gabbox

Tearful and damned. Better composed than The Fire of Love but hindered by a poor production that made the sound unnatural.

Impressive the amount of comments. ALMATEO, I nominate you as a Sage of DeBaser, but we await your reviews :-)

Well, the title of Calvino's splendid book has also been corrected, which seems appropriate in this primordial musical broth.

Beautiful narration. Intense but unfinished album, with ups and downs.

For those familiar with English, I report a passage from Byrne's booklet, crucial for understanding avant-garde works like this. ----- "By making music we are pushing our own buttons, in effect, and the surprising thing is that vocals that we didn't write or even sing can make us feel a gamut of EMOTIONS just as much as ones that we wrote. In a way MAKING MUSIC IS CONSTRUCTING MACHINES that, when successful, dredge up emotions - in us and in the listener. Some people find this idea REPULSIVE, for it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, deceiver. They would prefer to see music as an "EXPRESSION" of emotion rather than a GENERATOR OF IT, to believe in the artist as someone with something to "say". ----- And it may help in the perennial critic/artist debate already addressed on this site (see also the discussion on Ralph Towner's Odra-rece).

The cover is actually the cardboard packaging. Inside the cover, there’s the original image (from an Eno video). I recommend the purchase, not only for the seven tracks + one video but especially because the quality is definitely BETTER. The internal texts explain the genesis of the work well. The initial input came from the fascination of the three (Brian, David, and Hassell) with phantasmagoric writings and poems (from the 50s) that produced afrofuturism (Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Funkadelic up to Miles Davis and Lee Perry). Thus, Byrne and Eno isolated themselves to produce the album conceived as a non-autobiographical avant-garde operation. They didn't want to appear with their own voices but to create an artifact composed of the most disparate vocal recordings. The game was to insert these fragments gathered by the two in unexpected occasions. This took the two of them by surprise, and once the work was completed, they had to seek out the sources to ask for rights. It was precisely the delay and, in some cases, the refusal of rights that caused delays and the cancellation of tracks.

It might be because I share their background, which has revolved quite a bit around Antenna Uno rock Station, it might be because they always sound sincere, getting less than they deserve, it might be because you wrote something that goes beyond the idea of a review... in short, all of this makes me feel good... thanks

Impeccable review. Of course, they left their mark with Psychocandy. I also saw them at a concert, after Darklands, and it seemed like they were imitating themselves. Behind a wall of feedback and industrial quantities of smoke, they looked like ghosts "made" of who knows what...

Bryan's gaze on the cover reflects that of a generation.

They look like the numbers to play in the lottery. I'm putting a 39 down in a week... a page apparently visited by "mature" ones.