I'd Love to Turn You On #239 - Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)

An argument could be made - and I’ve made it - that Brian Eno is the most pivotal artist of the rock era. If one lays his output on a graph with music history it seems like he has been constantly either breaking up the past or predicting the future. His work with Roxy Music took a hatchet to rock and prog convention, making concept over technique a willful and meaningful choice. His first four solo albums played with the idea that pop music could be more challenging than we had been led to believe. Combining a love for rhythm, heavy beats, and prog instrumentation with avant production he created a body of work that stands up well next to Bowie and Can as the tip of the spear of what might have been called cutting edge in the mid-1970’s. With Before And After Science he reached a new level of tea leaf reading. Released in 1977, this album is split into two parts: side A is angular, joyous proto-New Wave, and side B is a gentle and beautiful preamble to his ambient period which would preoccupy the next decade or so of his solo releases. This album took Eno two years to complete, and the ten songs included were whittled down from one hundred he wrote during this period. Each one of the chosen songs feels momentous and integral to the whole.

Also relevant to Before And After Science is the fact that it was the first album in which Eno employed his recently invented Oblique Strategies cards. These production tools were a series of “oracle cards” which when drawn from a deck at random would make suggestions like “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” Eno and his fellow musicians would attempt to act on these instructions without question. This method of creation shares DNA with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s Cut Up method of writing. There was intentional art, and there was entrusting the process to the whim of the universe, and each of these ideas was given equal merit. The result was magnificent as nothing on Before And After Science is predictable and everything sounds new and unexpected.

Opening with the chaotic rhythms and phased vocals of "No One Receiving" we are immediately thrown into a woozy world of off-kilter cadences that seem to come out of the mix like lead instruments instead of their usual background position. With accompaniment by members of Cluster, Brand X, King Crimson, Can and Roxy Music among others, Eno finds the perfect musicians for his vision. With minimal instrumentation he creates a symphonic version of rock music. Infallible melodies are coaxed out of the barest use of drums, bass and synths. No matter how carefully one examines the songs and their instrumentation there remains a certain magical Eno-ness to each number that gives it immediate and permanent mnemonic properties. You can’t exactly tell why, but they live in your head forever. "Kurt’s Rejoinder" will make you feel like you are in a pop music house of mirrors as synths soar above crazy time signatures with unforgettable Lewis Carroll-like lyrics. Track four, "Energy Fools The Magician," is the first hint of the ambience to come - a slinky instrumental led by Percy Jones’ slippery bassline and Fred Frith’s spooky guitar. Side One comes to a close with what I have always considered one of the first punk songs. "King’s Lead Hat" (an anagram for Talking Heads, whom he had just seen for the first time and would go on to produce) storms out of the gates with Andy Fraser’s crashing drums, marching handclaps, and clanging metal, and is punctuated by a deranged Fripp guitar solo. It bristles with spiky energy that would have fit in on a Magazine or Buzzcocks album.

If side A is a sonic report on rock’s contemporaneous state, side two is a never ending dream balm. Faultlessly melodic, "Here He Comes" is a beautiful and simple song with Phil Manzanera’s guitar and Paul Rudolph’s fretless bass solo playing off each other ecstatically. As side B progresses, we can hear Eno working his way toward ambiance. "Julie With" is a whisper of a song whose lyrics evoke beauty, eroticism and dread equally. Nothing but sparse keyboards, droning guitar and bass provide the gentle background. Eno intones "I am on an open sea, just drifting as the hours go slowly by/ Julie with her open blouse is gazing up into the empty sky." It is the audio equivalent of a Renoir painting - hazy, dreamlike, lovely. The album closes with the sublime "Spider And I" which finds Eno alone with synth waves, moody bass and the lines "We sleep in the morning, we dream of a ship that sails away…a thousand miles away." Eno’s muse was about to set sail. When Eno followed this album with more than half a dozen contemplative instrumental albums which plumbed the quiet recesses of modern art, it should have surprised no one at all. Side two of Before And After Science sounds like a man quietly slipping under the inky surface of his own artistic impulses with no intention of breaking the surface anytime soon. It is a sublimely quiet and singular listening experience. My highest endorsement is that for years I would go to sleep to side two of Before And After Science, and I never had any nightmares.

- Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On #148 - Brian Eno/David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

After Talking Heads released their fourth album and masterpiece, Remain in Light, the band went on hiatus while its members explored side projects. Guitarist Jerry Harrison released The Red and the Black, an underrated solo album which built on his work with The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Rhythm section and married couple, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, formed Tom Tom Club with Tina’s sisters and members of the Remain in Light touring band. Tom Tom Club’s debut functions like a release valve for the pressures building on Remain in Light and endures as a funky, energetic party album. Lead singer David Byrne and Brian Eno, producer of three Talking Heads albums, set off to create an album that draws upon similar archetypes as Remain in Light, but stands apart from anything these considerable talents have created before or since. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sounds like Byrne and Eno discovered a way to tune into the radio signal of this entire planet and distill it into 40 minutes of genre-blurring, hypnotically engaging, and beautifully layered music.

Three and a half decades after its release, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts remains a ground-breaking and brilliant tangent from the minds of two of the most idiosyncratic and cerebral artists in popular music. Whereas Tom Tom Club seized upon the incredible pool of talent that had formed around Talking Heads and aimed it in a loose, upbeat, and fun-loving direction, Eno and Byrne set out on a concentrated, enigmatic, and exploratory mission into the unknown. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts contains some of the same DNA of poly-rhythms, experimentalism, and pastiche as Remain in Light, but this album grows into its environment without the frames and guidance of Byrne’s observational characters or recognizable song structures. Although both Eno and Byrne were known at this point for their skills and abilities as lead singers and songwriters, it may come as a surprise to some that this album features neither their voices nor their lyrics. The album’s liner notes credit both Brian Eno and David Byrne with, “guitars, basses, synthesizers, drums, percussions, found objects.” In place of Eno and Byrne’s vocals, nine of the eleven songs on the album contain elements cited in the liner notes as “voices” and include samples of radio hosts and callers, preachers, an exorcist, and singers from Egypt, coastal islands near the state of Georgia, and Lebanon. Among the eleven musicians who worked with Eno and Byrne on this album, eight are percussionists and three play bass. Eno and Byrne combine this robust rhythmic engine with the found, fragmented vocals to create a set of self-contained, evocative snapshots that, when regarded as a whole, reflect back to the listener like a mosaic formed from the pieces of a broken mirror.

Eno and Byrne reunited in 2008 for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, an album that serves as a high point for both artists’ output in the last twenty years but bears no discernible connection to their first collaborative album. Everything That Happens Will Happen Today features some of Eno’s best recent production work as well as some of Byrne’s most natural vocals and most compelling lyrics since Talking Heads, but feels strangely orthodox and prosaic compared to the radical poetry contained within their first joint musical endeavor. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts merges elements of art rock, experimental music, funk, electronic music, African pop, folk music, field recordings, and minimalism into a highly influential sum, but few of its successors can compare with this fascinating musical exploration.    

John Parsell

I'd Love to Turn You On #138 - 801 - 801 Live

In 1976, Phil Manzanera, of the temporarily disbanded Roxy Music, got together with his ex-bandmate Brian Eno (then still going just by Eno) to form a new band for a series of live shows. Dubbed 801, from an Eno lyric, the group included several members of the prog scene and young drummer Simon Phillips who would go on to be one of the premier session players in rock and jazz. The material came primarily from Eno and Manzanera's solo work as well as containing a pair of classic covers, cleverly reworked. Most of the live set (and resulting album) alternates between instrumental and vocal tracks with Eno singing lead. With everything Eno has accomplished in the years since, and with the reputation that has grown up around him, this album seems like an oddity to look back on. This is primarily a prog/fusion group and it may seem like heresy to some to hear a few of Eno's classic songs performed in such a fashion. But at the time, they were all part of the same scene and it's great to hear this excellent material performed by a highly talented group of musicians, even if Eno claimed to be a "non-musician."

