Let’s end the day with a bang! The second album from Brian Eno and Karl Hyde will be out on June 27th. And I’m quite sure I’ve listened to the growing of one or two of the tracks during the legendary „concert for one“ :)! The big question is: will I get an advance copy for my next „Klanghorizonte“ show at the Deutschlandfunk on June 21st, starting one hour after midnight and running for three hours in a row …!? And, yes, the title of the album is „High Life“.
„When Someday World was finished I felt like we were still on a roll and I wasn’t ready to stop working and get into ‚promotional mode‘ for that record,“ Brian Eno explains. „So I suggested we immediately start on another album, a different one, where we extended some of the ideas we’d started, and attempted some of the ideas we hadn’t.“
„I wanted to work with a stripped down set of equipment,“ Karl Hyde says of the record. „For this album I was very keen for Brian to live process my guitar playing so that we would be effecting one another’s performance, bouncing off each other, inspiring new combinations of polyrhythms.“
Excerpts from an email Brian sent me on May 1st:
Our new record is almost finished…we’re in the last two days. It’s been a great experience and I can’t wait to see what people think of this music.
Thank you SO MUCH for the YMG’s. I don’t know how I didn’t know about them before now. Problem with being a working musician is that you don’t get much chance to listen to music! if you’re an artist or a writer you can have the radio on all the time…which is why artists and writers know more about music than anybody else.
YMG is the abbreviation of „Young Marble Giants“ , an ascetic masterpiece (imo) Brian had totally missed when it had been released at the beginning of the 80’s (at that time he was living in New York, the Talking Heads, David Byrne, Jon Hassell, and some Future Ambient classics (On Land, Apollo) were part of that life that also lead to early video experiments, first encounters with Daniel Lanois (will Warp / All Saints reissue Roger Eno’s Voices and Michael Brook’s buried treasure Hybrid?) Productions also included the New York No-Wave-scene and zither maestro Laraaji. The forthcoming album High Life with some Steve Reich and Fela Kuti-connections seems to revitalize some of the wild vibes of that era, too. (m.e.)