Discography: Brian Eno: Before and After Science

Released at the end of 1977, Brian Eno’s fifth solo studio album – the fourth made with a relatively conventional rock band configuration – marks the end of an era. Though rarely considered the best of his “normal” albums, Before and After Science just might be the most important of the four. Until that point, Eno albums had been made fairly impulsively – it was only three years since the release of his debut, Here Come the Warm Jets – but Before and After Science was the product of two years of work and an especially brutal and painstaking quality control process, which saw the album’s tracklist of 10 songs reportedly pared down from over 100 recordings. On the rear sleeve of the original 1977 pressing, the title is followed by the description “Fourteen Pictures” – less enigmatic than it seems now, as the album’s ten songs were originally augmented by four prints by the artist Peter Schmidt, who had previously worked with Eno in 1975 to develop the Oblique Strategies cards which have been key to his creative process ever since.

The characterization of all of the album’s pieces – both the songs and the prints – as “pictures” is revealing. Eno’s academic background was as a visual rather than musical artist, and one unintended product of his typical ‘60s art school education was his reverence for the finished object. The prevailing academic orthodoxy of the time, flavored by conceptual art and countercultural “happenings” valued the idea, artistic intention and the process over the product, but as a student Eno had ultimately rejected that philosophy and all of his work – albums, collaborations and installations – is notable for its refined, finished quality. The point of Before and After Science and the culmination of all the work that went into it – no matter how much Eno may have enjoyed the challenges of the process – is the album itself. That is of course an uncontroversial, even pretty elementary idea in the world of popular music, which is perhaps one reason why Eno has been drawn back to it again and again.

The process that went into making Before and After Science was long, and interrupted by many other projects, but the album has a strong and distinctive atmosphere of its own. More like Another Green World than any of his other work, it’s innovatively textured and unusual but not sonically challenging to the listener; and there’s warm and gently questioning atmosphere about the songs that makes them more than simply soothing and balm-like. Eno’s lyrics, as was usual, tend to be concerned as much with sound as sense, so it’s difficult to assign deeper meanings to many of his songs, and yet the album definitely feels like it has recurring themes and preoccupations. It’s an album whose songs return again and again to images of water; of seas and rivers and ships and rafts. Then there are endless skies, vast distances and a surrounding sense of mystery and sometimes wonder. The songs’ protagonists drift, wander and escape.

In a more general way, the album seems to be concerned – as perhaps alluded to by its title – with the rejection of dry sense and logic in favour of feeling. And that perhaps suggests why it was the last Eno album of this type; there’s only so far you can go in rejecting sense and logic and still be writing words that rhyme to fit songs that have concrete and generic structures. Perhaps the knowledge that he was finished with the rock song format, at least a while, also led Eno to make it a definitive kind of record; it’s the only one of his more conventional albums to bear his full name – well, not his actual, 15-syllable full name, but “Brian Eno” rather than just “Eno.”

As a title, Before and After Science seems almost ironic coming from someone with Eno’s aura and reputation. Despite and/or because of his self-proclaimed status as a non-musician who makes music and because of his interest in systems rather than songwriting in the usual sense, Eno has often been considered some kind of cerebral techno-boffin, but Before and After Science serves as an almost romantic re-statement of the artist as primarily an intuitive, spiritual creator. Eno had said a couple of years earlier, “I don’t think the craft of music is relevant to the art of music,” and though the songs on Before and After Science feel incisive, clear and elegantly disciplined, they emerged from restless experimentation rather than nuts-and-bolts songwriting.

That two-year gestation period is important, because in the years since Another Green World in ’75, Eno had recorded his proto-ambient album Discreet Music and the cues-and-snippets Music for Films which would emerge in 1978. Both of these albums would inform aspects of Before and After Science, but just as pertinently, since releasing his last collection of songs, Eno had collaborated with Bowie on Low and “Heroes”, the latter of which was being recorded as Eno prepared his own album for release. Though tonally very different – in fact, it often sounds remarkably like Bowie’s next album, Lodger, recorded in ‘78 – Before and After Science to some extent mirrors Low, with a set of solid, relatively conventional songs placed alongside more atmospheric, ambient material. But whereas on Low the two aspects of the album are set apart from each other for maximum contrast, on Before and After Science they are interwoven to make an album that ebbs and flows with a lovely, often melancholy warmth.

Another consequence of the album’s extended gestation is that Before and After Science features a long list of collaborators, though typically each song only involves four or five musicians. The lineup includes guitarists Fred Frith, Phil Manzanera, Robert Fripp and Paul Rudolph, who also plays bass, as do Bill MacCormick and Brian Turrington. There’s a brace of illustrious drummers and percussionists; most notably Can genius Jaki Liebezeit, but also Free’s bass player Andy Fraser, Phil Collins and Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine. And then there are two members of Cluster; Achim Roedelius on grand piano and electric piano and Möbi Moebius on Fender Rhodes, as well as Eno himself, on a variety of synths and keyboards, plus vibes, a bit of guitar and of course, vocals. Because of this sprawling, disparate lineup, Before doesn’t quite have the straightforward rock band feel of his couple of few albums. Instead, in working with 13 or so musicians rather than four or five, Eno ironically feels more like a solo artist than at any point – excepting Discreet Music – prior to the album.

