When I was expecting not to like the album–because I thought maybe history was right, and Eno’s only recent breakthroughs were going to be the installation pieces and Bloom (I haven’t even talked about Bloom yet!), his iPhone app–I nonetheless decided to give Drums Between the Bells a listen one night, the album, when I had really bad insomnia. I was thinking, There is no way that I’m going to like these poems, because … because, well, because I have trouble with the word “poem,” and whenever I see the word “poem,” I want to the poem to be a victim burnt at the stake signaling through the flames, and unless the poem has this much going on in it, it’s going to leave me cold. Don’t talk to me of love, unless you are Dido awaiting Aeneas on the pyre, and don’t write lyrics unless you actually have something to say, and for godsakes, don’t speak of your lyrics as though they were poems. But still: I had insomnia, and it was the middle of the night, and I downloaded a track from the album, the track called “Bless This Space,” and initially I didn’t like the groove, because the synth part sounded like this sort of trashy synth preset, “fat synth” that I associate with a Casio or something similarly well-traveled, but then once the lyrics started, and we had the oddly stiff and limpid and alluring reading by Eno himself, saying: “bless this space/in sound and rhyme/as we suspend it/arrested from the race/for meaning/by these slices/of cityscapes” Well, it was hard not to be compelled. In fact, it’s possible that awake, at three or four in the morning, listening to the song on headphones, while my daughter drowsed nearby, was in someway the perfect listening situation for Drums Between the Bells, itself reminding me of those lines by W. C. Williams, “If I in my north room/dance naked, grotesquely/before my mirror/waving my shirt round my head/and singing softly to myself:/”I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so! . . . Who shall say I am not/the happy genius of my household?” My experience of “Bless This Space” was like that experience, the experience of Williams’s narrator, and so I saw something in “Bless This Space” that I might not have seen, heard, otherwise, namely its absolute fidelity to its earnest resolve, and upon coming to believe that that earnest resolve was good, that I should not second guess it, I came to see how potent the drumming was on the truck, the syncopation, and some really fancy rolls, perhaps edited slightly, but nonetheless drums with the real warmth and truth of acoustic drumming, and then a guitar solo like a pair of squirrels falling out of a tree, squirrels wrestling, and suddenly I was a believer. It didn’t matter that the original synth part sounded too plug-and-play, I believed in the blessing part of the song, and in the strange decontextualization of the poem in Eno’s performance, both blessing and mechanization, as rendered there. The next one I tried, and there is no real reason that I tried, this particular track, there was no method, and with Eno there should always be the possibility of random sorting in the listening experience, was “Seedpods,” which does not follow “Bless This Space” on the album, but which has, in stark contrast to the preset-like synth part on “Bless This Space,” a ridiculously infectious groove, one that achieves some of its effect because of the presence of shakers. Yes, I mean those little percussion items. Shakers that actually require people to shake them. I derive great pleasure from the idea of Eno, at home, in his studio, recording the shaker part for “Seedpods.” As opposed to using a shaker sample. And in this fantasy Eno is not in some luxury studio (because a lot of the record was recorded at home, as most of his work is these days), but waking up one morning, between doing interviews on cybernetics, taking the time to record the shakers, instead. However: hesitating over the shakers for too long will keep me from describing the vocal presentation here. The vocalist is a woman, one Caroline Wildi, whom I believe to be an actresss, and she brings a palpable joy to the very eccentric lyric: “all over London/the clicker of seedpods/against passing buses/organism/or prism/heart light divided/heart sound machine/in different souls/trying to pick the bones . . .” Or something like that! The lyrics are not available in the booklet, so I am trying to reconstruct them. I’m trying to reconstruct the way that Wildi’s joy, in delivering these lyrics, works in the context of the aforementioned groove, a groove that is resistant to its electronic origins, which may be why some listeners to Drums Between the Bells resist the album for not being electronic enough, or not up-to-date enough as contribution to the genre of electronica, when that, for me, is not what it’s about, but what it is about, is a belief in whatever poetry is, and an idea about using whatever poetry is for your lyrical basis, and in believing, mattering, and mattering making pop music less disposable.

