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Brian Eno - Eno, Moebius & Roedelius: After The Heat CD (album) cover

ENO, MOEBIUS & ROEDELIUS: AFTER THE HEAT

Brian Eno

Progressive Electronic


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Syzygy
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars This album came from the same sessions which produced the 5 star masterpiece Cluster and Eno and the song By This River on Before and After Science. This is another splendid album, but it lacks the cohesiveness and sustained other worldly atmosphere of their previous release. It's also a rather more uptempo album a lot of the time, although the overall mood is still tranquil with some nagging dark undercurrents.

One major difference between After The Heat and Cluster & Eno is the inclusion of Eno's vocal on a few tracks. This is particularly effective on T'Zima N'arki, which sounds as though Eno is singing his lyrics backwards or possibly is just singing nonsense syllables with bizarre inflections. This track also features Can's Holger Czukay on bass, and has some dub reggae styled sound effects - all in all, an oddly enjoyable musical confection. The Belldog, on the other hand, sounds like a track from an Eno solo album - a perfectly good song in its own right, but not quite in keeping with the rest of the album. The instrumental tracks mostly recall the spacy soundscapes of Cluster & Eno, which itself called to mind the best moments of Another Green World and Music for Films.

After the Heat is a strong album from a remarkably productive collaboration, and is highly recommended, but to hear these musicians at their best go for Cluster & Eno.

Report this review (#40048)
Posted Saturday, July 23, 2005 | Review Permalink
soundsweird
PROG REVIEWER
3 stars Oh boy! I finally get to review a Cluster album!! This followup to the album entitled "Cluster & Eno" should be of interest to fans of Brian Eno, since he sings on three of the tracks. For me, these are the highlights of the album, and none of them are throwaways. These songs sound like nothing on any of Eno's solo works, and in fact sound nothing like each other. Experimental but catchy stuff. The rest of the album is made up of typical, simplistic Cluster instrumentals. They've done better on their own albums.
Report this review (#41366)
Posted Wednesday, August 3, 2005 | Review Permalink
philippe
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars After his return in pop solo recordings, Eno continued his exploration in deep experiments with a serie of collaborations with other musicians. For this astonishing original meditative effort, Eno collaborated with two pioneers of the Kosmische music genre, Moebius & Roedelius (well known by a public of specialists for their recordings in Cluster and Harmonia). A fervent admirator of the two German musicians, Eno will record none less than 3 albums with them ("After the Heat", "Cluster & Eno" and "Tracks and traces"). "After the heat" is a great collection of synth, minimalist soundscapes performed in a rather melancholic bliss. Eno's influence seems to be discreet compared to his other solo works (if we expect his intervention for lyrics). The music is clearly inspired by the landmark of Cluster's ambient recordings (from the "Sowiesoso" era). However this album deserves the attention of everyone who is into Eno's ambient instrumental efforts, "discreet music" and in sacred years of 70's German electronic music. Dedicated to beautiful dreamscapes and new sound experiments, this album is one of Eno's most achieved releases.
Report this review (#41684)
Posted Friday, August 5, 2005 | Review Permalink
tarkus1980
PROG REVIEWER
4 stars I find the second Cluster/Eno (which for whatever reason is credited to each of the individuals instead of just to "Cluster/Eno") collaboration so much more enjoyable than the first one that it's nearly mind-boggling. Part of it's because the synth tones don't sound so unearthly and inhumane, part of it's probably because some of the songs have vocals this time around, but mostly it's because it actually sounds to me like Brian was the primary creative force of the album (with the German dudes merely providing some neat complementary ideas). It's not so much of an ambient album as it is just a "regular" electronica album, but that's fine by me; these songs might be repetitive, but there's an awful lot going on underneath the seemingly "monotonous" surface.

Plus, it helps that there's a MAJOR classic on this one, "The Belldog," which features one of the most incredibly hypnotic main synth lines that I've ever heard in my life, and builds layers upon layers of synths and piano around it and tops it off with a terrific vocal melody about receiving snippets of encoded transmissions. It's hard to describe in text why it is that I find this track so awesome, but if you haven't heard this, you have to just take my word for it when I say this is six minutes of pure sonic bliss and total friggin' catharsis, and believe me, that's not something I say about electronic proto-trance (I guess) compositions on a regular basis. Every fan of Eno (and yes, of Cluster too) needs to hear this at some point.

