MISTERY SOLVED

"Throughout much of 1990 and 1991, he [Eno] made impromptu recordings whenever he visited a foreign city, often with local collaborators, slowly accruing a series of sketches he would work on extensensively back at The Wilderness and then gather on an album with the deliciouly 'trashy', 'throwaway', 'sexy' and 'industrial' title, My Squelchy Life. (...) [It] would be an album of by turns playful and claustrophobic digital art funk, interleaved with dark, unsettling pools of DX7 ambience and a smattering of post-Wrong Way Up avant-pop songs. (...) There were lots of live drums, albeit heavily processed into mechanistic shapes. Eno took to calling his new sound 'Crash Jazz' or 'Juju Space Jazz'. (...) Indeed, Eno had delivered a finished master of his squelchy opus in the late summer of 1991, with a release date set for September. Review copies were issued to key journalists. Then Warners decied their schedule was too full (...) and the album was delayed until the New Year - which, realistically, meant February. Eno was displeased: by February, he reasoned, he would be thinking about something completely different. (...) Ultimately the extant Squelchy Life would be effectively abandoned (or, perhaps, desiccated). (...) The result was a new album, Nerve Net, which would eventually see the light of day in September 1992. It was an album, true to its title, that was even more hyperactive than its forsaken predecessor. Some of the Squelchy Life cuts had survived (including the title track), but Nerve Net put the emphasis on twitchy, electronic art funk, mainly at the expense of vocal numbers. (...) On Nerve Net's sleeve he appended a number of adjectival descriptions of the music within. One of them was 'Godless': 'Well, I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call the last illusion', Eno explained. 'The last illusion is that someone knows what's going on'." (On Some Faraway Beach - The Life And Times Of Brian Eno, de David Sheppard)

(2008)