Brian Eno and David Byrne's 1981 collaboration was recorded before Remain in Light but delayed by sample-clearance problems. Its title comes from Amos Tutuola's novel, though the musicians had not read it when choosing the name. The record is a constructed encounter with recorded voices and sounds.
Brian Eno's first solo album followed his departure from Roxy Music and appeared in 1974. It combines glam and pop forms with experimental working methods. A large cast of guests supplied performances that Eno could direct, combine and transform.
Before and After Science is Brian Eno’s fifth solo studio album, recorded over two years while he worked concurrently on Music for Films, Discreet Music, and David Bowie’s Low and 'Heroes'. Released in December 1977, it concludes his pop and rock phase and was inspired by Oblique Strategies. It features electronic and artistic rock compositions with vocals, built via 'deconstruction and elimination'. Only two tracks are instrumental: 'Energy Fools The Magician' and 'Through Hollow Lands' (dedicated to Harold Budd). Guest musicians include Fred Frith, Jaki Liebezeit, Cluster, Dave Mattacks, Andy Fraser, Percy Jones, and Phil Collins. It received equalised acclaim upon release.
Brian Eno's 1978 EMI release grew out of a bad afternoon at Cologne's airport and a conviction that background music could be more than wallpaper. Made from looped tape rather than a band, it named ambient music as a genre in the act of making it.
Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti regrouped at Hansa Studio 2 in West Berlin in mid-1977, months after finishing Low, and built songs largely from scratch in the room with a returning rhythm section and a guest guitarist flown in on short notice. The setting bleeds into the record, and the title track has outlasted almost everything else Bowie made.
Made after Bowie left a Los Angeles addiction behind for Europe, Low pairs Tony Visconti's harmonized drum sound with Brian Eno's ambient textures, opening with fractured songs before giving its second side over to instrumental mood pieces.
Made across studios in Nassau and New York with producer Brian Eno in mid-1980, Remain in Light grew out of instrumental jams built on African polyrhythm rather than finished songs, with David Byrne adding scattered, half-improvised lyrics only once the band returned to the United States. Extra musicians, a struggling frontman and a near-collapse in the writing process all shaped a record now widely treated as the band's finest hour.