Brian Eno - Music For Films (1976)

'Music For Films' is one of Brian Eno's best-known albums, and it was the beginning of the 'ambient' phase of his career, where he would compose instrumental pieces that emphasize tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. If you own the album then it's unlikely that you have this version, as the basic core of tracks making up 'Music For Films' was originally assembled in 1976 in a limited edition of 500 copies, for inclusion in a promotional LP of prospective cues sent to film directors, alongside Eno's cryptic comment: "some of it was made specifically for soundtrack material, (and) some of it was made for other reasons but found its way into films". As with most things Eno, this led to a good deal of speculation and controversy, with one filmmaker long ago stating, "All of that is crap -- this music was never used in any films," and another film student who had tried out some of the cues commenting "this is the worst music for films ever. These cues don't synch to anything." However, the second filmmaker had unintentionally discovered the essence of 'Music For Films', as the 27 pieces here are actually little films, stimulating the visual part of one's brain and thus fulfilling their promotional purpose, and in that sense, 'Music For Films' was revolutionary. The US vinyl edition was notoriously crackly sounding, and impossible to track properly, and so when it finally gained a commercial release two years later in 1978 it was welcomed by fans, although they soon realised that this eighteen track version had ditched many of the pieces from the original album, while renaming or replacing others, and so it was a vastly different record. Here is the original vinyl edition of 'Music For Films', in all its crackly glory, cleaned up as much as possible. 

Track listing

01 Becalmed
02 Deep Waters
03 'There Is Nobody'
04 Spain
05 Untitled
06 The Last Door
07 Chemin De Fer
08 Dark Waters
09 Sparrowfall (1)
10 Sparrowfall (2)
11 Sparrowfall (3)
12 Evening Star
13 Another Green World
14 In Dark Trees
15 Fuseli
16 Melancholy Waltz
17 Northern Lights
18 From The Coast
19 Shell
20 Little Fishes
21 Empty Landscape
22 Reactor
23 The Secret
24 Don't Look Back
25 Marseilles
26 Final Sunset
27 Juliet

David Bowie - The Leon Suites (1994)

David Bowie and Brian Eno were two of music’s most avant-garde figures, and throughout their lifelong friendship they often collaborated, most notably on Bowie's Berlin records. After reuniting at Bowie's 1992 wedding, they started emailing each other about what they felt was missing from music, and in a bid to reignite some artistic bravery that they clearly felt was lacking, they decided to embark on an album together without so much as "a gnat of an idea". They put together a band consisting of Bowie/Eno, Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson, Erdal Kizilçay & Sterling Campbell, and began recording at Mountain Studios, in Switzerland, and the resulting album was far more fleshed out than its initial beginnings, being a narrative-focused cyberpunk curiosity built largely of interviews the pair conducted with patients at a wing of a Vienna psychiatric hospital, who were well-known for their outsider art. 'The Leon Suites' was a bold attempt to bring more conceptual artistry to the modern album, a bizarre offering that was influenced by murder, Twin Peaks, and hospital interviews. The two musicians put together a three-hour recording consisting of mainly spoken word passages and strange jams, employing the cut-up technique employed by William Burroughs and Brian Gysin, relying on an app Bowie had co-developed, called the Verbasizer. It allowed him to auto-generate random sentences to bulk out tracks or use its words to trigger an idea that formed the shape of a song. Eno was said to hand out cards to backing musicians each morning with their unique backstory, which contained instructions like: "You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed". 

