Music Arcades: Fripp and Eno: Beyond Even (1992

We don't do bonanzas on Music Arcades. Nothing so extravagant or unguarded. Yet there has been a minor flourish of Fripp & Eno on these pages in recent months (1, 2, 3), on the heels of three and a half years of drought.

I was going to make excuses for this release. It was originally a download-only in 2006, under the title The Cotswold Gnomes. This version is two CDs. The notes explain that "CD1 offers the first 12 pieces in segued form, while CD 2 offers the 13 pieces individually." Does that sound like a good deal to you? Or does it just sound like one CD is the same as the other (both have all 13 tracks in fact) with a few seconds of inter-track silence added — something you could add yourself in iTunes? Because that's pretty much what you get, aside from some modest editing of the first and last seconds of each track to ensure they segue OK. This two-CD version was a limited edition, of course. Still available, at reduced price, two years after its release. For carbon emission crimes alone, making a fake double album to no good purpose, it deserves to remain available indefinitely as wiser customers than me decide to boycott it.

The notes also compare Beyond Even to Eno's Curiosities albums, since it's another compilation of odds and ends from the studio floor that didn't find their way onto any release before. So no claim is made for this being a "best of" collection. Nevertheless it's hard not to make the comparison back to (No Pussyfooting) and Evening Star, remembering how incredibly different and unusual they sounded to us becoming teenagers in the seventies. Now the rest of the world has caught up. Fripp & Eno are not guilty of standing still and perhaps it's a bit much to expect them to reframe the values of popular music all over again. We're now in an era of incremental rather than radical change; and maybe sometimes too much thinking leads to getting stuck or going backwards. Eno himself has spoken of a period of cultural 'digestion' rather than the revolution of the sixties and seventies.

There's some more excuses I could make for them. But then I read this allmusic review. Allmusic are not given to the hyperbolic build-em-up-and-knock-em-down ethos of the NME, so don't take it lightly when they write, "this entire thing comes off as a pair of old noodlers messing about in a digital studio."

So all excuses are off. Forty eight hours or so ago, I was sniffy about Anderegg being "not-substantial-enough-that-I-would-care-much-about-hearing-it-again". Beyond Even is no better. Given that it's by the guys that made it possible for Anderegg to conceive of his record, it bloody well should be, shouldn't it? Or did they create a genre so anonymous that anyone can do it?

And if they did, perhaps that is their great achievement, and sniffiness about their own later labours in this garden is beside the point?

Excuses again: I'm tieing myself in knots again, so let's postpone further discussion until the next and final (so far) Fripp & Eno item in my collection.