Brian Eno, Dieter Mobius & Hans-Joachim Roedelius
After The Heat
To say that Brian Eno was on a bit of a tear in 1978 would be an enormous understatement. Dude was making music, producing records, discovering artists, and inventing genres; he had a hand in five of the albums on this list. Of those albums—which will be revealed in due time—After the Heat is probably the least known, and it is a fascinating bridge between the Eno who founded Roxy Music and put out a series of mid-70’s pop albums (or, at least, albums that began to redefine pop), and the Eno who dove headlong into ambient music around the time of After the Heat’s release. Those other two guys in the band name, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, were founders of the heavily influential krautrock band, Cluster, who helped convert progressive rock tropes toward Kraftwerk and Neu!’s early electronic music. Eno had collaborated with Moebius and Roedelius once before, in 1977, on an album called Cluster & Eno. Cluster proved to be an excellent foil for Eno, encouraging his experiments with ambient textures and synthesizers while ensuring that they also had a compelling drive to them.
After the Heat is a patient, deliberate album. Many of its artier choices seem relatively tame in retrospect—the song with the vocals played backward, the spoken word piece, the electronic instrumentals—but it aims for a detached beauty that it frequently achieves. “Luftschloss” and “The Shade” could have had a place on Music for Airports, if the songs only had a little more air in them. “Base & Apex” contains a series of confident variations on the same, three-note synthesizer spurt. Mostly, though, the instrumental pieces serve as bookends for the three songs that feature Eno singing (or doing something like singing). Those songs, “The Belldog,” “Tzimi N’Arki,” and “Broken Head,” share a similar structure—they each use the vocals to build tension over a slow crescendo—but diverge in their use of Eno’s voice. After album opener “Foreign Affairs” spends three and a half minutes slowly ramping up with piano and keyboard, “The Belldog” looks as if it will follow suit, holding off on Eno’s vocals until more than a minute in. When he finally begins to sing, it’s one of the most stunning moments of the album. The melody of “The Belldog” is rich, but neither “Tzimi N’Arki” or “Broken Head” are interested in creating the same kind of beauty in Eno’s singing. Instead, “Tzimi N’Arki” runs the vocal track backwards so seamlessly that someone who knew nothing about the album might think it was one of those weirdly-named guys singing in German. “Broken Head” takes a more aggressive approach, with Eno chanting, “Now I stumble through the garbage/ Slide and tumble/ Slide and tumble” over the album’s most abrasive beat. Yet, though its individual tracks use disparate approaches, as a whole, After the Heat possesses an uncommon cohesiveness. It’s a minor masterpiece, done just the way minor masterpieces should be done—tucked in between albums with David Bowie.
-Martin Brown, 2009
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