He also used the Oblique Strategies cards that he and artist Peter Schmidt had pioneered in 1975, which involved using a series of prompts on cards drawn only when faced with a creative blockage. Everything was highly improvised and written by Bowie in the studio, and he described what emerged as an almost obsessive interest in ritualistic, outsider artists. He told Vox magazine: "It's like a replacement for a spiritual starvation that's going on, like a tribe with dim memories of what their rituals used to be. They're sort of being dragged back again in this new, mutated, deviant way, with so-called gratuitous sex and violence in popular culture and people cutting bits off themselves. For me, it seems like a natural kind of thing". There were five suites recorded for 'Leon...', but two were deleted, with three receiving a final mix and then being presented to the record company for release, but they were not as forward-thinking as Bowie, and rejected the project as being too uncommercial. He therefore scrapped the whole thing and started work on something that the record company would accept, with snippets from 'The Leon Suites', including some of its narrative arcs and characters, ending up appearing on his 1995 album '1. Outside'. Although these tracks are often touted as 'Outside' outtakes, its more true to say that 'Outside' was based on outtakes from 'The Leon Suites', which was an album in its own right, and if the record company had accepted this as Bowie's next album, then '1. Outside' would never have happened. It's great that we can now get to hear these tracks, in the best quality so far, as these come from a CDR provided by Adam Bedstroke, and so thanks to him for letting these demos be shared amongst fans.

Track listing

01 Suite 1: I Am With Name  
02 Suite 2: Leon Takes Us Outside 
03 Suite 3: Enemy Is Fragile 

Brian Eno - Music For The Great Gallery (2012)

In 2012, Brian Eno decided to compose some music which could be played in The Great Gallery Of Venaria Reale, in Italy, so that visitors could be bathed in an ambient soundscape while visiting this architectural masterpiece. Eno's own notes give an insight into his workings:
I started writing '12 Seasons: Music For The Great Gallery' in my studio in London. I had seen pictures and plans of the Reggia di Venaria and I was confident I had found the right approach: I worked for a few weeks on a track that I brought to the Reggia for testing in May 2012. However, when I listened to it in the extraordinary context of the Great Gallery, I realized that it was not right. What I had composed - in my studio in London, wrapped up in England's grey climate - was introspective and somewhat dark. There was not doubt in my mind that it was an "interior" track. What is most striking about the Great Gallery - and you realise as much only when you step into it - is that it is soaked in light and space: nothing further from an "interior" feeling. Juvarra had designed it to invite the world to get in, so it seemed appropriate that music should exist inside as well as outside of space, almost like a cloud or an atmosphere that would envelop the construction from the outside. Conceptually, this music is similar to other works I did around forty years ago (e.g., Discreet Music, 1975). I am still deeply fascinated by the range of transformations that are possible starting with a limited stock of original notes, and this piece is a perfect example in this sense. Nevertheless, there is also a new starting point. Building on the Reggia’s classical imprint, I wanted to make sure that the track was made up of several movements rather than a single block. Thus only 4 or 5 or 6 of the original 7 sounds I had decided to work with will eventually be used in each section. This means that the emotional quality of each section is slightly different, and as it progresses, the piece evolves and takes on different overtones. I love the Great Gallery of La Venaria, it is a sort of secular cathedral, and I hope that my music will encourage more people to spend time in the Gallery than it is normally the case.
In its final version the piece is made up of two one-hour tracks consisting of 12 sections each. 
Only four speakers are in place, two at the entrance and two at the end of the Gallery, all facing the center of the hall. Visitors walking down the Gallery are wrapped into two distinct sound flows: as they approach the center of the hall, echoes of the sounds behind turn into a memory that blend in the soft reverberations of the sounds that lay ahead. The two movements are complete when they meet at the heart of the Gallery. The sound tracks are made of melodic cores that are sketched and whispered, with the warmer sound of real violins in place of samplings. This recording was taped by Renzo on Saturday 29 September 2012, with the first half being recorded walking in the Gallery, while the second half is taped in the dead center of the Gallery. It's an excellent quality recording, probably due the superb acoustics in the Gallery, and although you can hear voices and noise from people visiting the installation, it's almost as if they are meant to be there, and they seldom distract from the music. Eno's 2012 album 'Lux' was based on these pieces that he composed for the Gallery, but this recording features the original compositions. 

