Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)

For his last in a run of art-rock-based albums in the 1970s, Eno assembled the cream of the musicians he'd worked with thus far (including members of Roxy Music, Brand X and Cluster - I ran out of space in the tags to list every name), and recorded over a hundred possible tracks over two years.  This was whittled down to ten that were a summation of the quirky avant-pop/rock sound he'd established, and also looked forward to his increasingly ambient interests.

Overlapping in part with the time Eno spent with Bowie in Berlin, Before And After Science plays well against Low & Heroes, not least on King's Lead Hat (also anagrammatic of future collaborators), and has several krautrock touch points too.  The lyrics on opener No One Receiving look forwards to The Belldog on After The Heat, and Moebius & Roedelius themselves appear on By This River, giving definitive Cluster & Eno overlap.  Another krautrock guest appearance comes in the form of Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Backwater.

Energy Fools The Magician aside, the original LP's two sides divide neatly into an uptempo, jagged art-rock side and a sublime pastoral side.  As good as the former is, the latter takes the crown for me in Eno's 70s output: the lovely Here He Comes; the bucolic-melancholic Julie With; the aforementioned Cluster co-write; an ambient instrumental aptly dedicated to Harold Budd, and the gorgeous closer Spider & I (thought by some to be about Bowie).  Outside of his purely ambient work, Eno really doesn't get better than this.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
Cluster & Eno 

After The Heat
Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (with Harold Budd)

Ambient 4: On Land
Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno)
The Pearl (with Harold Budd & Daniel Lanois)

Eno, Moebius, Roedelius - After The Heat (1978)

The second Cluster & Eno album (link to first one below), this time credited to their three individual names - perhaps with the more pervasive Eno influence, this one was felt to be a truer three-way collaboration.  

 

After The Heat is well named: there's a fair amount of cold and dark among the drifting ambient atmospheres on this album, and in the more rhythmic tracks like Foreign Affairs and The Belldog, the latter with a suitably unsettling Eno vocal.  Eno sings on two more tracks, Broken Head and the reversed vocal of Tzima N'Arki, which is also anchored by a Holger Czukay guest spot.  And of course, there's the requisite amount of Roedelius piano gorgeousness on Luftschloss and The Shade.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Cluster & Eno

Brian Eno - Ambient 4: On Land (1982)

Been giving this Eno classic a lot of play in the last week or two, mostly at as low a volume as possible, letting it blend in with the ambient sounds coming through the open windows.  On Land was the last album in Eno's Ambient series, and was created via a kind of "musical composting" from previous recordings and environmental sounds.

Guest musicians give On Land a fresh perspective too, with no less than three on the opening track, including Bill Laswell on bass.  Jon Hassell also contributes trumpet to the all-too-brief Shadow.  As a whole, On Land conjures up (not least from the track titles and liner notes) half-forgotten landscapes from childhood, reconstructed as vague impressions.  It's both one of Eno's most organic-sounding ambient records and most alien, and does get a bit unsettling in places, verging on dark ambient, with the more soothing pieces towards the end.  Essential stuff, endlessly listenable at any volume.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
Cluster & Eno
Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (with Harold Budd)
Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno)
The Pearl (with Harold Budd & Daniel Lanois)

Cluster & Eno - s/t (1977)

The first fruits of Brian Eno's collaboration with Moebius & Roedelius to be released (Harmonia sessions from 1976 would stay in the can for two decades), Cluster & Eno took the loveliness of Cluster's maturing sound on Sowiesoso and made it even lovelier.  The album opens, like Sowiesoso, with a simple monochordal pulse, but made much more delicate and less overtly electronic, with Roedelius on piano.  Holger Czukay, who'd have been on the brink of leaving Can at the time, drops by for a relaxing busman's holiday.

The second track, Schöne Hände, is barely there at all - just a gentle breeze of synth that whispers across an open field, causing small stirrings in the flora & fauna.  Even more than on the previous Cluster album, the move to rural Forst was working wonders on Moebius & Roedelius' sonic outlook, as was the addition of Eno's unique lightness of touch. 

