Tag Archives: Brian Eno

705. mea culpa

Posted on by
Reply

“In which David Byrne and Brian Eno step outside of the Talking Heads for a bit and end up changing music forever. No, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts didn’t invent sampling (Holger Czukay was already messing around with disembodied voices inside and out of Can), but it did rather open the floodgates, with Mea Culpa proving ideal for heroic doses of LSD, assuming you were up to it. Which I wasn’t at least once — a gloomy January dusk, a riverbank in the flight path of the local airport, with a church in the distance. I became convinced a plane was going to crash into it. I don’t remember the rest.” (Philip Random)

Eno+Byrne-tea

747. the great pretender

Posted on by
Reply

“It says 1974 on the cover but Brian Eno‘s second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy) will always be pure 1981 for me. Weird and oft times jagged pop that was pretty much perfectly in synch with the times and thus not at all afraid to just dissolve into abstraction if necessary. Which was fine by me given all the acid I was taking. I needed those dissolutions, like at the end of The Great Pretender when the crickets (or whatever they are) just take over, suck us into the insect realm, alien and strange.” (Philip Random)

BrianENO-1974-3

787. king’s lead hat

Posted on by
Reply

“Second of two in a row from Brian Eno’s Before And After Science, because the post-punk frenzy of King’s Lead Hat has never really sounded right to me unless it’s fading up from the strange and sensual calm of Energy Fools the Magician (and vice versa). In fact, the whole first side of that album is an argument for the whole being more than the sum of its parts, even as the parts are, in turns, disorienting, magnificent, groovy, abstract, intense, everything. And Side Two – well, that’s a whole other kind of journey.” (Philip Random)

788. energy fools the magician

Posted on by
1

“It took me a while to warm to what Brian Eno was up to come the later 1970s. Actually, what it took was a cold night, a small town, a dose of weapons grade LSD, a bunch of people playing foosball, taking it way too seriously. Meanwhile, the soundtrack was the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, other resolutely non-psychedelic options. Something Has To Change, said a voice in my head (several million of them actually). But I couldn’t change the people or the town or even go outside really, it was too f***ing cold. But I did have this Brian Eno cassette in my pocket that a friend had recently slipped me. I could change the music. Before And After Science, said the cassette, and inevitably, effectively, seductively, about four tracks in, energy fooled the magician, and nothing’s ever really been the same.” (Philip Random)

866. dead finks don’t talk

Posted on by
Reply

“Here Come the Warms Jets, Brian Eno’s 1974 solo debut, didn’t find me until early 1981, but the timing was nevertheless perfect as I was gobbling lots of LSD at the time, imposing apocalypse on everything I’d ever accepted or believed, opening great holes in my brain and soul that only purposefully deranged dada-pop such as Dead Finks Don’t Talk could adequately fill.” (Philip Random)

brianeno-1974LSD

The 12 MixTapes of Christmas

Posted on by
1

chrs-bopsolid-master

The Twelve Mixtapes of Christmas have got nothing to do with Christmas (beyond being a gift to you) and they’re not actually mix tapes, or CDs for that matter – just mixes, each 49-minutes long, one posted to Randophonic’s Mixcloud for each day of Twelvetide (aka the Twelve Days of Christmas).

The mixes are in fact remnants of an unfinished project from a few years back that had something to do with compiling a playlist for an alternative to Alternative Rock (or whatever) radio station. To be honest, we’re not one hundred percent clear about any of it because somebody spilled (what we hope is) red wine on the official transcript, thus rendering key parts illegible.

Bottom line: it’s five hundred eighty-eight minutes of music covering all manner of ground, from David Bowie to Bow Wow Wow to Tuxedomoon to Claudine Longet, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Captain Beefheart, Aphrodite’s Child, Tom Jones, Marilyn Manson, Ike + Tina Turner, anything and everything, as long as it’s good.