The album opens with "Lagrima," a Manzanera solo guitar piece, which serves as an intro to a radical reworking of The Beatles' psychedelic classic "Tomorrow Never Knows." The song is turned into a funky, spacey workout with particularly excellent bass lines from Bill MacCormick. The complex instrumental "East of Asteroid" follows and is the album's most purely prog selection. Next comes the ballad "Rongwrong" which contains a surprisingly gentle vocal from Eno, who breaks out of his usual monotone style of singing. This leads to the first appearance of an Eno composition, "Sombre Reptiles" which originally appeared on Another Green World. The tape loop-enhanced original actually translates nicely to a full band format. Unfortunately, the time and space limitations of old LPs force the track to fade out before the performance is complete. Another Eno tune follows and "Baby's On Fire" get transformed from an intense slow-burn to an all out rocker. Manzanera takes center stage on "Diamond Head," the title track of his solo album from the previous year. This is a true guitarist showcase with Manzanera moving from clean melodic lines to fiery solos. "Miss Shapiro" was also taken from the Diamond Head album but was co-written with Eno and actually sounds more like an Eno track than anything else here. Just as "Miss Shapiro" reaches its musical climax, in pops one of the most recognizable riffs in rock, The Kinks' "You Really Got Me." The venerable classic is given a complete makeover that manages to be whimsical while still rocking out. The album concludes with a thunderous version of Eno's "Third Uncle" that finds the entire band charging at full speed.

801 Live may not be the first record that comes to mind when discussing the long and varied careers of Eno and Manzanera. It is somewhat of a relic from the time when prog and glam were fading but punk had yet to assert itself.  It's essential listening not just for Roxy/Eno/Manzanera fans, but fans of prog, fusion and art rock.

            - Adam Reshotko

I'd Love To Turn You On #45 - Roxy Music – Roxy Music

 Roxy Music arrived on planet earth in an explosion of sight of sound, unlike anything ever seen before, sometime at the birth of the new decade. It was somewhere in between 1952 and 1992, and Roxy remarkably, seemed to be about both; doo-wop and electronics, Sinatra and space.

England 1972: there is a lot of music going on - earnest singer-songwriter stuff, progressive rock, hard rock. Thanks to the influence of Marc Bolan's T.Rex, there was another, more colourful scene bubbling up - glam rock. And because Roxy Music, on the surface at least, appeared to fit into this new, fun fad, they enjoyed massive exposure and chart success in Europe. However, this subversive crashing onto Top-Of-The-Pops merely allowed them to bring art-school weirdness into the British charts, just as Syd's Pink Floyd had done five years earlier. Like another glam star, David Bowie, Roxy Music immediately transcended this bubblegum trend and became something altogether cooler and more sophisticated. These two acts would, in England at least, change the course of music and influence nearly everyone there for decades to come. It's all here on Roxy's stunningly realized first LP - blueprints for punk, new romantic and new wave synth-pop can all be found in these grooves.

Roxy combines elements of the new gaudy Glam fad, European Prog, English surrealism, 50’s American Rock 'n' Roll and the old-timey songbook. On one side of the stage, there was Bryan Ferry - the impossibly cool crooner with a philosophical twinkle in his eye. On the other, there was Eno - futurist egghead and saboteur. In the middle, there was one of the great rock bands of the 70’s - Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson, guitar hero and tubthumper. They kept it real and rocking.

The album begins, like some nightclub Pepper, with light chat and clinking glasses, before kicking into the rip-roaring "Remake/Remodel," which not only is a corker of an opener but also lays out the conceptual ethos of their band; musical pastiche, post-modern quoting (Duane Eddy, Wagner, The Beatles) and esoteric lyrics (“CPL593H”). If you didn't notice any of the intellectual content, it's still killer rock 'n' roll, that still sounds cutting edge today.

Next, comes the amazing "Ladytron." A mutated love song, this track exemplifies everything Roxy were about in '72 - bizarre song structure, twisted romance, monstrous guitar and outré electronics. With Andy Mackay's exotic oboe and Eno's moogy noodling, it's the final word in Avant-garde pop music.

"Virginia Plain" was a giant hit in the UK and something of a standard on radio over there. This debut Roxy single (not on original UK copies of the LP, but on most CD versions) is another giant statement by Ferry and the boys. A fade up intro with fuzzed out bass leads into a proto-punk track filled with stops, starts, a shocking guitar solo and a surprise ending. Classic.

Side 1 ends in style with "2HB," an electro pop gem nostalgically dedicated to Bogie, highlighting Ferry's undead Bing Crosby and Eno's treated keyboards. Heady, beautiful stuff, which sounds as if the 60’s never happened.

