No One Receiving

Brian Eno recorded Before and After Science over two years, at Basing Street Studios in London and Conny Plank's studio in Cologne, with a guest list that reads like a catalogue of everything interesting happening in 1970s music. Phil Collins on drums. Percy Jones on fretless bass — the Welsh bassist whose liquid playing had already redefined what a bass guitar could do in Brand X. Paul Rudolph on fretted bass and guitar. Moebius and Roedelius from Cluster. All of them appearing across an album that Eno described as his attempt to make something simultaneously energetic and contemplative — Side A urgent and syncopated, Side B dissolving into the ambient territory he was about to make his own.

No One Receiving opens the album and opens it strangely. The rhythm is syncopated in a way that resists settling — Collins's drumming locks in with Jones's fretless bass and Rudolph's fretted bass, the three together creating a skittering, sci-fi funk pulse that seems to lean forward without ever quite falling. Eno's vocal is deadpan, almost bureaucratic, delivering lyrics about transmission and silence — signals sent into empty space, no one on the other end. The whole thing runs for three and a half minutes and ends before you've fully worked out what it was.

Before and After Science was Eno's fourth and final vocal rock album — after this, he moved almost entirely into ambient music, production work, and his long collaboration with David Bowie on the Berlin trilogy. No One Receiving sits at that exact hinge point: it has the energy and oddness of his earlier records — the art-rock strangeness of Here Come the Warm Jets and Another Green World — but there is already something cooler, more detached about it. The transmission going out with no guarantee of arrival. Eno knew exactly what he was saying. He was about to stop singing.