ALBUM REVIEWS
‘Nerve Net’ (1992) was a relatively busy,
bustling offering by Eno’s standards,
reminiscent of some of the livelier
passages of his 1977 ‘Before And After
Science’ album. He himself described
‘Nerve Net’ in self-penned notes for
Warners as a record that “draws on jazz,
funk, rap, rock, pop, ambient and ‘world
music’… what it turns out as is none
of these things but a weird and selfcontradictory mess, and a mess that I
love – like paella, everything I like is in
there somewhere”.
BRIAN ENO
Nerve Net / Shutov Assembly
Neroli / The Drop
All Saints
A quartet of welcome reissues of
some of Eno’s 1990s output, complete
with extras
The 1990s was an excellent decade for
Brian Eno. He’d made his name, of course,
in Roxy Music, before it turned out there
was insufficient room for his and Bryan
Ferry’s large personalities within the
group. He did his most historically vital
work in the 1970s, assisting Bowie in his
European transition (which helped turn
round the sensibilities of subsequent rock
counterculture from American fixation
to Europhilia) and producing his series
of ambient recordings. However, these
were considered by critics as impressive
but academic, of little relevance to
mainstream development.
Come the post-rave culture, ambient
was now a key part of the afterglow of
pop, a key usage. Eno was vindicated;
furthermore, he was right at the centre of
things, producing U2. He was a wealthy,
revered and influential figure in a flush
decade for music, but by no means
complacent. The recordings he made in
the early 90s showed that his unabashed
thirst for new ideas about the formal
possibilities for pop music and what it
could potentially constitute was unabated.
Certainly, there’s a feeling of splurge
and abandon about ‘Nerve Net’, on
which he lets his notional hair down,
with tracks like ‘I Fall Up’ reminiscent of
Talking Heads (a group with whom Eno
had played a mentoring/producing role).
And yet it retains a sense of formalism
– that this is pop music about what pop
music could be about – while ‘The Roil,
The Choke’ sounds more like an artful
assemblage of words juxtaposed for their
phonetic effect rather than conventional
self-expression.
In contrast, ‘The Shutov Assembly’,
released the same year, is a collection
of sound installations put together for
the benefit of a Russian artist friend
who’d had difficultly obtaining Eno’s
music in the recently expired Soviet
era. Comprising work he had created for
mostly European venues, ‘The Shutov
Assembly’ is hardly the soundtrack to
the end of history heralded by Shutov’s
freedom to listen to what he damned
well pleased. It heaves and looms and
rolls darkly. In its generally ominous
mood, it seems to anticipate troubles
in Europe ahead (Eno would later be
among the few musicians to engage
with and explain the fate of war-torn
Bosnia and the particular tragedy of that
multicultural society in a conflict driven
by ethnic tension).
‘Neroli’ (1993) followed at a time when
Eno was taking a lively interest in
perfume – olfactory ambience and its
fundamental role in the human sensory
experience struck him as a potential
future for artistic endeavour. ‘Neroli’,
however, subtitled ‘Music For Thinking’,
comes with no scratch ’n’ sniff sleeve.
Minimal in extremis, it’s the perfect
accompaniment to cerebral cogitation or,
as I have found, to the writing process. It
turns over its main theme patiently and
repeatedly, rotating in unclouded deep
mental space. It’s music for when music
is too intrusive but silence too unhelpful.
‘The Drop’ (1997) is the least essential
of these reissues. Its cover is also
curiously perfunctory, a kitschy piece
of work featuring the silhouette of
a forklift driver. It’s never mediocre
(Eno is constitutionally incapable of
mediocrity), yet never more than an
efficient collection of glacial, angled,
funk-inflected sketches. But Brian Eno by
this point belonged to a higher pantheon,
as much a reference point