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Rating: A nervous, electric sound, scattered throughout the twelve tracks of this album like the electrical impulses traveling through the network of nerves in the human body. The one in "Nerve Net", released in 1992, is a Brian Eno very distant from the soft atmospheres of previous albums (especially those in which he coins the definition of ambient music in the title). Here we witness the transfiguration of musical material, generally attributable to rock or some of its stylistic offshoots, into a hybrid infused with tense and syncopated rhythms, with an electronica stirring on a dark and nocturnal sonic background, with atmospheres contaminated by jazz and even hip-hop (in "Ali Click").
An instrumental music by vocation because even where the human voice appears it is treated as pure sound: whether it is distant and faded (in the opening track, "Fractal Zoom"), or lends itself to declamation rather than singing ("Wire Shock"), or is distorted or filtered through vocoder and other effects ("My Squelchy Life"). Eno himself is present with his voice on several occasions, but it happens, for example, that he limits himself to singing just one verse (in the synth song "The Roil, The Choke") and then loses interest in the song and leaves it to its instrumental continuation.
"Nerve Net" gathers a throng of guest musicians, about 25 (not counting the spoken voices) and yes, there's also Robert Fripp. Quite amusing, in the CD booklet, is a list of 30 definitions following the phrase "This record is:". Here are a few: "This record is: like paella / a self-contradictory mess / dissonant / frenetic / evanescent / overheated / godless / technically naive / too vague / revisionist / shamelessly exhibitionist / too much / not enough / the work of a disturbed mind", and so on.
Certainly, this is very dense music, to be savored with pleasure one track at a time and as a whole. Music that makes saturation its creed, until it dissolves in the sound of a moon piano (moon piano, as the author defines it) in the last track, "Decentre". If you have expectations from "Nerve Net", Brian Eno has every intention of satisfying them.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 Fractal Zoom (06:26)
Slow
there
reply
toil
no need to go on
do I need to go on?
Slow
lie
endure
recline
in a separate time
on a different plane
07 The Roil, The Choke (05:01)
He raised the stake
And broke the soil
And phrased the stroke
That takes the oil
And stoked, erased and foiled the lake
And smoked and boiled the grazing snake
The roil, the choke, the cakes of praise
The spoils that break now cloak the days
That wake the coil of blazing coke
The flaking glaze of Royalty broke
He raises, stakes, admires, stokes
The flowery blaze, the fiery pokes
08 Ali Click (04:15)
Jolly roger in a pickup
Has a packet on the horses
He's a docker with a bucket -
Just the ticket in a thicket.
Silly sally isn't pally
With the crackers in the alley:
She's a smacker and a whacker -
Wouldn't dally with a slacker.
Sally keeping in her locker
Little packets for the docker jolly roger
(looking pretty, just the sucker for a shocker)
Jolly roger in a pickup
Has a packet on the horses
He's a docker with a bucket -
Just the ticket in a thicket.
09 Distributed Being (06:12)
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10 Web (06:41)
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12 Decentre (03:25)
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