Brian Eno
Before and After Science

The Before and After, and its very special science.

Yes, because I have always thought that the correct translation of this album's title is not “Before and After Science” (as I've read in various places), but “The Science of Before and After”.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I like to think I'm right.

Perhaps it's because I discovered this album thanks to “The Son's Room”, and more or less we all know what Moretti's film is about, what before and after it talks about...

For me, the science of Before and After is like pataphysics, an invented but perfectly existing science.

After all, hints of the science of Before and After, as explained and told in music, I had already encountered in some songs I knew as a kid, which had struck me quite a bit.

One above all?

“Yesterday,” by The Beatles (“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away..”).

In truth, there are many songs that tell and explain it, but never before, as far as I know, had anyone, before Brian Eno, dedicated an entire album to it, giving it such an explicit title.

So what is, getting to the point, the core of the science of Before and After, what gave rise to the science, the event that created it (and continuously recreates it)?

Only one. The end of childhood, which clearly coincides with the clear and definitive discovery of death, and in particular our death, the clear awareness of not being immortal.

All other befores and afters are nothing but pale imitations of this “before and after,” which often evoke, without knowing it, the distant memory.

And now back to Brian Eno.

I like to think that the musician, producer (and much more), in honor of his title, consciously separated his album into two parts.

The first part with tracks like “Backwater,” the same “Kurt’s Rejoinder,” with sharp and almost martial rhythms, confident, decisive, carefree (but perhaps the lyrics are not that much..).

And then “King’s Lead Heat”, which may well be a simple anagram of Talking Heads, but has a chorus that evokes for me, when I hear it, a group of children walking with a resounding step through the woods playing tin drums (as was done when I was young..), on a mission to conquer the world.

And then the second part, right after the break of “Here he comes” which splendidly sets the atmosphere, completely different, with the unsettling and nocturnal ambient of “Julie with..”, the famous (thanks to Moretti, at least as far as I'm concerned), minimalist and chilling “By this river”, and the splendid ultra-melancholic instrumental with the flavor of Ravel and Satie “Through Hollow Lands”.

As for this second part, what it talks about, well, I've already said enough before.

What might have happened to Brian Eno between the composition of the first and the second part of the album?

Maybe a clue is in that track in the middle, which talks about a "boy who tried to disappear again, who is no longer here with his sad blue eyes"?

Perhaps nothing, it's all just the result of an artistic choice.

One thing I know for sure though.

My beloved Flaming Lips, and particularly their leader Wayne Coyne, some years ago composed and dedicated their “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot” to a friend of theirs, a colleague, a member of a band, if I remember correctly, Japanese, who tragically passed away during the composition of the album.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that, when listening closely, quite a bit of the sounds of “The Science of Before and After,” of its carefree confidence and the melancholy that this science so splendidly tells, can also be heard in the album of the wonderfully melancholic clowns of Oklahoma.