Photo of Rick Holland, by Charlie Campbell

There are vocal performances on this album that are inadequate, on purpose, for example the Italianate English of “Pour It Out,” which so dramatically improves the song. The guitar part on “Pour It Out,” which serves as the better part of the sonic bed, is a dead ringer for a guitar piece on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, sort of country, sort of ambient, but Italian accent of Laura Spagnuolo, especially on such resolutely hard-to-read lines as “it is weird release/to imagine the miniscule/where deep sea molluscs/can glow orange in tendrils/and haemoglobin nodules exist,” raises the song up out of the off-kilter country-and-western into some surging narrative bit of tenderness. Spagnuolo is not a reader, not capable of reading, and so she doesn’t read like a reader, but like someone who is discovering the English language while speaking it, and so the poem is disrupted and made to exist as a sequence of very unusual sounds, just as the music, by the use of these strange, and frequently arresting words, is disrupted, and caused to be other than it first appears. The same is true in “Glitch,” where Graznya Goworek is auto-tuned, and made especially glitchy to serve as both theme and method, and it’s worth mentioning the booklet in this case, where Eno’s layout of the lyrics much resembles John Cage’s old Finnegans Wake pieces, in which there was sense across both a line of text, and up and down.

“The Real” is also an especially beautiful piece here, again, using an ambient field not entirely unfamiliar to longtime listeners of Eno (it reminds me a bit of “An Ending,” also from Apollo, and might even be a sample or a re-edit of that track), but made new and more compelling by the problematic proposed in the lyric itself: “the flourish/seeing the real in things/really seeing the real/describing the exact actuality/of what it is you see/or what it is you seem to see/you really seem to see the real . . .” Elisha Mudly’s voice, adolescent, uncomplicated, through its naïf charm, makes the real a possibility (though the non-existence of the real seems to have been settled long ago), and in this sense the song is a triumph of literary material over electronics, delivering on an allegedly impossible task, an electronic composition that feels deeply organic and touching, while nonetheless having a vocoded, auto-tuned section in the middle where the machines reread what has been carefully “sung.” There’s so much humanness on the track you can almost hear Mudly rustling the pages. There are mouth sounds, and the sound of the interior in which the actress read  the poem. Does Eno himself despair of the real? Or does Eno admit that the real is here, in the recording, far beyond all the cultural and philosophical disputes that might argue against the real? Holland’s lyric has a bit of the opening of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, too, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Holland wants to efface the real and accept the real, and in that way he makes poetry transportative and contemporary at the same time. And yet until the poem is entrapped in the amber of Mudly’s reading, and in Eno’s original electronic score that is not entirely original, since partly self-plagiarized, it does not have the great beauty that it ought to have. Then it arrives at its incredibly sad last line, “the real is done,” and suddenly the work arrives at its purpose. Holland is young, and Mudly is even younger, but Eno is not, and it’s the bittersweet architecture of the piece, made by a middle-aged person, though composed by another, that makes “the real is done” so sad.

