30
respectability for itself by borrowing so blatantly from late-Romantic ideals the aspect that
has troubled most critics, rather, Eno, ever the Apollonian technophile, seems genuinely of-
fended by its sheer technological excess, its lack of restraint. In 1983 he recalled
the early 70s, when recording had just gone from four to 24 tracks in a
very few years. Rock became grandiose and muddy, like a bad cook
who puts every spice and herb on the shelf in the soup ... I started
thinking in reductive terms.
21
Infatuation with technological means is something Eno has no use for, in his view, it tends to
get in the way of the functioning of the most important link in the musical chain the human
ear. In the early 1980s, a visit to Stanford University, home of one of the world's most sophis-
ticated computer music studios, proved disillusioning: "Techies don't listen to what they're
doing ... I'm no techie."
22
The last movement within rock to capture Eno's sustained interest was the new wave music of
the late 1970s, he moved to New York in 1978 in order to be in the thick of the latest devel-
opments. The rawness of the British punk sound may have intrigued him for a while, but he
was never attracted to its overtly political, anarchistic message, the New York new wavers, on
the other hand, seemed to be experimenting with music and with ideas:
The New York bands proceed from a "what would happen if" orienta-
tion. The English punk thing is a "feel" situation: "This is our identity,
and the music emanates from that." I've always been of the former
persuasion. A lot of the British bands now are based on personalities
Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe. With the Velvet Under-
ground and the new New York bands, you're conscious of personality,
but it's almost incidental.
But there's a difference between me and the New York bands. They
carry the experiment to the extreme, I carry it to the point where it
stops sounding interesting, and then pull back a little bit. What they do
is a rarefied kind of research, it generates a vocabulary that people like
me can use. These New York bands are like fence-posts, the real edges
of a territory, and one can maneuver within it.
23
The New York scene of the late 1970s impressed Eno as a kind of paradigm of the develop-
mental process in rock:
What's going on in New York now is one of those seminal situations where there are really a
lot of ideas around, and somebody is going to synthesize some of them soon ... That's always
been the way of rock music as far as I can see, this forming of eclectic little groups of disci-
plines.
24
21
Michael Zwerin, "Brian Eno: Music Existing in Space," International Herald Tribune, 14
Sept. 1983, 7.
22
Zwerin, "Eno: Music Existing in Space," 7.
23
Rockwell, "Odyssey of Two British Rockers," 16.
24
Moore, "Eno = MC Squared," 68.