Send "Brian Eno " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Who's your Brian Eno? The art-pop savant of Here Come the Warm Jets? The ambient theorist of Discreet Music? The prog-jazz dabbler of Nerve Net? Or the film music composer of Small Craft on a Milk Sea? Maybe you think of him mainly as a virtuoso technician, an innovative pop producer, a prodigious collaborator, or a visionary mixed-media artist. His broad range of talents and activities makes getting your head around his catalogue about as plausible as giving him a haircut, and it's natural for us to establish our own versions of what his baseline aesthetic is. Whoever the "real" Eno is to you, he's bound to show up at least once on his second LP for Warp Records, a mercilessly erratic collaboration with the poet Rick Holland.You could say with only slight hyperbole that Eno's signing to Warp last year was like the Beatles joining Elephant 6. The British label's eclectic roster-- Broadcast's cerebral electronic pop, Autechre's ascetic IDM, Boards of Canada's synthetic naturalism, Aphex Twin's ambient techno-- could reasonably be called the Eno Diaspora. Small Craft, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, was oriented around music composed for (and rejected from) Peter Jackson's film The Lovely Bones, but with its jungle breakbeats, ambient drones, and computer glitches, it sounded like Eno refracting Warp's own history. In other words: Eno making music influenced by Eno. Drums Between the Bells retains many qualities of Small Craft, including propeller-like live percussion and mildly dated whiffs of trip-hop and downtempo. The big difference is that the music is built around Holland's words, read by a number of different speakers. As it doesn't rely on the ironic voice and language games of modern fashion, Holland's richly imagistic poetry is well-suited to the project. The music around it is scattershot, but not random: Each song is designed to complement the poem at its center. Still, the record has a rather unnerving pace, overpowering and retiring in quick alternation. "Bless this Space" opens things inauspiciously with an electronic jazz fusion setting, which is about the most unsympathetic environment for a poet imaginable. "Glitch" is musically livelier, with a mightily abrasive climax, but the HAL-like vocal treatment flattens Holland's poem into numbingly literal sci-fi boilerplate....full text |
| Independent |
| Drums is a project designed to explore the resonancy of the spoken word in its relationship with music – in this case, Eno's elegantly airless electronica. The key is Eno's deployment of "found" voices, some of whose first language is not English. The effect is softly inclusive without being entirely bland, and even if Holland's poetry doesn't ring your bell as poetry, then it certain works in this context as sound-art....full text |
| Nytimes |
| For Brian Eno the biggest surprise in life these days isn’t that, at age 63, he continues to be one of the world’s most sought-after record producers, making platinum sellers with the likes of U2 and Coldplay. Or even that he remains a prolific solo artist four decades into his career, turning out three albums in the past two years. Blog ArtsBeat The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion. More Arts News Enlarge This Image The cover of "Drums Between the Bells." Rather, it’s his positive attitude. “Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it,” he said. Given Mr. Eno’s characteristically eclectic form of brain gymnastics, the conversation was only partly about his new album, “Drums Between the Bells” (Warp), to be released on Tuesday. Ask Mr. Eno a question — about lyrics, say, or his songwriting process — and an hour later you walk away with an unsummarizable catalog of big ideas on music, history and technology, as well as a reading list to keep you occupied for a month. In a recent telephone interview from his studio in London, Mr. Eno enthusiastically discussed evolution, the meta-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the effect of cloud music services on creativity and why “music” itself is an outdated term. (His suggested replacement, for which he has even designed an app, is “sonema,” which, he says, connotes a sense of “sonic immersion and environment” more appropriate to the 21st century.) And, not least, he explained his thinking behind “Drums Between the Bells,” a collaboration with Rick Holland, a young British poet, that is a kind of test of the limitations for interpreting the human voice....full text |
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