Riffs, Rants & Rumors: Eno's Art Rock Era On DVD

posted in: Features • Music News • Rock

Let’s face it, Brian Eno is the kind of guy who can make you feel bad about yourself. Now, don’t blame poor old Eno, it’s not really his fault. After all, he’s not setting out deliberately to undermine anyone’s self-confidence, it’s just that he seems to get more accomplished between breakfast and lunch than many people manage in a year. That’s the way it’s been from the beginning for the seemingly tireless, quite conceivably workaholic artist. After helping Roxy Music make rock history, he embarked on an endless flurry of projects that included not only a solo career, but a host of collaborative efforts, production jobs for other artists, and the inauguration his own label”and that’s just the ’70s. From the ’80s on, Eno worked at an even harder pace (if anything) breaking new ground in electronic-oriented music pretty much every time he blinked, but the new documentary Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth focuses exclusively on Eno’s ’70s “rock” period, presenting a fascinating portrait of an artist in perpetual motion.

As it’s title indicates, the documentary” which is set for a DVD release on May 17 through MVD Entertainment Group”begins with Eno the longhaired, cosmetically enhanced, outrageously attired glam-rock provocateur, presenting a striking figure behind his synthesizer as he electronically treated the sounds of the other musicians in the band and generated some groundbreaking tones of his own. Eno’s solo on Roxy’s “Editions of You,” to name just one, remains one of the greatest, most gloriously unhinged synthesizer solos in all of rock and roll. From there the in-depth, two-and-a-half-hour documentary does a laudable job of following the twists and turns of Eno’s mind-boggling mid-’70s evolution, incorporating commentary from critics, collaborators and in just a couple of instances, Eno himself.

Before turning his attention more exclusively to electronic music and ambient textures”though the groundwork he laid for that in his duo albums with Robert Fripp and his solo release Discreet Music is covered here as well”Eno released four solo albums that still stand apart from anything else ever to come under the umbrella of “rock.” If pressed, you’d be within your rights to label them art-rock, especially since they include contributions from members of King Crimson, Genesis, Matching Mole and of course Roxy Music, among others, but Eno’s blend of the conceptual and the instinctual was unprecedented and still sounds entirely sui generis today. The film sheds some light on the process behind these massively influential works, which have informed the output of everyone from LCD Soundsystem to Moby. It also examines Eno’s equally seminal contributions to Bowie‘s “Berlin trilogy” of Low, Heroes and Lodger, his championing of avant-garde music through the establishment of his trailblazing Obscure Records imprint, his work with krautrockers Harmonia and his production of albums by John Cale and Ultravox, to name just a few items on Eno’s ’70s CV.

It just so happens that The Man Who Fell To Earth arrives at a time when Eno is ramping up for a new release, Drums Between the Bells, set to drop in July on Warp Records, but then, it probably would have been difficult for the DVD to appear at a point when there wasn’t a new Eno project in the offing. Such is the continuing prolific nature of Eno’s output, with more accomplishments being added to the dossier all the time, but if you want a thoughtful, comprehensive look at the works that Eno’s legend was built on, look into this lovingly-detailed doc.