The album continues in this meditative mode until it picks up a little in the second half with the more rhythmic Selange and Die Bunge, before taking a turn into the more Eastern-sounding One, featuring guest appearances from Moebius' Liliental bandmates Asmus Tietchens and Okko Bekker.  The most gorgeous track is saved for last, the shimmering sunset magnificence of Für Luise.  I've often though of Cluster & Eno as a winter album, but been trying to mix things up a bit of late, and it works just the same magic at any time of year.

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Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno - Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983)

Ambient weightlessness at its most divinely spacious and melodic.  Recorded for Al Reinert's documentary on the Apollo missions, which wouldn't be finalised until 1989, this 1983 LP collected all the original music.  Sampled heavily by subsequent artists, and reappropriated for other film soundtracks, Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks is still a standout in the careers of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno.

Making extensive use of the then-new DX7, Eno further processed the sounds of the synthesizer to create a spacey, floating atmosphere.  Mixed in with this at intervals is the sound of pedal steel guitar, played by Daniel Lanois, more associated with country music.  On Eno's part, this was a deliberate stylistic choice, finding country imbued with a sense of weightlessness when he heard it as a child, and also drawing the link between country as music of the American frontier with the space missions.  All of it is magnificent in its desolation - no highlights necessary to list.  Just play the whole thing, and drift in space.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
The Plateaux Of Mirror
The Pearl

Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

links:
Disc 1
Disc 2
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extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

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Harold Budd & Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois - The Pearl (1984)

For their sequel to the eternally gorgeous Plateaux Of Mirror, Budd & Eno added Daniel Lanois as producer, and Plateaux's piano & sound treatments blueprint into a masterpiece.  The Pearl was very much cut from the same cloth, but also improved on the formula, and nudged it closer to pure ambient music.

Much of the joy of The Pearl is in the small details: the occasional environmental sounds in the mix, the closer blending of the piano and electronics, and the more pronounced production touches on Budd's simple melodies, for instance the echo delay on the sparse notes of Their Memories.  A beautiful album that suits background listening and close attention equally well.

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Brian Eno - Another Green World (1975)

Sitting at the crossroads between Eno's earliest art rock offerings and this first ambient explorations,  Another Green World always makes me smile.  There's still a handful of his off-kilter pop songs scattered throughout, with random sung syllables developed into nonsense (but weirdly charming) lyrics.  For the most part, however, this album is composed of gorgeous proto-ambient minatures that prefigure Eno's work with Cluster/Harmonia.  Eno's guitar playing, with that long sustain from all his unique experiments, is possibly my favourite aspect of this album.  Listen to the all-too-brief title track for example, then think of Michael Rother's guitar style in the late 70s - wonder who was really influencing who?

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Harold Budd/Brian Eno - Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980)

Ambient magister Eno was introduced to US pianist/composer Harold Budd when the former produced & released the latter's Pavilion Of Dreams in 1978.  This follow-up collaboration, Volume 2 in Eno's Ambient series (Volume 1 was the seminal Music For Airports) puts Budd's gentle, "soft pedal" pianism front and centre, with Eno supplying soundscapes from which to build on, and adding varying degrees of synth accompaniment.

From the first moments of First Light, it's clear what an inspired meeting this was.  The track titles are perfectly evocative of the sound worlds they create, none more so than this opener as dawn breaks on a misty, dewy autumnal countryside.  Budd is on acoustic piano for all but two tracks - Wind In Lonely Fences, and the title track - the latter another high point on an album full of them, with an echoing chime-like tone and a proto-Twin Peaks backdrop from Eno.
 
Things get only slightly more uptempo on An Arc Of Doves, with rolling notes from Budd (although he's still utilising as few as possible, as per his brilliantly effective modus operandi) and a warm blanket of Eno synth.  The only other instrument that makes an appearance on the album is a gosammer wall of wordless voices on Not Yet Remembered, cooing a melody that Budd played by transatlantic phonecall to Eno - who, true to form, promptly reversed it.  It should be obvious by now that this album is one of my most enduring desert-island favourites; as long as I can swap the desert island for a windswept Hebridean island to get the optimum environment for it.

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