From Life

Just when did art become a four-letter word in rock ‘n’ roll? Anti-intellectualists always seize on art-rock scapegoats who are (often erroneously) perceived as obscurists: Beefheart, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and of course, Brian Eno.

The primitivist pop painters are conveniently forgotten – Kurt, Bob, Bono, John Lennon, Madonna. Hence U2 and Eno’s Passengers project being considered “challenging” by people who have no problem digesting 30-minute suites by Orbital or the Chemical Brothers.

Speaking to Jools Holland recently, Brian Eno summed up his musical philosophy as an attempt to balance the intellect and the emotions.

Here, with German percussionist, DJ and composer J. Peter Schwalm, Eno’s managed to marry the ambient and the rhythmical. The title From Life presumably serves as a metaphor for both representational art and experiential values. Listening to the opening piece ‘From This Moment’, one is reminded of the Generative Music programme he enthused about in A Year (With Swollen Appendices), where a piece of music is made capable of remaking itself so that it never plays the same way twice. ‘Persis’ sounds as close as a conventional recording can get to such a synthetic-organic ideal without getting into Flaming Lips’ 4-CD Zaireeka territory.

In the end, there is no invisible intelligentsia, no art-rock equivalent of the Bilderberger illuminati. From Life is about the simplest aesthetics: beauty, pleasure, pure sensation. Easy-