow, delicate evolutions of these mini-romantic sonatas, which at times recall Mendelssohn's most sorrowful wordless romances (Slow Water), at others brush against mantras (Sparrowfall, Events In Dense Fog, Final Sunset), and elsewhere create cosmic suspense (Alternative 3). Despite its heterogeneity and occasional character, this collection represents the peak of formal perfection in Eno's minimal and romantic approach to musique concrete.

Later, Eno took the concept of "discrete music" to its extreme with Music For Airports (Ambient, 1978). The work is part of a "music for environments" project in which Eno would involve other experimenters (Harold Budd, Jon Hassell). With it, Eno positions himself at the forefront of a movement dedicated to producing background music, analogous to the muzak of the 1950s in terms of listening methodology (or rather non-listening, since this music is forbidden to be listened to attentively: after forbidding the composer to compose, Eno forbids the listener to listen), but different in its makeup.
Eno envisions it as the soundtrack to everyday life, both in the large pavilions of an exhibition and in the vast halls of airports. Beyond the declared rejection of the traditional roles of composer and listener, ambient music defines the contours of the void already hinted at in discrete music.
In any case, this album marks the extraordinary maturation of Eno's emulation of Robert Wyatt's dreamlike weltanschauung, which had fascinated him since his miniaturist album period. Now, instead of acting on the tonality of the vocals, Eno dilutes the rhythms, erases them entirely, and scatters piano notes at a slowed pace.
The sixteen minutes of the first piece are performed by Wyatt himself and are the most transcendental: each piano pattern lifts elegant spirals of reflections in the form of fragments of an ecstatic electronic mantra. The second piece consists of pulses, echoes, and overlays of an a cappella choir, methodically unfolding over eight minutes and giving the impression of inertly bouncing from galaxy to galaxy. The third piece merges piano and choir, but while the choir maintains its religious and astral motion, the piano now has a drier touch, proceeding in brief, nervous bursts toward a more human despair.

In reality, the term "ambient music" would come to assume at least three different meanings over time. At the time of Discreet Music, Eno realized the importance of the environment for listening: for example, the same album can be played on a properly functioning stereo or on a faulty one, and the results are drastically different. John Cage's concept of aleatoric chance is here transferred from the compositional process to the listening experience. In this sense, it makes no sense to create "sensational" music - that is, music that surprises and captivates the listener - while it is interesting to create neutral music, which flows without emotions, possibly even for hours. In its execution, if not in concept, it was not very different from the work of Can on Future Days (1973).

Ambient music is also that which is conceived for a very specific environment (film, airport, supermarket, art gallery) - the muzak of the technological age. Again, it is more to be ignored than actively listened to. Finally, ambient music can be that which draws inspiration from an environment (even including concrete sounds) and thereby indirectly describes it.

In practice, Eno's ambient music is none of these three, because the non-musician does not stop there. The gradual progression toward movement (of harmony and sensation) continues with the next two albums, which introduce psychoanalytic elements and effectively create a kind of "psycho-ambient" music.
Each piece nonetheless retains the characteristic of staticity: the mechanical, infinite repetition of its own sonic hieroglyph, oscillating around a point of equilibrium. The main differences lie in mood (from mystical-transcendent to psycho-dramatic) and especially in duration: the melodic/rhythmic/harmonic pattern is not repeated indefinitely but stops after four to five minutes.

Continuing the program of Films, the album On Land (EG, 1982) is a mosaic of eight evocative rallentandos swept by languid breaths of synthesizer. With rhythm abolished, Eno explores the spaces in between within his discrete sonic realm, where, according to the texts of Theoretical Physics, nothingness is a random fluctuation of waves.
The music is nothing more than a heap of echoes and vortices stretched over time: the imperceptible distant hurricanes of Lizard Point, the dark cosmic frequency of Lost Day, the lugubrious rustlings and screeches of Lantern Marsch, the flashes of dissonant guitar in Denwich Beach, the reverberations of jungle animal calls in Unfamiliar Wind. Each composition replicates itself ad libitum, recycling its "theme" in countless variations. It is a sparse, imploded, convoluted sound, produced through electronic decantation and designed to evoke infinity through stasis and hypnosis, to simulate imperceptible motions of nature, to give sound to pure abstract immensities, to feed fears and nightmares, to compose symphonies of palpitations and whispers.
The obsessive stillness of these slow and eternal fluctuations is interrupted by the organic, pulsating, boiling disturbances of Tal Coat and by the suspense of Shadow, a field of cicadas driven by the archaic and oriental breath of Jon Hassell's trumpet.
Ambient music becomes thriller music, shiver-inducing music, suspense music, music of ominous premonitions, of irrational terrors, of inner disorders. Nature (the given environment) becomes a malevolent presence, looming threateningly. All the pieces are dark, and their immobility adds to the sense of unease a spasmodic anticipation of "something" about to happen.

