Brian Eno and Fred Again - Secret Life (Album Review)
Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Written by Jacob Brookman
‘Secret Life’ is an ambient collaboration album between muzak pioneer and reluctant national treasure Brian Eno and downtempo house producer Fred Again. The two met in the early 2010s when the latter was still a teenager, and the result has been a kind-of menteeship as he has moved through the grades of electronica.
The album is an unremarkable but pleasant listen. One of the reasons for its lack of impact is the fundamentals of the sonic oeuvre. Eno’s most successful sound—minimalist meditation music—relies on discipline, space and stillness to work.
There are huge gaps in melodies where one forgets about the music altogether. It can be awesome, intense and thought-provoking but it leaves a lot of space for the mind to wander.
In ‘Secret Life’ you have frequent interjections, sometimes vocal, sometimes melodic, that arrest and interrupt the thought process.
This is evidenced on the weepy I Saw You, which sounds like an early mix of a Bon Iver song, and the most noteworthy track, Enough, which lands like a bit of a James Blake B-side. This is music that falls between the stools of ambient and downtempo dance. It's neither fish nor flesh.
And yet, it is high on quality in both production and musicianship. Eno himself has collaborated as producer on so many albums with so many artists at this point that he probably doesn’t have to try very hard to fix tracks, to make them work, to stop them from being bad.
The problem is that ‘Secret Life’ feels a little dated. It's exactly the sort of stuff that could be created by Artificial Intelligence and electronica needs to react to that, and fast. Such a realisation may tie into Eno (and Fred Again’s) broader philosophy about muzak, but in the meantime 'Secret Life' doesn’t really feel like essential listening.
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