One foot in top notch art rock, and another in fantastic ambient music!

Clean Ambient

Not Eno's best work, but a highly interesting piece. Much more accessible than some of his more difficult albums. Gotta love that he's always reaching for something he hasn't done yet.

Brian Eno, ex-keyboardist of Roxy Music, is one of the most influential figures in rock music having single-handedly changed the course of its trajectory on at least three occasions. Firstly he fused pop and electronics in an experimental way and thus changed the very notion of what a 'pop song' is. Secondly, he invented meta-pop music by taking cheap melodies (the kind that are used at the music-hall, on tv commercials, by nursery rhymes) and added a strong rhythmic base and counterpoint of synthesizer. Finally, by the time of the release of 'Before And After Science' (1977), he had acquired a sinister and surreal quality to his catchy ditties.

The album counterposes renaissance madrigal's with a disco rhythm to create a sound that is unlike either. What emerges on 'Before And After Science' is a music that focus on 'sound' - a kind of mathematically structurd musique concrete in which composition is abolished. In this sense, Eno had created an ambitious programme of 'music for non-musicians' that was the equivalent of Schoenberg's electronic music. With 'Before And After Science', Eno has produced a brilliant and bleak masterpiece - a vision of the end of civilization in which humankind is dominated by robots.

"By This River" is seriously going to make me cry one of these days. I can feel it.