Apollo (EG, 1983), conceived as the soundtrack for a documentary, and one of the very first albums to employ the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer, was another subtle Eno journey towards the microstructure of sound as well as the depths of the human psyche. It provided, in fact, the best definition of psycho-ambient music: given a landscape, describe the effect on the human psyche. Eno attempted a concept on what astronauts feel as they fluctuate weightless, as they observe the drifting Earth, as they plunge into the dark belly of the cosmos. Eno's implicit assumption and thesis is that we are all astronauts. We all share in the feelings of the astral journey. It is "our" journey. The limitation of the album is that the fragments are brief and inconclusive. The icy stupor of Under Stars, the mild dissonances of The Secret Place the majestic melody An Ending do not lead us anywhere. They merely exist, trapped for eternity in their unfinished status. The slowly revolving clusters of dark tones in Matta and the distant plateaus of the eight-minute Stars convey the most unsettling emotions.
A few tracks (notably Deep Blue Day and Weightless) attempt a fusion with guitar-based country music; which probably does not rank among Eno's most brilliant ideas.

The sixty-one minutes of Thursday Afternoon (EG, 1985) instead constitute the most radical experiment in discrete music, directly reconnecting with the compositional process of Discreet Music but on a larger scale.

More typical of the period, however, are the video frescoes Two Fifth Avenue (1979) and Mistaken Memories from Mediaeval Manhattan (1980), a kind of rock verite' that elevates, as an art form of great suggestiveness, the newly born medium of the videocassette.

Meanwhile, Eno had initiated a parallel project with David Byrne and the Talking Heads, although Eno is credited as an author only on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (Sire, 1980).

Eno returned to song with Wrong Way Up (Opal, 1990), which is primarily a John Cale album. Eno contributes mostly the exotic, Penguin Cafe' Orchestra-style tune of Lay My Love and the funky, synth-pop-arranged song with vocals, Spinning Away.

Eno produced his masterpieces during a period dense with organizational events but almost entirely barren creatively. He increasingly devoted himself to collaboration with other artists on the Obscure label and to discovering new American talent (godfather, among others, of Ultravox, the Talking Heads, Devo, and the No Wave scene), thereby helping, through his production imprint, to lay the foundations for the music of the future.

During the 1980s, Eno enjoyed an almost unassailable charisma. At times, he assumed the role of a rock ideologue, a wandering messiah of the musical jet-set (especially in New York), primarily concerned with keeping the media's attention firmly on himself and attracting as much talent as possible into his sphere of influence. His fame meant that some albums on which his role was practically only that of producer were also co-credited to him, in addition to the rightful author (Robert Fripp, Cluster, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, David Byrne, Roger Eno, John Cale). Brian Eno's participation in an album had become a marketing trick to boost sales.

The twisted thread of Brian Eno's musical experience actually follows a coherent path, one that moves from consumption to the avant-garde.

Eno rejects the label "musician" and prefers that of "systems manipulator." The reason lies in a radical revision of the very concept of music, which, paraphrasing his own words, can be illustrated with this comparison.

Originally, it was a common belief that photography existed merely to produce affordable portraits; in fact, photographers would tamper with images so that their final work resembled that of a painter, deliberately compromising the medium's fidelity. Similarly, early films were theatrical comedies; in effect, a film was nothing more than a traveling version of a stage play. In music, something similar happened with the invention of the record: the commercial power of the record lay in the fact that anyone could hear Caruso without having to attend Carnegie Hall.

In all these cases, the practitioners took time to realize that their medium could also be used in ways peculiar to its structure, fully exploiting its potential. This is precisely what is happening in music today: it is now possible to record music that not only bears no relation to what can be performed live, but is even music that could never be performed live - music that cannot exist in nature. "Music" is, in fact, something very different from what has been understood so far: it is that "black box" that exists between the recording studio of the "composer" and the hi-fi of the "listener" (assuming these terms still make sense).

An integral part of the project is the "holographic" theory of music. The fascinating fact about a hologram is that, if broken, each fragment still contains the complete image (albeit less precise), unlike a photograph, which loses part of the image when a piece is torn off. In a hologram, the entire image is etched across the whole surface, so that even the tiniest part retains information about the whole. Observing an abstract painting gives the same impression: each fragment produces the same feeling as the whole. The same is true of absurdist plays (Beckett): each individual scene, or even each line of dialogue, conveys the same message as the entire piece. In both cases, it does not matter if a random fragment is removed. Eno applies the same strategy to music: each track, or at the extreme each pattern, should contain the information of the entire album. At that point, it hardly matters how many tracks or patterns are recorded.

