Brian Eno: The Drop

This feels like an odd-man-out in the Brian Eno catalogue. Even the cover bears no family resemblance to any other Eno cover I can think of. It's quite un-Eno-esque. Which, I suppose, is quite a challenging accomplishment 25 years into your career. (I wish I could be less David-ian sometimes.) Before I put it on, I thought of it as my least favourite Eno album, but its very oddness gives it a curiosity value.

Effectively it's two albums in one: the first 16 tracks are all short sketches which take 42 minutes between them; then the 17th track is the second 'album', being 32 minutes of minimal ambience. The latter seems to me a minor work, just padding out the CD, while the first 'album' contains the exceptional material.

I'm just going to quote the notes from the Hyperreal Eno discography in full, because they "explain" the music better than I can:

The Drop showcases a new kind of music which Brian created. The album title went through a number of changes, including Swanky, Hup! and This is Hup! Reviews were less variable, being mainly hostile to the album — partly, I suspect, because the album didn't deliver what's normally expected from Brian. Drop music was originally called "Unwelcome Jazz" because "most of the people I played them [the pieces] to don't really like them" according to Brian. He said: "they all share this quality of having melodies that go in very odd directions and take sharp turns and so on. They have another characteristic: they use a combination of instruments that are so recognizable, that come with a huge amount of cultural history, you know, like jazz piano sounds, the ride cymbal, all that sort of things. As soon as you hear those instruments you have some kind of picture of how the music was made. Within that, I place those things in an electronic landscape, which is completely another world, a world that never belonged to that music." Another proposed title was Neo Geo, and there are instrumental/approach similarities with Ryuichi Sakamoto's album of that name.

MusicBrainz entry for this album

Comments

[John Baez]

This album keeps growing on me. Yes, it's annoying in how it avoids doing all the things Eno has gotten so good at over the years! But he managed to show us something new.

[Brian]

Stephin Merritt calls it the worst album he has ever heard.