 
Track listing 

01 Music For The Great Gallery

Robert Fripp - ...and on guitar (1980)

Robert Fripp was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, the second child of a working class family, and at age ten he received a guitar for Christmas from his parents. After taking guitar lessons, by age 11 he was playing rock, moving on to traditional jazz at 13 and modern jazz at 15. In 1961, the fifteen-year-old Fripp joined his first band, The Ravens, which also included Gordon Haskell on bass. After they split the following year, Fripp considered a job at his father's estate agency, but at seventeen, he decided to become a professional musician. He became the guitarist in the jazz outfit The Douglas Ward Trio, followed by a stint in the rock and roll band The League of Gentlemen, which included two former Ravens members. In 1965, Fripp left the group to attend Bournemouth College, which was where he met future musical collaborators John Wetton, Richard Palmer-James, and Greg Lake. In 1967, Fripp responded to an advertisement placed by Bournemouth-born brothers Peter and Michael Giles, who wanted to work with a singing organist. Though Fripp was not what they wanted, his audition with them was a success and the trio relocated to London and became Giles, Giles And Fripp, with their sole studio album 'The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles And Fripp' being released in 1968. Despite the recruitment of two further members, singer Judy Dyble (formerly with Fairport Convention and later of Trader Horne) and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, Fripp felt that he was outgrowing the eccentric pop approach favoured by Peter Giles, preferring the more ambitious compositions being written by McDonald, and so the band broke up in 1968. Almost immediately, Fripp, McDonald and Michael Giles formed the first lineup of King Crimson in mid-1968, recruiting Fripp's old Bournemouth College friend Greg Lake as lead singer and bass player, and McDonald's writing partner Peter Sinfield as lyricist, light show designer and general creative consultant. King Crimson's debut album 'In The Court Of The Crimson King' was released in late 1969 to great success, and Fripp's long and illustrious career was off to a great start. 
During King Crimson's less active periods Fripp collaborated with other artists, such as Keith Tippett, on projects far from rock music, playing with and producing jazz-progressive rock big band Centipede's 'Septober Energy' album in 1971 and 'Ovary Lodge' in 1973. During this period he also worked with Van der Graaf Generator, playing on the 1970 album 'H To He, Who Am The Only One', and in 1971 on 'Pawn Hearts'. In 1972 he produced Matching Mole's 'Matching Mole's Little Red Record', and then later that year teamed up with Brian Eno to record the classic electronic album 'No Pussyfooting', reconvening two years later for 1974's 'Evening Star'. In 1973 Fripp performed the guitar solo on Brian Eno's 'Baby's On Fire', from his first solo album 'Here Come The Warm Jets', and later contributed to his 'Another Green World' album in 1975. After a one year sabbatical he returned to musical work as a studio guitarist in 1976, working on Peter Gabriel's first self-titled album, which was released the following year, and he also toured with Gabriel to support the album, but remained out of sight (either in the wings or behind a curtain) and used the pseudonym 'Dusty Rhodes'. He assisted Gabriel again in 1978 on his second album, producing and playing on it, adding solos to 'On The Air' and 'White Shadow', and musically enhancing 'Exposure'. In 1977 Fripp reconnected with Daryl Hall, who he'd first met in 1974, when Hall asked him to produce his debut solo album, on which he also provided guitar and co-wrote two of the songs. The recording was completed in 1977, but the record company didn't feel that it would be a commercial success and so refused to release it for three years, with it finally seeing the light of day in 1980. Also in 1977 he added his distinctive guitar sound to the b-side of Bryan Ferry's 'This Is Tomorrow' single, and while living in New York in 1978 Fripp contributed to albums and live performances by Blondie, most noticeably to 'Fade Away And Radiate' from their 'Parallel Lines' album. The same year he worked with Talking Heads on their 'Fear of Music' record, and he also produced The Roches' first and third albums, which featured several of his characteristic guitar solos. A second set of creative sessions with David Bowie in 1980 produced distinctive guitar parts on songs from 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)', and he also appeared on Peter Gabriel's third solo album the same year. To be honest I'd never really thought of Robert Fripp as the sort of artist to guest on other people's records, although obviously I knew that he was on Bowie's 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)', but I was amazed to find that he played on a Blondie record, or collaborated with Daryl Hall. Unfortunately the Van Der Graaf Generator tracks that he played on were too long to include here, and you couldn't really hear him on them anyway, but I have included a track from Peter Hamill's solo album 'Fool's Mate' as an example of his work a member of VDGG. We all know that Fripp is an outstanding guitarist from his work with King Crimson, but I hope that this album shows another side to him that people might not have known about.  

