Manafonistas

on life, music etc beyond mainstream

2017 26 Jul

Der dritte Streich

von: Michael Engelbrecht Filed under: Blog | TB | Tags:  | 5 Comments

Mir gehen die Geschichten langsam aus, was „Another Green World“ betrifft, aber wohl nie die Empfindungen. Mitte der Siebziger gab es in Italien eine ganz famose Musikzeitschrift, vom Gehalt bis zur Aufmachung. Ich war dort, in Padua und Venedig, mit der schönsten Frau Gelsenkirchens, als ich in diesem Blatt, dessen Namen ich vergessen habe, die Besprechung der alsbald zur Veröffentlichung anstehenden Schallplatte las. In den Monaten zuvor hatte ich mir alles besorgt, was Eno herausgebracht hatte, und war natürlich voller Vorfreude – eine scheinbar glückliche Liebe unter mindestens einem dunklen Stern, die verrotteten Strassen Venedigs mit Giftschildern an jeder Ecke, die pulsierende linke Szene Paduas, eine Stadt, die in einem kleinen Laden ein knappes Hundert Sun Ra-Platten hortete – und meine Lust, diesen italienischen Text halbwegs zu verstehen. Endlich wusste ich, wozu mein Grosses Latinum gut war. Als es dann soweit war mit dem ersten Hören, war die Erwartung immens, und sie wurde nie enttäuscht, auch nicht nach dem schätzungsweise vierhundertdreiundzwanzigsten Lauschen von vorne bis hinten.

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, 26. Juli 2017 and is filed under "Blog". You can follow any responses to this entry with RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. Michael Engelbrecht:

    Bis zum vierten Streich dauert es eine Weile. Erstmal erscheinen alle vier Songalben der 70er am 4. August, und da soll dann die Bewertung der Neuausgabe von BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE miteinfliessen.

  2. Uli Koch:

    Bei einem Album, an dem man sich einfach nicht satthören kann, hängen notwendigerweise sehr viele Erinnerungen. An eine befreundete WG, wo wir Another Green World exzessiv durchgehört haben inklusive der damit verbindbaren Bewusstseinszustände, ein Urlaub in Südfrankreich, wo meine Familie dieses Album durchgehend ertragen musste, nachdem ich Geeta Dayals Büchlein darüber gelesen hatte und, und, und …
    Und es würde auch gerade zu der heiteren stillen Atmosphäre der hinter den Steineichenwäldern untergehenden Sonne passen. Und überhaupt, war gerade dieses Album für mich immer Musik für Sonnenuntergänge. Da scheint sich die Stimmung am besten zu entfalten.

  3. Michael Engelbrecht:

    The passage of time
    Is flicking dimly up on the screen
    I can’t see the lines
    I used to think i could read between
    Perhaps my brains have turned to sand

    Oh me oh my
    I think it’s been an eternity
    You’d be surprised
    At my degree of uncertainty
    How can moments go so slow.

    Several times
    I’ve seen the evening slide away
    Watching the signs
    Taking over from the fading day
    Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled.
    Several times
    I’ve seen the evening slide away
    Watching the signs
    Taking over from the fading day
    Changing water into wine.

    (…)

  4. Jan Reetze:

    Bei dieser Platte kann einfach nichts schiefgehen.

  5. Calvin Wright:

    So, then waiting for No. 4, Mike. Masterpieces they all are. But the vinyl, think, is more for collectors and newbies.

    Before and After Science is being touted as Brian Eno’s most commercial album, and with some reason: it’s a graceful, seductively melodic work, and side one even kicks off with a neat little disco riff. But this view also confuses the issue. People who think of Eno solely in terms of the static, artsy instrumentals on David Bowie’s Heroes and Low forget, or never knew, that on Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), the master of dadaist cybernetics also made some of the wittiest and most enjoyable music of our time. These records were supremely entertaining, in the best sense, and they were rock & roll, kimd of. By contrast, Before and after Science is austere and restrained, an enigma in a deceptively engaging skin.

    Not that Eno isn’t the avant-garde intellectual genius everyone always says he is. But he’s also a deeply emotional artist whose music, for all its craft, often seems to emerge straight from the subconscious, his compositions suffused with a humane serenity and marvelous, clearheaded tenderness in the face of decadence. In this context, Eno’s obsession with patterns is the modern equivalent of the romantic’s craving to recapture a lost past. And this obsession is the real source of both the surreal, infectious high spirits and the almost subliminal melancholy that run in constant parallel through all his work.

    On Before and after Science, the gaiety is given a sketchy, restless treatment, and the melancholy predominates. As a result, the new LP is less immediately ingratiating than either Taking Tiger Mountain or Here Come the Warm Jets. Still, the execution here is close to flawless, and despite Eno’s eclecticism. the disparate styles he employs connect brilliantly. At first, the pulsating drive of „Backwater“ seems totally at odds with the resigned lyricism of „Julie With…“ or „Spider and I,“ but it soon becomes clear that drive and lyricism are only complementary variables, organized by the album’s circular structure.

    Like all of Eno’s records, Before and after Science is concerned with journeys that have no destination and end only in pauses. Traditional pastoral images of river and sky are the LP’s central verbal motifs; when cued to the electronic instrumentation and to Eno’s shifting, kinetic sense of rhythm, these images take on a powerful, futuristic concreteness. The classical irony, „You can never step in the same river twice,“ is the album’s real epigraph in more ways than one. Brian Eno’s position is ambiguous almost by definition: a perfect child of science, he uses its rationalism to celebrate mystery. For him, technology is not bloodless machinery, but a wondrous instrument of delight. This delight, however muted, is still what makes Before and after Science linger so vividly in the mind. One title here may crystallize the paradox: „Energy Fools the Magician.“


Manafonistas | Impressum | Kontakt | Datenschutz