Rock’s minimalist master The expansive influence of Brian Eno BY TED DROZDOWSKI
	Speaking of Shelby . . . Q: The new album seems a lot less dark than I Am Shelby Lynne. Are you in a happier place now? A: Well, I don’t understand why a lot of people assume that I was unhappy then. You know, sad songs are the best. You don’t have to be miserable to make those kinds of records, not in every case anyway. Q: That brings up the creative-process question. Some artists write about what they’re going through; others decide to picture an emotion. A: It works either way for me. Sometimes I’m in it; sometimes I’m thinking about being in it. Q: So, what inspired an abstract new song like "I Won’t Die Alone"? A: Well, I wrote it in five minutes. . . . I don’t know; I’ve tried to figure it out myself. There’s the line in there about the "monkey on your back" thing. And I think that automatically people would think about drugs or whatever. But I think that there are certain burdens in life that don’t have anything to do with drugs or alcohol; it could simply be your family or the past. And I think that’s pretty much what it’s about — the past, and how it’s kind of like a monkey on your back. There’s nothing you can do about it. _FS

Remember rock-and-roll family trees — the ones that appeared in programs for arena concerts or inside jackets of greatest-hits LPs or, sometimes, in glossy music magazines? They’d trace an artist’s history or a band’s from birth (the roots) to various groups (the trunk) to spinoff outfits, side projects, and related bands (the branches). Eric Clapton’s, for example, might start with his upbringing in Ripley, Surrey, and go on to the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, and his solo work, with branches for Fleetwood Mac stemming from the Bluesbreakers, the Baker-Gurvitz Army from Cream, and so on.

Mapping Brian Eno’s career and sphere of influence would require an entire forest. From his first conceptual recording in 1965 — the slowed-down sound of a metal lamp stand being struck overdubbed with a friend reading a poem — to his new Another Day on Earth (Hannibal/Rykodisc), he’s had an amazing run as a composer, musician, producer, and sonic artist. Eno’s résumé includes charter membership in 1970s art-rock outfits Roxy Music and its spinoff group 801. But after an artistic dispute with Roxy co-founder Bryan Ferry, he went solo and recorded his first minimalist pop gems, Here Come the Warm Jets (Island) and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (Island), both of which have just been reissued by Astralwerks/Virgin.

These oddball experimental-pop albums, with their defiance of conventional musical technique and appreciation of jolting energy, influenced a school of arty post-punk outfits who fell under the "no wave" umbrella — Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, the Contortions. The one-fingered keyboard line and barked vocal of Warm Jets’ "Baby’s on Fire" foreshadowed Eno’s production of Devo’s bareboned 1978 debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (Warner Bros.). But Eno’s gift for surrounding his lyrics with woven layers of keyboard, guitar, and percussion stretched to odd tonalities by his affinity for electronic effects also torched creative bonfires for more-sophisticated pop outfits, from Japan in the late ’70s to James in the late ’90s.

Then came the tape-and-guitar duets No Pussyfooting and Evening Star (both on Antilles) with Robert Fripp, which laid the groundwork for the looping techniques that are such a large part of the current sound of techno, hip-hop, and pop. After a 30-year break, Eno and Fripp reunited to release The Equatorial Stars (Inner Knot) earlier this year.

Along the way, Eno invented and codified a sound we’ve come to know as "ambient," beginning with 1978’s gently hypnotic Music for Films (Antilles) and continuing with Music for Airports (Ambient; both also just reissued by Astralwerks/Virgin) and other microtonally evolving jewels. These albums played a role in defining the low-key æsthetic of new-age music and eventually influenced mainstream studio recordings.

As a producer, Eno has shaken the dust off major artists who’ve painted themselves into a creative corner, starting with David Bowie in 1977 with Heroes (RCA) and continuing into the ’80s with the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (Warner Bros.) and U2’s The Unforgettable Fire (PolyGram). He also launched a school of studio hitmaking — marked by lush, reverbed, and experimental sounds — by taking on Daniel Lanois as his apprentice. Lanois absorbed the soft attenuation of Eno’s ambient sonic techniques — careful recording with judicious use of electronic effects — while toiling on albums like Harold Budd’s The Pearl (Editions EG) under Eno’s direction. Then he went on alone to apply what he’d learned to a stack of albums from Robbie Robertson’s solo debut to Bob Dylan’s daring Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind (both on Sony) and Peter Gabriel’s So (Geffen). And he in turn took on the engineer Flood, who later brought the swirl of ambiance to PJ Harvey’s masterpiece To Bring You My Love (Island) and has worked with Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. Today when artists say they’re looking for a sound like Lanois’s or Flood’s, they’re really looking for Eno’s. You could argue that since Sgt. Pepper nobody has had as challenging or complete a vision of rock’s many possibilities.

Sixteen of Eno’s earlier titles (see sidebar) have just been reissued by Astralwerks/Virgin and Rykodisc. In light of that stack of CDs, which range from the hush of Music for Films to the primal charge of Warm Jets to the quirky post-industrial pop of Nerve Net (Hannibal/Rykodisc), Another Day on Earth is Eno’s great unifier. It’s his first solo album that weds the warm sonics of his ambient recordings with his pop tunes. Whereas time and shifting passions have smoothed the rough edges that made Taking Tiger Mountain, Warm Jets, and even Nerve Net such throbbing attention getters, there’s a mastery to Another Day on Earth that’s equally appealing.

Although he tends to sing in little riddles ("How many worlds will we ever see/How many people can we ever be/If we wake up," he asks in "How Many Worlds"), it’s no mystery that Eno is aiming for pure beauty. In "How Many Worlds," his voice is just another instrument, overdubbed and layered to a warm, musical sheen that slips into its place beside the keyboards and strings. And the title track, with its fascination for medium-size industrial beats and its shifting colors and rhythm patterns, is rhapsodic. "Bottomliners" is a superb fusion of Eno’s ambient and pop interests. He sings its fairy-tale lyric high and sweet and renders his voice into one more strand of the tune’s melodic fabric by using electronics to make it inhuman, like a high-tech keyboard playing a sample. On "Bone Bomb," he uses vocalist Aylie Cooke like a drum machine. Syllables get digitized and used as snare hits. She halts her way through an anti-war message, stopping at odd points to draw us farther into the music’s dreamy swirl.

With its words and vocal lines employed as melodic and rhythmic tools, its guitars adding colorful Fripp-like melodies, and its keyboards painting sonic glue over everything, Another Day on Earth might seem a bit of a science project, but it’s also gentle, often lulling pop. Eno’s newest hooks aren’t barbed the way they were back in the braying "Baby’s on Fire" days — they’re velvet-coated and slowly set. But once they sink in, they’re as memorable as the best of his earlier work.