Brian Eno: Nerve Net

At the start of this month I mentioned the single that paved the way for this album, and I said I liked The Roil, The Choke better than the 'A-side' of the single. Actually I like it best among all the pieces on the album as well. Ah, look: I've just found the source of what I said before about bell-ringing and the phonemes in that song.

Actually I wasn't looking for that; I was looking for details of the illustrated lecture that Brian Eno gave at Sadlers Wells Theatre on 20th July 1992, around the time this album came out. I was late for the lecture. I got the train down from York specially, but then got caught in a downpour of such biblical proportions that I think I ended up getting a taxi to go the last 200 yards, because to walk that far would have got me unthinkably wet. Apparently Eno doesn't remember the evening particularly fondly, either.

I can think about this album in two different ways. The first is that it marks the beginning of a phase where each Eno release (with the notable exception of The Shutov Assembly) has promised more than it has delivered. The second is that he's onto something that is quite subtly innovative and which I have yet to fully absorb. I've been reading some Alan Lomax recently, and he talks about pygmies and bushmen making music that doesn't have a clear leader or central focus to it. Eno has said similar things about the music of Fela Kuti, for example, and I know he's also a Lomax fan.

So perhaps that's what's going on with a track like What Actually Happened?, which has a spoken word story about date-rape going on in it. But the vocal is filtered, making it hard to concentrate on it, and I've never been able to make it out all the way through and figure out, well, what actually happens in the story. Quite clever and quite irritating at the same time.

Some of the most enjoyable parts are Robert Fripp's guitar breaks. He's particularly dirty in the two versions of Web, making grittier music than you normally associate with Eno. I've noticed that, when Fripp is playing on songs that go out under Eno's name, he seems to have licence to let rip — think of Baby's on Fire and I'll Come Running, for example. But when the music is going out under the 'Fripp and Eno' moniker, Fripp is more self-effacing.

All Eno albums seem to be spun with some new gimmicky schtick recently. With his most recent album, it was "Shock, horror! Eno returns to singing songs" even though it was immediately apparent he was doing no such thing. The schtick with this one, as I remember it from a Mixing It radio interview, was that the CD form encouraged listeners to programme their own listening experiences, and cut out anything that they felt was chaff. That's presumably why there were two versions of Web, and the last track is billed as an appendix… but we all know that everyone just slapped it in the CD player, pressed play, and then sat down to read the paper for the next 63 minutes.

Finally the CD booklet has an example of the adjective games that Eno seemed to like at the time. It says "This record is:-" and then follows it with a series of words and phrases, including "like paella", "squelchy", "far too vague", "post cool", "post man" (his dad was a postman), "post world", "unamerican". He did something similar about himself for his book. Let me see what descriptions I can remember without looking: "a masturbator", "a company director", "a father", "a drifting clarifier" (or something similar). And that's it.

MusicBrainz entry for this album