Learning From the Masters ; Many Bands Have Learned Sonic Tricks From Byrne and Eno

By Jeff Miers

To the average listener whoever that is, and however you choose to measure him or her — the names Brian Eno and David Byrne might be considered peripheral to the mainstream.

Perhaps one remembers Byrne as that crazy dude in the oversized suit fronting Talking Heads, or the sweaty professor-type karate- chopping his arm and ranting about this not being his beautiful wife, and that not being his beautiful home, during that dim and distant past when MTV used to show art-rock videos. (Or any videos, for that matter.)

Maybe Eno crept into the popular consciousness in one way or another, as the peacock-plumed freakazoid twiddling the knobs of his synthesizer with Roxy Music. Or maybe your brother-in-law listens to one of the man’s ambient records when he’s trying to chill out after a long day at the office.

Most probably, though, the casual music listener doesn’t really know who these cats are. Interestingly, if they’ve been at all cognizant of the more adventurous strains of popular music over the past 30 years or so, they’ve been treated to an interpretation of the Eno-Byrne influence.

What do Radiohead, Beck, Coldplay, Gnarls Barkley, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Arcade Fire, Outkast, Lupe Fiasco, U2, Adrian Belew, Paul Simon and Vampire Weekend have in common? They all operate — or have operated, at one time or another — within the paradigm first conjured by Eno and Byrne, both with Talking Heads and during the creation of their legendary, recently reissued “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” project.

What defines that paradigm?

In the broad sense, a constant lack of ease that translates as musical wanderlust and a voracious appetite for cross-pollination of musical forms and cultures of sound. In the microcosmic sense, it’s the creation of what we now casually refer to as collage art, as it applies to popular music, that is the great gift bequeathed by this gloriously obtuse, eccentric and odd couple.

The multilayering of disparate conceptions of sounds, harmonic and rhythmic patterns — this might now seem common, and might further be interpreted as self-indulgent to the “Gimme the chorus, quick, and quit messing around” set. The rest of us hear it as fulfilling music’s purpose by suggesting an ever-opening sense of the possible.

To quote Radiohead, “I Might be Wrong,” but I doubt it. Nearly 30 years after the brash collage-rock/hip-hop/world music hybrid “Bush of Ghosts” was released, Eno and Byrne subtly drop “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” on us. It doesn’t emerge tentatively, but comes like a bolt from the blue. How, after all this time, can the two so ably pick up the conversation exactly where they left it back in 1981?

I dunno, but more importantly, I realize that it doesn’t matter. What does matter? First, “Everything” is the equal of everything the pair created together in the past, and I’ll include Talking Heads’ watershed “Remain in Light” album. This new body of song might loosely be described as “electronic gospel” music — in fact, both Eno and Byrne describe it as such on the Web site dedicated to the album, www.everythingthathappens.com.

Which leads us to a second point of interest: This record is an independent one, and you can only get it through the artists’ Web sites. Three options are available for varying but appropriate prices: a digital-only download; a digital download plus “hard copy” to be shipped at a later date; and a digital download/hard copy/ ornate box set deal with all sorts of goodies.

The circle closes, in a way. After all, Radiohead is its own generation’s fulfillment of the Eno/Byrne ethic. Now the father comes around to follow the path of the son. Maybe there’s something to this whole digital swapping of information thing after all.

There is a continuation of the post-modern conception here, since Eno created all of the music beds for these songs on his own, sent them to Byrne, who then set lyrics to melodies and urged a full flowering from the song’s seeds.

Byrne, from the Web site: “Brian’s chord structures were unlike anything I would have chosen myself, so I was pushed in a new direction, asked to face the unfamiliar, and this, of course, was a good thing. The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliche. The results, in many cases, are uplifting, hopeful and positive, even though some of the lyrics describe cars exploding, war and similarly dark scenarios.”

Unless something positively earth-shattering happens, and soon, it’s likely that “Everything That Happen Will Happen Today” will end up being, at the very least, one of the finest albums to see release this year. It really does rank among the finest pieces of musical art that both Eno and Byrne have been associated with.

e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com

Originally published by NEWS POP MUSIC REPORTER.

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