Before disappearing entirely into abstracted atmospherics, Eno had one last hurrah with quirky pop music by spending 1976/77 in Berlin with David Bowie and Iggy Pop, overseeing their greatest records as well as making one of his own. Before and After Science (1977) is structured similarly to Bowie's Low and Iggy' The Idiot, having a first side of odd pop songs and a second side of more abstract tone and mood pieces. The pop songs on Before and After Science are really great, from the stuttering 'No One Receiving' to the clattery Talking Heads tribute 'King's Lead Hat' (a couple of years later Eno would help to turn the Talking Heads from one of the most interesting post-punk bands into one of the most interesting bands full stop), and each one has a clear character and a clear sense of construction. They're by turns peculiar, whimsical, frustrating, and all great. The bridge between the sides is the languid straight pop song 'Here He Comes' which is a hazy, delicate song which wouldn't have been out of place on Another Green World. From then the album stretches out into the calmest, most serene pieces, some songs, some instrumental, with some fabulously delicate chord changes and progressions which are not only brilliantly clever, but also calming, moving and entirely warm. It's a really wonderful album.
1978 saw a return to the kind of atmospheric ambient approach of Discreet Music, but refined to absolute perfection. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) is a truly astonishing piece of work, subtle, delicate, graceful, fluid and assured, its stated aim to be specifically background music is misleading. This is some of the most beautifully designed, rigorous avant-garde composition around. The first of the four pieces '1/1' is 18 minutes of subtle pastel shaded synth distantly underscoring a repeating but ever evolving single piano motif. It's hypnotic and extremely clever, like a less formalised interpretation of repetition that Steve Reich was exploring at the same time. The second '1/2' is shorter and less graceful, being synthesised voices repeating and evolving a worldess motif. In some ways the greatest piece is the last which is ten minutes of shifting thick keyboard waves which rush in and recede, and it is the most clearly the result of tape loop recording, as parts rise up and degenerate to allow others to wash in to take their place. Despite the noise being thick and faintly sluggish, it's still incredibly engaging and oddly moving.
I think people really rate 1978's other ambient project, Music for Films, but I'm not sold on it myself. Music for Films has 18 brief pieces which, mainly because of their brevity, sound more like sketches of melodic ideas than whole completed pieces of ambient or mood music. Some of them are unsurprisingly lovely ('Events in Dense Fog' is wonderful, creepy and uplifting by turns), but the whole thing has too much of an air of Windham Hill recordings about it. As does, but for very different reasons, 1980's collaboration with Harold Budd, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (that title just led to Zo dubbing Eno "a twat". Unforgiveable. But sort of understandable). Anyway, Ambient 2 is the first album on which Eno gave Budd his trademark echoing gentle piano sound, and in 1980 it would have been pretty unusual. It's undeniably stunningly pretty, but it's a sound whose revolutionary appeal would have been very brief indeed as the co-opting into being used as the soundtrack for everything sedate, from TV adverts to background music in health spas, was fairly instant. It means it's hard to listen to any Harold Budd records without having those thoughts about them, which really is a great shame because objectively they are stunningly attractive and evocative records.
The production work Eno had done for the Talking Heads over the preceding three years had led to conflict within the band who felt that David Byrne had fallen too much under Eno's spell and had left the band's original ideas behind. If anything their concerns were consolidated by the release of 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration between Byrne and Eno. The band may have been right to worry but sadly their loss was the world's gain because not only did Eno turn the Talking Heads into one of the most unique and uniquely interesting bands in the world but My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was a game-changing masterpiece. "World music" before the term had any currency, the album is a fantastical journey through the musical world channelled through the experience of television. I think the idea is that TV allowed access to the whole of the rest of the world and its various cultures, through a distorting lens without question, but access nonetheless, and the album throws everything it can into the pot. The rhythms are all essentially Middle Eastern and African, there are chanting Imam's, there's South American percussion, funk bass, choppy African guitars, endless samples from US TV of preachers and salesmen, and the whole thing is stitched together seamlessly. The fact that everything is mixed in together with nothing venerated, nothing given precedence, and all of it slightly inauthentic makes the feeling that it's musical channel-surfing entirely plausible. It's an extraordinary record because not only is it astonishingly clever, completely without precedent at the time, it's also amazingly listenable, and the first in particular is loads of fun. (My copy is the Nonesuch reissue, hence the new cover, which has a handful of added scraps of songs that didn't make the final album which are interesting but inessential)
Ambient 4: On Land (1982) is another superb collection of atmospheric pieces which gently unfold throughout their running time. This time out the music seems to have been played directly and organically rather than with heavy processing or using tape loops and as a result the sound is both more immediate and more human. There's something a little sinister about some of the sound of On Land and for me it sits somewhere between being too winsomely Windham Hill, and not quite spacious enough. Unlike Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983) which I think is possibly Eno's greatest ambient work. It's absolutely stunning, the cover setting out the theme of the record. I believe it actually came out of a commission to compose the music for the great NASA doco, For All Mankind. As a soundtrack to space it succeeds wonderfully and between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, all of the stereotypical notions of the sights and sounds of outer space were created. There's nothing in the album that has any relationship with its theme, of course, yet somehow it really is the sound of emptiness, of weightlessness - it's truly remarkable. And it's another astonishing testimony to Eno's unparalleled skill at constructing entirely new views, entirely new ways of thinking about music as both an idea and as a tool. Apart from anything else it's a stunningly beautiful listen.
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