The rest of the album isn't as flabbergasting as that track, but except for "Oil" (which I just can't help but think of as four minutes of largely wasted space; it just reminds me too much of the weaker moments on Cluster and Eno), all of the tracks feature something that I enjoy quite a bit. A couple of them (the lovely piano-based "Luftschloss," the brief, vaguely playful "Light Arms") might seem a bit too "lightweight" in comparison to the relatively stern atmosphere of the rest of the album (which is the most obvious contribution of the Germans to this album; Eno never got this kind of overall mood on his own), but I can't really think of that as a tremendous negative here. These tracks are just less elaborate than the other songs, is all; they're quite enjoyable while on. As for the others, the most impressive ones (to my ears) are the opening "Foreign Affairs" (which features a solid rhythmic pulse in the synths and uses low-pitched, pounding pianos in a much better way than the requiem-like pieces on Cluster and Eno), the bizarre-as-hell "Tzima N'arki" (which features yet another hypnotic sequence of rhythmic synths, overlaid with Eno singing the chorus to "King's Lead Hat" backwards (!!)), and "Broken Head," which has (in addition to the standard cool rhythm) one of the best synth-bass sounds I've heard in some time and such delightful lines as, "I was just a broken head, I stole the world that others punctured. Now I stumble through the garbage; slide and tumble, slide and stumble."

The "lesser" tracks are cool too, though; "Base and Apex," for instance, matches its title well by having two synth-lines moving independent of another, one of which is low and moderately tweaked and distorted (and bounces around funnily) and the other of which is heavenly and lovely and all that rot. "The Shade" is a nice pleasant instrumental that's largely in the vein of the best stuff on Cluster and Eno, and the closing "Old Land" is a fabulous cross between the angelic statics of Becalmed and the atmosphere of "Fur Luise," and that's a pretty solid complement right there. It's a perfect close to the album, too, and comes as close to matching the album cover as anything I could think of.

If there's any overall gripe, I guess it would be that the album doesn't really transcend the electronic music genre in the way that Another Green World does, and as such I don't really enjoy the album more than I do an average **** album. But man, for me, a **** is an extremely high grade for an album of this kind, and I would highly recommend it for any and all fans of Eno's better-known work.

Report this review (#279452)
Posted Monday, April 26, 2010 | Review Permalink
Evolver
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR
Crossover & JR/F/Canterbury Teams
3 stars I would say that this is the best of Eno's work with Moebius and Roedelius. The pieces, while still mostly sounding like rhythmic musical soundscapes have more form than on the "Cluster & Eno" album, and the few other tracks I've heard from them together.

There are two vocal songs (Eno sings, of course) on this album. Broken Head is quite good. Although Eno just chants out the words, they are very eerie. And on Tzima N'arki Eno is singing, but the tape is running backwards.

This is actually a good listening album, and almost makes up for all of those ambient releases I made the mistake of purchasing back in those days.

Report this review (#399454)
Posted Saturday, February 12, 2011 | Review Permalink
colorofmoney91
PROG REVIEWER
4 stars After The Heat is a collaboration effort between Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius and Hans Roedelius, and most resembles Eno's ambient works prior to this album, but is enhanced slightly by an amount of fervent energy. Much of the material has a caliginous feel, but also a misty and beautiful airiness that Eno's earlier ambient works usually have. I'm not too familiar with Moebius and Roedelius as of right now, but from what I understand they were large figures in the kosmische music scene, which seems to be very apparent on this album (which basically sounds like Eno + Schulze).

Brian Eno provide some vocals on the tracks "Broken Head", reversed vocals on "Tzima N'Arki", and sparsely on "The Belldog". I usually detest the use of vocals in my progressive electronic, although I try to keep an open mind, but the vocals here aren't really all that noticeable. The most noticeable would be the use of vocals on "Broken Head", which sounds like a super- noisy and dissonant track from one of Kraftwerk's early krautrock albums.

If there's anyone out there who has trouble getting into Brian Eno's chill ambient works and are persistent in their need to become a fan, After The Heat probably has just the right amount of energy and bizarreness to get you started.

Report this review (#438117)
Posted Saturday, April 23, 2011 | Review Permalink
Warthur
PROG REVIEWER
5 stars Whilst Cluster and Eno was presented in a style consistent with Cluster's albums, the second collaboration between Eno, Moebius and Roedelius is a continuation of the ambient-leaning art rock explorations of Another Green World and Before and After Science. On a par with the former, this classic proto-ambient piece presents a cohesive musical vision evoking sparse, barren landscapes, junkyards and ruins. Conny Planck once again does an excellent job of the engineering, the album having better sound quality than even Eno's exacting standards usually yield, and Moebius and Roedelius prove adept at making contributions consistent with Eno's approach. An understated classic at the border between Krautrock and ambient.
Report this review (#559540)
Posted Saturday, October 29, 2011 | Review Permalink

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