With the figure of the "non-musician," Eno essentially invented the modern electronic composer. He redefined the composer standard so that it could be an ordinary person and made the synthesizer artistically respectable.

Eno is also important as the epitome of the independent artist: he has no complexes, does not perform concerts, does not seek contracts with record labels, his instrument of virtuosity is the tape recorder, and he works alone in his private recording studio. All independent music descends from him.

Starting from sources as disparate as psychedelia, music hall, and musique concrete, Eno arrived at a historical and brilliant synthesis of avant-garde and pop subculture. From world music to new age, there is no avant-garde genre that does not owe something (or everything) to him.

Working Backwards (EG, 1984) and More Blank Than Frank (EG, 1986), reissued as Desert Island Selection (EG, 1989), are terrible anthologies.

A decade after My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (Sire, 1980), Eno felt the need to return to the same project of ethno-techno-funk music with My Squelchy Life (Opal, 1991), an album that was aborted and later released as Nerve Net (Opal, 1992). The central theme is explored along different dimensions. Fractal Zoom mixes the African polyrhythms with Klaus Schulze's cosmic music and Giorgio Moroder's disco music.
Despite the superficial "funky" appearance, the album is notable for the sheer commitment of Eno to jazz music. Wire Shock anchors the strong African presence (both vocal and percussive) to a derivative of Weather Report's jazz-rock. Pierre In Mist sounds like a warped echo of a nocturnal bebop solo. The playful theme of Juju Space Jazz mocks the bossanova. Ali Click is a slick, keyboards-driven, high-energy funk-jazz jam. The haunting, conga-heavy Distributed Being evokes Latin-jazz, Don Cherry and John McLaughlin.
Elsewhere (and it sounds like a different album), Eno leans towards the harshest, most disorienting aspects of industrial music. What Actually Happened sounds like drum'n'bass ante-litteram drenched into industrial frenzy. My Squelchy Life superimposes the electronic whispers of new-age music and the angular syncopation of industrial dance music. Web, possibly the most powerful piece, is a menacing distortion repeated obsessively.
The album was made by Brian Eno on studio machines, assembling and editing both electronic sounds and electric instruments. But it ends with the ultimate incoherent act, a simple piano sonata, Decentre.

Shutov Assembly (Opal, 1992) collects leftovers from 1985-90.

Neroli (Gyroscope, 1993) is an hour of ultra-static ambient music.

Spinner (Gyroscope, 1995) is a collaboration with Jah Wobble in which Eno probably did not play a major role.

The Drop (Virgin, 1997) collects 17 trivial electronic vignettes, and marked a very low point in Eno's career. Drawn From Life (Virgin, 2001) is a collaboration with percussionist Peter Schwalm and an army of distinguished guests. The results are disappointing at best: the compositions are hardly revolutionary and hardly captivating. The musicians behave like a bunch of spoiled intellectuals toying with the concept of "sound" (Like Pictures).

January 07003 - Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (Opal, 2003) marks, in a sense, a return to his ambient music, except that, instead of structuring a flow of piano notes, here Eno manipulates the sounds of bells. Eno finds a natural correspondence between his ambient music and electronic soundsculpting. If the concept is a bit outdated (countless avantgarde musicians had already discovered the "ambience" of soundsculpting), Eno still manages to give it a unique emotional spin.

The new collaboration with Robert Fripp, The Equatorial Stars (Opal, 2004) is an exercise in digital textures that adds little to either composer's canon. At best (Lyra), Eno is composing the lush background for a follow-up to Apollo, while Fripp largely abandons his frippertronic and relishes clean sustained tones. The proceedings make Eno look like an aging legend (of electronic rock music) who tries to catch up with the new generations (of digital post-rock music) without truly belonging. Eno was a product of the convergence between progressive-rock and hard-rock. Eno was, first and foremost, a revolutionary but still immersed in the sound of his age, which was fundamentally a "warm", humane sound. Trying to reinvent himself as a practitioner (not a revolutionary) in another era's sound (a sound that is, by definition, glacial and inhuman) is like selling his soul to the devil to gain a false immortality.