Eno reserves the deepest perception of the album for himself on “Breath of Crows,” whose tinkling and echo-laden bells frankly recalled On Land. Eno sings this one, and this amounts to a paradox on an album of “spoken word,” an album which is not a spoken word album, and which is not an album of pop songs, and is not even an album of music, but something that amounts to a hybrid of all these. “Breath of Crows” is very close, if you leave aside the bells (perhaps the bells alluded to in the title), to electronic noise. It is only by happenstance that it is musical, and that is part of what’s so unsettling about it. Holland’s lyric here concerns theological (and anti-theological) matters, and the recoiling therefrom, as indicated in the first line, “my god is in the breath of crows/it grows and shrinks with nature’s whim,” and, later, “it must be absolute this god.” I am making these lyrics my own today, because Eno doesn’t print these lyrics, nor are these lyrics generally accessible on the web, and that is of some interest, that these lyrics are here alone for now, and Eno’s improvised melody, which does not have a conventional melodic movement, but feels, rather, improvised over the ambience,.which amounts to a rather creepy seventh chord, is of the Carnatic variety, or so it feels to me, because the Carnatic tradition is primarily vocal, and Eno here is improvising, as one would improvise in Carnatic tradition, moreover the scale, in which the seventh note is played first, in the bass, before the root note, is, I guess, locrian, and locrian is not unlike the way sevenths and ninths work in Vedic chants, and perhaps in this way the theology of “Breath of Crows” is of a pantheistic or non-Western shape, May I not delude my eyes, the narrator says, meaning may all religious experience be not doctrinal, but full of woe and passionate observation equally, rooted in the paradoxical real as indicated above. We don’t know what the real is, the breath of crows suggests, but we know how it feels.

There’s a lot that I haven’t said about Drums Between the Bells yet, and that’s after almost eight thousand words. There’s a lot more I might do to indicate the awe that I associate with the advent of this album, there’s a lot more to say about the voices, and about the “dance oriented” numbers, and the way that Eno confronts expectations about “dance music” and with ideas of “intelligent dance music,” reiterating how art plays a part in all of this, while at the same time making an album that is surpassingly British in some ways (I can’t even think of this album without the moment in “Seedpods” when Caroline Wildi says “All over London . . .”), or at least that it has a terrain in which its effects find their origin, and that is a British terrain. I might have said more about the surprise of the whole thing, about the way drums continue to be used in Eno with marked originality, and I might have said more about the variety of vocalists, and about the whole was done modestly, far more modestly, let’s say, than recent recordings by Jay Z or Beyoncé, and yet with more care or certainty than any of these recordings. And this recording was made by a man who will be 64 on his next birthday, and while other musicians of his generation rest on their laurels, go on the road performing songs they wrote nearly a half century before, Eno has done no such thing, has almost never performed his own songs, at all, and has turned his back on almost every tendency in his own output, embracing, contrarily, opposition over consonance, happenstance over intention, conceptual heterodoxy, pathos where least expected, and all of this long after the Sweet Spot, when the Sweet Spot would long seem to have migrated over to, I suppose, Radiohead, or, maybe, Kurt Vile, though the days will come when these artists will clamor for the respect they once took for granted.

I was somewhere on the road, not so long ago, don’t remember where, and again completely beyond sleep, and sitting in a tub in a hotel I never would have been able to afford, were it not for the largesse of some festival, or book publisher, in that despair which is the loss of all things, of all relevant handholds, in the tub, as the water slowly cools toward that lukewarm which is the universal temperature required for self-slaughter, and I had just downloaded Bloom, which is a software program devised by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers in which you simply touch your touchscreen and certain rather euphonic sounds emanate from a visual field of impressionist bubbles, and these replay and decay rather slowly, while some Eno-ish drones drone in the distant sonic space. If you are too lazy to fashion your little pizzicato stabs of sound, Bloom will do it for you. Eno describes the whole thing, I believe, as his composition, which is sort of like La Monte Young saying that he picked the one note that the Theatre of Eternal Music used to play, but who wants to quibble? You compose what Eno composed first. The thing plays itself, and you can intervene, or you can just let the breath of crows play the thing while you lay there cooling toward absolute zero, toward the time when all of our musical gestures will sound like Eno’s best compositions, little desperate iterations of sonic order against a backdrop of white noise, radio static, and then silence, and if this is what it means to be no longer in your Sweet Spot, that you are capable of making Drums Between the Bells, on the one hand, and Bloom on the other, so that very nearly dead in the heartless hotel interiors of the post-industrial wasteland are afforded a few more minutes of relative comfort, just before capitalism finishes them off, then I say we should all be so lucky as to be beyond our sweet spots.

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