One thing that seems clear from the start with Before and After Science is that, whereas the first couple of Eno albums could almost have been beamed down from another universe, working with peers like Bowie, Fripp and members of Can was rubbing off on Eno as much as vice versa. Opener “No One Receiving” is jagged funk that channels Bowie’s “Breaking Glass” and Can’s “I Want More” but the result has its own oddly exotic flavour and would go on to inform the sound of Bowie’s Lodger shortly thereafter. Lyrically, it also seems to bear the influence of the withdrawn, muted Bowie of Low, although Eno sounds more poetic and less austere. There are future echoes of, or insights into, other Eno collaborations, too. “Kurt’s Rejoinder” is a key song in Eno’s ’70s oeuvre, In it, he samples a recording of German artist Kurt Schwitters’ experimental sound poetry from his 1922 Ur Sonata – a poem that applied musical form to language. While Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin were looking to the German expressionists, Schwitters – their contemporary and for a while an expressionist himself – was a very Eno-esque figure. Influenced by the like-minded Dadaists, Schwitters preferred to strike out on his own, founding an all-encompassing one-man art movement, Merz, which included painting, collage, sculpture, experiments in writing and sound and even a kind of immersive experimental, experiential multi-discipline installation/theme park, the Merzbau. The Schwitters/Merz/Dada influence seems to inform Eno’s lyrics to “Kurt’s Rejoinder” too; seeming to evoke the Merz collage in sound, with imagery which seems to belong to the WWI period when Dada was born. Regardless of its roots, the mixture of Schwitters’ sampled voice, with the song’s clattering, almost tribal percussion and Percy Jones’ mutant funk bass feels on the one hand very like Bowie’s “African Night Flight” but even more like Eno and David Byrne’s superb 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Byrne himself is evoked, imitated even, on “King’s Lead Hat.” The title is a fairly lame anagram of “Talking Heads”, but the song is the album’s most propulsive, featuring punchy, New Wave/garage rock guitar from old Roxy Music colleague Phil Manzanera and some very peculiar Robert Fripp trimmings. Again, it presages Lodger and specifically “Boys Keep Swinging,” but there’s nothing Bowie-like about Eno’s vocals, which are modelled, to a surprising extent, on David Byrne’s early, especially twitchy manner. The album’s other more forthright songs are a winningly eclectic bunch. “Backwater” is light, catchy, possibly satirical but definitely not devoid of humor. The narrative – a group of people floating aimlessly on a raft, sometimes falling off and drowning – feels metaphorical, possibly even grim, but no song can say the word “sausage” so prominently without meaning to be funny. Incidentally, that repeated line – “Ooh what to do, not a sausage to do” has caused some confusion with those trying to interpret it, but “not a sausage” is just a slightly archaic British slang term for “nothing.” “Here He Comes” sits between the album’s more rock and more ambient-toned songs. Highly unusual in the Eno canon, it’s a lovely, slightly melancholy, almost country-rock inflected song with whimsical, possibly autobiographical lyrics. The song’s blue-eyed boy, striving to escape through time from the context of his life and rise above reason and logic feels like a central figure to the album – a romantic, almost mythical figure – but Eno’s typically unpretentious performance neutralizes any sense of melodramatic hubris.

The album’s gentler, more pastoral songs include a beautiful, soundtrack-like instrumental, “Energy Fools the Magician,” which features deliciously woozy synths and a somber, sinister, dramatic mood that presages the sluggish nocturnal dark lounge jazz of Bohren & der Club of Gore. “Julie With…” is even nicer; warm and, unusually, gently bluesy with soft-focus vibraphone and Eno singing and playing beautifully understated guitar. One of the strengths of Before and After Science is that the vocals are treated with as much care as any of the album’s tones or timbres and Eno’s very human voice has never sounded better. “By This River” with its delicately lazy piano/electric piano texture features one of his finest performances as a singer; intimate, articulate and contemplative, it defines and reinforces the song’s gently melancholy quizzical flavor. “Through Hollow Lands (for Harold Budd)” is another meditative piece, a slow, low-key instrumental that reaches for and achieves a perfect balance of electronic and organic tones, something that Eno had been seeking throughout his career up to that point. The album closes with a final piece of pastoral loveliness, “Spider and I,” just Eno singing and playing synth, accompanied by Brian Turrington’s nimble, brilliantly recorded bass. Lyrically, it’s an almost Kevin Ayers-like piece of delicate whimsy (“Spider and I sit watching the sky…”) and it brings all of the album’s imagery, sea, sky, ships and dreaming to a blissfully peaceful close. And with a wistful, perhaps knowing, smile, Eno gently closed the door on that particular phase of his career.