Confirming that he lost most of his compositional genius, Eno delivered a set of slow pensive ballads on Another Day On Earth (Opal, 2005). Most of them are truly embarrassing for a composer of his reputation, and one suspects that they were mere left-overs that (like much of his recent releases) he somehow felt impelled to deliver to the audience. Discrediting himself one more time, Eno shows that even the greatest brains fail when the subject of their thinking is themselves. This (reminiscent of One Word from Wrong Way Up) is possibly the least worse of the batch.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008), the second collaboration with David Byrne, was a cold and surgical affair carried out across the ocean, with little emotional involvement. Eno uses all the tricks up his sleeve to make Byrne's songs sound more than trivial lullabies. Pleasant but uneventful where the first collaboration, permeated by the spirit of punk and the new wave, had been unpleasant and eventful.

Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp, 2010) was a (mostly improvised) collaboration with keyboardist Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams.

Drums Between the Bells (2011) was a collaboration between Eno (sculpting the electronic soundtrack and manipulating the vocals) and British poet Rick Holland (whose texts are read by friends). The EP Panic of Looking (2011) added six more songs to the collaboration, basically leftovers whose main attribute that they are more poetry than music.

Lux (Warp, 2012), Eno's first solo album since Another Day On Earth, ostensibly a continuation of the "Music for Thinking project" series (that includes Discreet Music and Neroli), is a 75-minute suite in four movements. The magic touch that he displayed on his classic albums has long been gone. The first part begins like a chamber duo for tinkling piano and droning violin but soon the gentle, evanescent doodling of the piano takes on centerstage, and that's where Eno's art of slow-moving reflections and diffractions, the audio equivalent of Monet's late paintings, has a chance to shine. The second part opens with jarring almost dissonant drones and the strident tones remain in control, despite a late sliding into torpor. The third part starts out rather unassuming but along the way it achieves the majestic pace of a pipe organ intoning a church psalm and then meekly decays into shapeless cosmic radiations. Very little happens in the fourth part. Slowly, a tender piano motif emerges but neither its timbre nor the background drones make it particularly appealing. All in all, only the first part is worth the listening. The rest often sounds trivial, uninspired and, quite frankly, ugly.

Someday World (Warp, 2014) and High Life (Warp, 2014) were two collaborations with Underworld's Karl Hyde. The former was the worst album of his life yet, a collection of inept songs. Some (like The Satellites and Man Wakes Up) sound like outtakes of Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (1974) and at least one sounds like an imitation of Peter Gabriel (Who Rings The Bell). The latter contains only six songs. Return sounds like U2 singing one of their grandiloquent ballads in slow-motion. Time to Waste It sounds like a tepid, African-tinged tribute to David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Lilac sounds like a rather trivial replay of Underworld's techno music contaminated with the kind of exotic-tinged minimalist repetition that Eno employed with the Talking Heads. That era is better evoked in the funky, epileptic Moulded Life, the most energetic moment of the album.

The Ship (Warp, 2016) contains two ambitious compositions, and they are two more failures. Initially, the 21-minute undulating The Ship feels closer to Klaus Schulze's cosmic vision Irrlicht than to Eno's static non-vision Music For Airports: it is music that wanders through galactic space. However, where Schulze was tragic and Wagner-ian, Eno is his "lite" counterpart: a mellow soundtrack for a sci-fi film. Then things get worse as Eno starts singing a sort of Zen mantra in a lugubrious bass voice. The coda is the best thing, as the music floats away in a dreamy landscape. The three-movement Fickle Sun is a confused idea. The first movement is an 18-minute song that seems improvised by a teenager on a laptop by assembling amateurish ideas randomly found on the hard-disk. The album ends with a cover of the Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free, one of their worst songs ever. Someone should have told Eno to stop destroying his reputation.

The 54-minute piece of Reflection (Warp, 2017) was ostensibly just an example of the music that users could generate on their own computer with an application called "Reflection" which produces a live endless stream. In the age of artificial intelligence, with computer programs already capable of generating all sorts of pop and nonpop music, this sounded terribly out of date. Luckily the music was better than expected, given the precedents in Eno's latter-age catalog. The counterpoint between chimes and synths works for a while, but then it gets a bit too brainy for this kind of music, as if Eno tried to find a way to make it still relevant 40 years later. It is not the poetry created by Wyatt's piano on Music For Airports, but the science created by a computer in Eno's living room.

The six-disc box-set Music for Installation (2018)

Meanwhile, Eno had also started a career as a visual artist, although still related to music, with Natural Selections in Milan (1990). In january 2019 he debuted his large-scale site-specific audiovisual installation 77 Million Paintings, originally a DVD for "visual music" on personal computers of 2006.

Brian Eno touched a new low with Secret Life (Text, 2023), a collaboration with dj and songwriter Fred Again (Fred Gibson).