Brian Eno
Nerve Net

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.