Neroli

by

Brian Eno

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This is a special record.

Taken at face value, I don't think that everyone will say that this stuff on first listen is "great" or "incredible" music or anything like that. It is basically the same scale over and over again, unfolding in a seemingly random, very slow way. However, this is really one of the most successful and truly ambient things I have ever heard. In a way, I imagine that this lives up to Brian Eno's entire concept of what ambient music is about. Two examples of how this record is should be listened to (one involves a short story):

1. Put it on and turn the volume down as low as possible (just barely audible), put the cd player on repeat and lay down (try to sleep, read, etc.). This is most effective if you let it run for several hours (or days). I really think that this is what Eno intended.

2. A couple of years ago I went on a camping trip in a part of extremely rural Southeastern Ohio (Vinton County). On that occasion, I brought a radio (which I don't often do) and at around 3:00 (I imagine, since I don't usually bring a watch with me), I tuned in the only station I could get: some public or college radio station from West Virginia. For an hour I heard the same simple tones over and over, broadcast in a seemingly random, but wholly intentional way. I cannot express the literally overwhelming impact of what I heard as it mixed with the frogs, insects, and whatever else made that night so loud. Pure beauty. As much as any great band on stage, that music on that night drove me to feel something utterly and completely beyond me. I, of course, had to wait for about an hour to hear what it was - Brian Eno's "Neroli". It was awesome (in the real sense of the word) and creepy and comforting and organic and so unbelievably right under that sky that this simple music is still one of the most important musical documents I own.

Most of Eno's work is visionary and important, but for me (a huge Eno and ambient fan), this record really codifies what all of the talk is about (the best part of the experience was that I had no idea that what I was hearing was Brian Eno or even a real radio station).

That's why this is a special record. It needs to be incorporated into your life to be effective and meaningful. Without meeting it halfway, it is necessarily meaningless, like everything else.

Brian Eno's work has meant a lot to me over the last eighteen years or so, and I still have not given up entirely on "Neroli." Nonetheless, at this point I cannot see how this album can withstand comparison to any of Eno's other work. To be sure, ambient music is meant largely as a background for relaxation and/or recreation, or even as a supplement to contemplation--and I suppose this album will serve these purposes as well as any other ambient piece. However, Eno himself claimed (on the back of *Music for Airports*) something to the effect that ambient music should reward an *active* listening no less than a passive one.

Unfortunately, Neroli possesses none of the magic or mystery of Eno's earlier thinking music. The background it provides is, in my view, neither interesting nor beautiful. Hence much of the advice we see here in other reviews to "turn it down so that you can hardly hear it" or "try to forget you even have it on." When did any of Eno's earlier music ever require such cautionary qualifications?!

Whereas "Thursday Afternoon" (1985) melds, merges, and develops before your ears during its entire 61 minutes of play, Neroli occupies its 58 minutes strumming through a single hyperslow, unaffecting and (according to the liner notes) Phrygian sequence over and over. In fact, one almost has to wonder whether anything more than 58 minutes went into the entire making & production of this album! And while Thursday Afternoon shifts and alters its textures not only at every interval, but also at each different volume level, Neroli offers (to these ears at least) no such multidimensional rewards.

Some of the other reviewers here have accused Neroli of being a gigantic joke on Eno's fans. While this is hardly likely, the sad truth is that this work might as well have been intended as a grotesque caricature of minimalist ambience taken to its furthest and most deadening extremes. Perhaps Eno was merely testing the limits of the genre (or even the tolerance of his admirers). In any case, he has forsaken much here of what made his prior music so great.