Track listing

01 Sunshine (from 'Fool's Mate' by Peter Hammill 1971) 
02 St Elmo's Fire (from 'Another Green World' by Brian Eno 1975)
03 As The World Turns (b-side of 'This Is Tomorrow' single by Bryan Ferry 1977)
04 Fade Away And Radiate (from 'Parallel Lines' by Blondie 1978)
05 Babs And Babs (from 'Sacred Songs' by Daryl Hall recorded 1977)
06 Exposure (from 'Peter Gabriel II' by Peter Gabriel 1978)
07 I Zimbra (from 'Fear Of Music' by Talking Heads 1979)
08 Teenage Wildlife (from 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)' by David Bowie 1980)
09 Hammond Song (from 'The Roches' by The Roches 1979)
10 No Self Control (from 'Peter Gabriel III' by Peter Gabriel 1980)

Brian Eno - I Dormienti (1999)

'I Dormienti' is an album of music by Brian Eno, taken from an installation that took place at the undercroft of the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, from 9 September to 6 October 1999. The event featured the work of Italian painter, sculptor and set designer Mimmo Paladino, who became established in the early 80's as one of the main exponents of the so-called Transavanguardia, a form of Neo-expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. His exhibition was in the form of drawings and terracota sculptures - about 30 reclining figures with about 20 attendant crocodiles he called 'I Dormienti' ('The Sleepers'). Eno's music came from well-concealed speakers and consisted mainly of a three-note Neroli-esque sequence, electronic noise, and treated, sampled voices speaking in syllables. The material condensed onto the album is a single track consisting of ten or so layers of the aforementioned syllables, speech excerpts, the standard Eno treated piano, and various drones and echoes. It's very much in his ambient style, with the repetitive sequences creating a relaxing atmosphere, and is much more musical that his work for the White Cube installation.  

Track listing

01 I Dormienti

Brian Eno & David Byrne - Life Before The Bush Of Ghosts (1980)

Brian Eno and David Byrne's 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' has always been a favourite album, and quite rightly so, being heralded as among the first recordings to meld ambient sounds and hip-hop-style sampling with global rhythms, and I'm so glad that I bought the vinyl when it came out, since the CD re-issue had to remove the track 'Qu'ran' after complaints from the Islamic Council Of Great Britain about using a recital from their holy book on a pop record. I've recently come across this collection of demos for the album, which were leaked online by someone who had obtained a pre-release cassette containing these recordings while staying at David Byrne's home in 1981. Some of the demos made it to the album in a more polished form, while others had to be left off, although some did surface on the expanded CD re-issues later on. It even features Byrne himself reading passages from the Quran, which were later removed from the finished product. It's a fascinating insight into the working partnership which produced the innovative '...Ghosts' album, and so well worth hearing for fans of Eno, Byrne, or the album itself.     

Track listing

01 Mea Culpa
02 Lot/Into The Spirit World
03 Regiment
04 Iron Bed
05 America Is Waiting
06 Breathing Once A Minute
07 Shaking With My Voice
08 Cunning Tendency
09 Late But Serious
10 In The Castle Of My Skin
11 Spirit Of Prey
12 Mountain Of Needles

Brian Eno - Healthy Colours (1994) / The Long Now (2002)

The four pieces that make up 'Healthy Colours' were recorded in New York in 1979, and fall somewhere between Fripp's 'God Save The King' and 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts'. Over a kind of automated funk backing (similar in some ways to 'Kurt's Rejoinder' from 'Before And After Science') Fripp plays some cross picking and adds a few squalls of his unique guitar noise, while Eno throws in fragments of radio and TV dialogue as the piece unfolds. It's a far reach from their previous collaborations on 'No Pussyfooting' and 'Evening Star', but I love the new direction, and just wish there was more of it.

