BRIAN ENO "BA-BENZÈLÈ / SUBTARRANEANS"

Brian Eno is one of the true pioneers of electronic music; from the very beginning of it's inception, as one of the most in-demand studio producers of his era, he served as one of it's most eager disseminators, accomplishing some of the first syntheses of rock, experimental and electronic music---and delivering it to popular audiences previously unimagined before his time. In the strangely familiar alien tones & effects of the then excessively intricate and virtually inaccessible synthesizers of the early 1970's, Eno perceived in electronic production the key to popular music's transcendence, it's elevation to the level of true intellectual & artistic expression---an expanse of seemingly endless potential that allowed not only the seasoned & qualified composer to express himself through the new electronic sound, but also provided entrenched genres the opportunity to discard with their embedded orthodoxies & breathe a whole new air of life into their creative process & product. His work with avante-garde trumpet player John Hassell is a deeply inspiring example of this early pioneering. Hassell was himself obsessed with atypical scales & unfamiliar instrumentation, only in his case he was convinced that in the most remote regions of Earth's untouched & undeveloped sonic landscape lay the most potent tools for music's superseding to the domain of sublime experiential transcendence. With Eno's prowess at the opposite end of the technological scale, the two produced some of the most wildly divergent co-existences of sound, mixing the unsettling tones miraculously produced from Hassell's trumpet---which were for the most part inspired by traditional forms of obscure world music---with the strange warmth of Eno's comforting synth chords & melodic disposition to create music that is at one moment deeply warm, comforting and pleasing to the ears---only to morph into something suspiciously unfamiliar, uncharted and singularly abrasive---beautiful still, but unsettling nonetheless...the perfect balance.
But it was Eno's work with legendary Rock/Pop/Post-Punk superstar David Bowie that demonstrated the breathtaking potential of Eno's electronic aesthetic, it's integration into the most resistant of musically opposite fields, and it's true transcendent potential. "Subterraneans" is the quintessential tragedy in song, a piece that needs no definite lyrical tale to relate it's truly melancholic expression, it's very notes, it's distorted, shivering wales of possibly human melodic groans, it's  sub-bass synth pads the only necessity for full expression: undeniably Eno's masterwork. It weeps, not through the deceiving over-intellectualization of poetry, but rather through the pure expression of tonal & melodic sound. This is the essence of Eno's contribution to the modern music....

Compiled by Francis Englehardt & Paul Nickerson for slow to speak.