Side 2 is another flawless batch of songs; highly experimental, highly tuneful, totally cool. "The Bob (Medley)," "Would You Believe," and "Sea Breezes" (later covered by Siouxsie and the Banshees) are all beguiling, radical tracks that you can hear the future of British music in. "Chance Meeting" is an amazing sonic picture drawn with a wash of guitar feedback. The album ends on a weird note - the 50’s vocal group charmer "Bitters End." When the backing vocals come in singing "bizarre" you know things are not as they seem. The album ends as it began, with a cocktail bar scene, bringing it full circle.

Eno's contributions to this world of sound mark the beginning of his illustrious career but he was never so brash or daring again, and Ferry's twisted nightclub persona was never again so edgy. Of course, Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry went on to conquer charts and hearts with further art rock classics, and later, the occasional AOR masterpiece, but this is where it began - on one of the most original, creative debut albums in the history of rock.

Start here and continue on.

- Ben S.

What Are You Listening To Lately (Part 10)?

Roxy Music - Roxy Music
Not quite seminal for me, but damn close. The album consists of weirdo artsy stuff that still retains enough pop/rock sense to seem sorta normal, though not so much once you delve into the soundscapes on side B. So yeah- wherever they take it, there's still a sense of melody, of structure, and for this I guess we ought to thank Mr. Ferry for dominating the proceedings enough that he deserved (or so he felt) sole songwriting credits no matter how clearly you can hear the audible input of his confreres. But the 'A' is downright classic art-rock, the 'B' never tests my patience unduly or anything, but I've noticed myself tuning out from time to time when they're not hitting it perfectly right, as they are in the fractured rhythms of "Sea Breeze" or the totality of "Bitters End." But it - and by this I mean the whole album, A- & B- sides alike - sounds fantastic. The enterprise of warped pop/rock songs makes a nice audio complement to Ferry's Romantic longings and letdowns and brings the whole thing up a notch. The record really opened some possibilities for my listening - it let me realize that you don't have to wear your strangeness on your sleeve to prove you're smart like too many avant-gardists think. You can be plenty subversive via more a broadly accepted means of expression.


Kimya Dawson - Alphabutt
It should be no surprise that someone like Kimya who's always sung about adult subject matter with the whimsy of a child and in terms a kid can understand should, on the event of her having her own child, make an actual kids' album complete with songs that indulge her mildly scatalogical humor ("Pee Pee in the Potty" and whatnot). I had hoped she'd take her gift for condensing adult ideas into child-friendly music, but given her penchant for being utterly goofy (not to mention the fact that her kid (named Panda) is still only an infant), songs about tigers in your bedroom and an alphabetical lesson that makes sure to use variants of "fart" at least six times out of twenty-six are probably exactly what I should've expected. So I may not listen to it much, but if I had a kid I just might, and should I choose to throw it on anyway, I'll get some laffs out of it for sure. And then at the end she throws down "Sunbeams and Some Beans" the politically charged kid song I had hoped the whole album might be. Killer. It fits totally within her ethos, but it's a unique item` for sure. Buyer beware. Juno fans, beware.


Various Artists - The Only Doo-Wop Album You'll Ever Need
It's great, sure, and only if you take the title literally will you have a problem with the selections that don't dive too deep. If you want a great intro to the music, 2+ solid hours of great doo-wop you'll be very pleased to have this, as I am. It's a bunch of no-brainer selections, by which I don't mean an insult, it's just that there's no way for things to go wrong if you program stuff like "In the Still of the Nite," "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" "I Only Have Eyes for You" and the like, the only potential problem being overexposure of some tracks. And that's what you get here, two discs worth of surefire greats, nothing controversial, every one of them very good or great. Again, if you take issue, it'll be with the false advertising of the title which is certainly misleading - there's plenty more great material out there if you want to look of course - but if you really only need two discs worth, if you look at the title and believe it, this probably will do you just fine. I personally take issue with the title, yes, but moreso with the skimpy book, which could tell you something about the personalities surrounding this great music and instead gives you nothing but a couple paragraphs by Billy Vera telling you why you should enjoy doo-wop. I mean, if you're reading it, you already know why it's worth your listening time, right? Anyway, take it how you will - a fantastic collection of music, or a misleading package that only scratches the surface; either way, it's a lot of great shit.