Kanye West’s new album bares some unlikely similarities to work of musical genius, Brian Eno.
During the build up to the release of Kanye’s album The Life of Pablo earlier this year, the singer/rapper/fashionista chucked a 180 on the whole thing, and decided that Pablo was not going to be released after all. At least not in the traditional sense.
West revealed that his new album was never going to be available to own, but that it would remain exclusively on Tidal, the music streaming service owned by Jay Z. Although he later caved and has broadened the number of platforms on which Pablo now streams, he has made the bold move to actively, “tweak” the album, despite having already reached the ears of his listeners. And, according to Forbes, he intends to keep on tweaking.
Comparatively, back in 1991, Brian Eno was all set to release My Squelchy Life through Warner Bros, which he then suddenly withdrew from the schedules at the eleventh hour. The following year however, he released Nerve Net which took tracks from My Squelchy Life and redelivered them to his fans in a different context.
In 2014, an expanded reissue of Nerve Net was released, along with a bonus disk that was an official release of the original 1991 album My Squelchy Life. Now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, speaking about Kanye’s new album Eno says, he’s into the idea of continuously tweaking and changing your art.
“I like that idea. I have a piece at the moment playing at the Natural History Museum, and I installed it about four or five weeks ago and then two weeks later, I went back and put a whole new piece in,” he explained.
“I don’t see why music should ever be finished, really. It’s fine that music has its own life. This actually always happened to written music, because written music was always open to interpretation.
“It’s interesting that records, of course, don’t change, which is both the miracle and the downside of them, that they’re static. So, of course, what I was doing with generative music all these years… is to try to make a kind of music that doesn’t sit still, that keeps changing.”
Check out the first track from Nerve Net below.
