Artist	Song
brian eno	spider and i (4:10)
brian eno & john cale	empty frame (4:27)
brian eno	and then so clear (5:48)
brian eno	backwater (3:45)
brian eno	how many worlds (4:44)
brian eno	the true wheel (5:11)
brian eno	everything merges with the night (3:59)
brian eno	st. elmo's fire (3:02)
brian eno	no one receiving (3:53)
brian eno	you don't miss your water (3:46)
brian eno (feat. christine west-oram)	wire shock (5:27)
brian eno	julie with... (6:20)
brian eno	here come the warm jets (4:03)
brian eno	the river (4:22)
brian eno	this (3:32)
brian eno	on some faraway beach (4:37)
brian eno	mother whale eyeless (5:45)
brian eno	by this river (3:04)

Comment:

"It will shine and it will shudder as I guide it with my rudder on its metalled waves." - Brian Eno, "No One Receiving"

I think this mix is the first I realized that listening to Brian Eno's music can be a statement. Listening to Wrong Way Up, his 1990 collaboration with John Cale that was his first song-based album in 13 years (and also the source of tracks 2, 10, and 14), I think: It's just so gosh darn cute that this visionary sonic landscape architect has decided to make a name for himself as a singer-songwriter too (everybody sing along: "I am the crow of desperation / I need no fact or validation / I spin relentless variation / I scramble in the dust of authentication."). Listening to 2005's Another Day on Earth, a solo Eno's now first song-based album in another 13 years (and the source of tracks 3, 5 and 15), I think: What a beautiful joke is this album.

Let me explain. This mix here is a sequel to Lingering in the Fireball Heat, my fire-themed Bob Dylan mix. As has been commented on in interviews with the man, water is just as much an elemental theme of a lifetime for Eno as fire is for Zimmerman, if not more so. Just like Dylan's burning, Eno's mention of anything watery (including, apparently, in "Here Come The Warm Jets", an ecstatic paean to peeing) serves as the key to a wider world of association, most clearly delineated in his "Empty Frame" lyrics:

"Maybe we're going round in circles
Where is this place we're going to?
Does anybody know we're out here on the waves?
And are any of our signals coming through?

"We're going round in circles
We have no single point of view
And like the clouds that turn to every passing wind
We turn to any signal that comes through."

Afterwards, "And Then So Clear"'s opening lyric stands out as a further guidepost: "And then so clear to wonder." The sonic result of this 32-year-spanning compilation of Eno water songs seems to be just that: a clear statement of wonder -- in clarity -- at the delirious mercy of the clouds at every passing wind. Instead of refining, and complicating, any technique, I now realize, Eno has always invented new techniques; and I can see him laughing his abstract ass off at the fans who, when hearing that Another Day on Earth was *finally* going to be another song-based record, started hoping for, of all things, something like Here Come the Warm Jets, his 1973 glam-rock solo debut masterpiece (and the source here of tracks 13 and 16).

Well, the joke's on me too. At this point, I think the only reason he's not writing hooky, button-pushing songs is that he's stricken them from his own peculiar brand of sonic asceticism. "Mother Whale Eyeless", from 1974, manages to be a great pop(-style) song in spite of its length and title (and really needs to be covered one of these days by the modern-day TMBG, or some other purveyor of ecstatic nonsense pop I suppose), but "Empty Frame" already started showing multitudinous cracks in the dance helmet into a more, well, environmental style of songwriting, and by Another Day on Earth the full fledge is hit.

So why is Eno no longer considered to be a songwriter to keep one's proverbial eye on, as he was in his mid-seventies heyday? He did, after all, at one point opine that rock music was the most vital of all art forms: something that, it seems like, the indie kids of today try desperately to convince themselves of. So maybe a song like "And Then So Clear" -- its assured, heartfelt vocals nevertheless coming at the listener through a muslin curtain of computer transformation, the kind of thing that's supposed to be, you know, not possible -- marks One Brain out as worse than an ununderstandable: a traitor.

I hear he's now in collaboration with David Byrne, who hasn't quite yet left Planet Rock himself; we'll see how that goes, now, shall we?

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