Track listing

01 Healthy Colours I
02 Healthy Colours II
03 Healthy Colours III
04 Healthy Colours IV


The Clock Of The Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock under construction that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It's being built by the Long Now Foundation, and a two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London. As of June 2018, two more prototypes are on display at The Long Now Museum & Store at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The project was conceived by Danny Hillis in 1986, and the first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000. Eno gave the Clock Of The Long Now its name (and coined the term "Long Now") in an essay, and has collaborated with Hillis on the writing of music for the chimes for a future prototype.
This limited edition promo CD was sent out to wine dealers to promote Pelissero's Long Now wine, named in honour of the Long Now Foundation, and consists of 'Bell Studies For The Clock Of The Long Now'

Track listing

01 Study 16
02 Study 17
03 If A Bell Became A Drone
04 Campion Bells
05 Bell Study With Distant Delays

Two EP's in one post.

Brian Eno - Music For White Cube (1997)

'Music For White Cube' was a sound installation created by Brian Eno for the White Cube gallery in London, which ran from 25th April to 31st May 1997. It consisted of 4 CD players playing tracks of Eno singing one note with a background of traffic and other street sounds, which had then been slowed down and enhanced using audio software. The gallery describes itself as 'possibly the smallest exhibition space in Europe', and consists of a simple square room, painted white. During the show, white blinds covered the two windows in one wall and a suspended ceiling muffled lights that were suspended above it. Mounted on each of the four walls was a CD-player with two speakers on either side, playing random tracks.

Eno created the music by selecting random sites situated within a one-mile radius of the White Cube and recording a variety of ambient sounds around him, such as crowd-noise, the ringing bells of clock-towers, weather and rushing traffic. On top of this he also recorded himself singing a single, long note at each location. Taking the raw recordings back to his London studio, he ran them through a variety of enhancement software/hardware to produce a series of time-stretched, compressed, equalised, reverberating compositions, which he burned onto CDs (8 to 16 tracks on each). These were the discs that were fed into the Installation players and set to 'random'. Eno says "I was thinking of the sound less as music and more as sculpture, space, landscape, and of the experience as a process of immersion rather than just of listening."

I'll admit that it's debatable whether you would actually call this "music", and it's certainly one of his most challenging works, which perhaps needs to be listened to in situ to really appreciate it, but I'm sure fans of his who haven't heard it will be intrigued enough to try it at least once. This CD of extracts from the installation was released in a limited edition of 500, and I've created new artwork for it to replace the minimalist line drawing that it was housed in. 

Track listing

01 Notting Hill, Feb 20   (11:37)

02 Old Brompton Road, Feb 20   (3:03)

03 The Oval, Feb 24   (7:03)

04 Regents Park, Feb 01   (24:34)

05 Barbican Station, Feb 24   (1:39)

06 Bermondsey, Feb 24   (4:16)

07 Kentish Town, Jan 29   (2:27)

08 Lavender Hill, Feb 14   (7:00)

09 Camden Town, Feb 24   (6:20)

Brian Eno - Textures (1989)

I'm listening to a lot of Brian Eno at the moment, particularly his albums with Cluster and Moebius & Roedelius, and in searching those out I stumbled on a couple of rare recordings that I hadn't heard before. 'Textures' is a 1989 album by Eno (together with his brother Roger, and Daniel Lanois) for the library music company 'Standard Music Library', consisting of edited and unedited ambient music, produced exclusively for licensed use in television programs and films. The album was purely intended for "business to business" use, and was never commercially released to the public, but a copy of the CD sold for £535.00 when offered for sale in 2014. Eleven tracks are unpublished elsewhere, and ten tracks are actually edits or versions of pieces from the previous years album 'Music for Films III' (1988), or the following ones 'The Shutov Assembly' (1992) and 'Neroli' (1993). This is the most musical and easily accessible of the four that I intend to post, as two of them are for art installations, and the other was a promo for a wine distribution company, so they are a little experimental, but I'm sure fans will want to hear them at least once, and hopefully this one more than that. 

Track listing

01 Soft Dawn 
02 The Water Garden (aka 'Cavallino')
03 Shaded Water (aka 'Alhondiga')
04 Suspicious (aka 'Lanzarote')
05 Ozone 
06 Landscape With Haze (aka 'Riverside')
07 Mirage (aka 'Triennale') 
08 River Mist (aka 'Asian River')
09 Constant Dreams ('Neroli' edit)
10 Dark Dreams 
11 Black Planet 
12 Night Thoughts 
13 Travellers 
14 Evil Thoughts 
15 Darkness 
16 Jungles 
17 Sanctuaries 
18 Menace 
19 Suspended Motion (aka 'Markgraph') 
20 The Wild (aka 'Stedelijk')
21 River Journey (extended mix of 'Asian River')

Robert Wyatt - The Unknown Zone (2009)

Throughout the early years of the new century Robert Wyatt continued to help out musicians who came to him for help with their music, as well as friends who just wanted to play with him, including Paul Weller on a duet of the Warren/Dublin classic 'September In The Rain', which was added to the 1997 Japanese re-release of Wyatt's 'Shleep' album. 'Afghanistan's A Country....' and DondestA' are reworkings of two Wyatt compositions by Jean-Michel Marchetti for the companion CD to his book 'M4W', while 'Flies' is Wyatt's contribution to the Various Artists compilation 'Plague Songs', consisting of music based around the twelve plagues of Egypt, with Wyatt and Brian Eno interpreting the plague of flies. The title track was recorded by Wyatt, Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, following a jam session that occurred when the three of them had dinner after recording sessions for Wyatt's 'Cuckooland' album, and the resulting track was offered as a free download in 2009. We close with two songs from an artist previously unknown to me, Monica Vasconcelos, but after hearing these tracks I will be searching out more from her. If there's one thing that strikes you about these two albums it's the sheer variety of music that Wyatt has made during his career, starting with the psychedelic Soft Machine, the jazz-rock of Matching Mole, forays into the charts with 'I'm A Believer' and 'Yesterday Man', his own superlative singer/songwriter efforts on 'Rock Bottom' and 'Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard' among others, the definitive recording of 'Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding', and now all of this music with other musicians, young and old. He truly is a renaissance man in the field of music, and you can see why he's held in such high esteem by his peers. The cover of this one is based on an acrylic painting by Sian Superman of Raw Art.

Track listing

01 September In The Rain (...with Paul Weller, from the Japanese release of 'Shleep' 1997)
02 Afghanistan's A Country....... (...with Jean-Michel Marchetti, from 'M4W' 2003)
03 DondestA (...with Jean-Michel Marchetti, from 'M4W' 2003)
04 The Unknown Zone (...with Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, free download 2009)
05 The Plague Of Flies (...with Brian Eno, from 'Plague Songs' 2006) 
06 Before We Knew (...with Annie Whitehead, from 'The Gathering' 2000)
07 Out Of The Doldrums (...with Monica Vasconcelos, from 'Hih' 2008)
08 Still In The Dark (...with Monica Vasconcelos, from 'Hih' 2008)

Brian Aspro - Music For BBC 2 Documentaries (1982)

The sleevenotes for this 1982 cassette release imply that it's a take-off of Brian Eno's ambient works, but it's really just an extremely competent collection of electronic music. The notes from the cassette are quite humourous, and are worth reading, so here they are.
The material contained on this album of 'Ambivalent Music' was recorded over the last two years and none has ever been (or is likely to be) used in a BBC2 documentary. All Brian Aspro compositions recorded cheaply and with the minimum of effort and equipment. Thanks to fellow musicians Jacko Pastorial bass (1.4), Schlaus Klutz - massed synthesisers (1.6), and Bob Frupp - treated guitar (2.5). 
It might not be quite as good as the Colin Potter releases from the same period, but then it's a different style of electronic music and so shouldn't really be compared anyway. Either way, I've obviously considered it good enough to hold onto the cassette for over 35 years so it can't be that bad. 

Track listing 

01 Mysterious Sequences Of Something Equally Impressive
02 Overland
03 Movements On A Glacial Plate
04 Without Frets
05 Station 5
06 Plotzlich (Eine Klein Durchfall Musik)
07 Two Sides Of The Same Face
08 MT2
09 Soft Appearances
10 Heathaze
11 Asprotronics
12 F..k Art - Let's Dance

Eno - My Squelchy Life (1991)

'My Squelchy Life' was recorded by Brian Eno in 1991, sent out to reviewers (with some reviews hitting the stands), then withdrawn suddenly after he decided it was a minor effort that needed extra work. A year later 'Nerve Net' was released, and while it is undoubtedly a more polished, adventurous, and mature album, 'My Squelchy Life' is a splendid pop album, and a fine follow-up to his collaboration with John Cale, 'Wrong Way Up'. Bootlegs abound of this album (albeit with an annoying glitch on one of the tracks), and most of the songs found their way onto the Eno Vocal Box Set, including the dreamy 'Under' and 'Over', and the upbeat 'Stiff', while 'I Fall Up' wound up on the b-side of 'Ali Click' a year later. That still leaves a number a fine tracks that are not that easy to get hold of, until the whole album was added to the deluxe re-issue of 'Nerve Net' in 2014. That should have satisfied anyone who still hadn't heard this elusive album, but as I found when trying to upgrade my bootleg copy, it's nigh on impossible to find a decent copy of the new 'Nerve Net' online, so to save you a frustrating search on the net, here it is in all its glory. As well as the tracks which have already been used elsewhere, 'The Harness' is a  slow, pulsing number similar to 'The Roil, The Choke' from 'Nerve Net', all grandiose and golden, and 'Tutti Forgetti' is a rhythmic workout similar to his work with David Byrne. 'Everybody's Mother' features a distorted vocal over an instrumental that would turn up on 'Shutov Assembly', and 'Little Apricot' is a solo piano composition, similar to 'Nerve Net's 'Web'. I think it's a great album, and can't see what he was thinking when he pulled it, but you can now hear for yourself here and make up your own mind.

Track listing

01 I Fall Up
02 The Harness
03 My Squelchy Life
04 Tutti Forgetti
05 Stiff
06 Some Words
07 Juju Space Jazz
08 Under
09 Everybody's Mother
10 Little Apricot
11 Over

Brian Eno - The Pop Album (1977)

Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is of course best known for his work on the first two Roxy Music albums, but when he left the group after the release of 1973's 'For Your Pleasure', few people could have imagined that he would become one of the best-known names in the music industry, both for his innovative and experimental music, and for producing albums by some of the biggest bands of the last 40 years, such as Talking Heads, U2 and Devo. He brought ambient music to the mainstream, and invented the concept of oblique strategies, but tucked away on his albums have been some surprisingly commercial pop songs. I first found a compilation of these pop songs at the Music For Manics site here http://musicformaniacs.blogspot.com/2012/12/album-du-jour-9-eno-lost-70s-pop-album.html, and after downloading it I made a cover for the site, and on checking recently I found that the link is still live. However, he decided to use rare and live takes of the songs, which I was originally going to do, before I thought that there's no reason not to use the studio versions and make a more polished album. So here they are collected together onto a record which would undoubtedly have surprised many people, who at the time considered him a pretentious and artsy auteur.   

Track listing

01 The Seven Deadly Finns  
02 The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) 
03 Needles In The Camel's Eye
04 Baby's On Fire
05 I'll Come Running
06 Some Of Them Are Old
07 St. Elmo's Fire
08 No One Receiving
09 Backwater
10 Spider & I
11 King's Lead Hat