Despite his unfortunate association with Phil Collins, Brian “The Bald Egon” Eno has spent a sizeable chunk of his career wading his abilities in the same creative waters as some of pop music’s grandest talents. From Robert “Granite Frets” Fripp to David “I Fucking Dare You to Call Me Dave” Bowie, Eno’s chops behind the boards and incisive musical brain have made him the perfect collaborator for many significant musicians, especially during his (arguably) mid-1970s creative peak. But for all the Byrnes and Bonos and Windows 95s that managed to keep Brain One well remunerated for his efforts, a host of other projects inevitably slipped through the cracks, doomed to be fed as scraps of art-rock arcana to music critics and unemployable prog-heads across the globe.
Tracks and Traces, Eno’s collaboration with krautrock übergrupp Harmonia, is one of those projects. In 1976 the two parties convened while Eno was en route to record Low with Bowie, but the tracks didn’t appear on wax until 1997 when Harmonia/Cluster co-founder Hans-Joachim Roedelius remixed nine tunes and released them as a single album. Though his autonomous actions angered the other members of Harmonia, Neu!’s Michael Rother and fellow Clustertacean Dieter Moebius, the pair certainly couldn’t fuss about the quality of the material. But Roedelius wasn’t the only one with a copy of the sessions gathering dust in his attic. Rother eventually digitized his copy into 27 fragments, and while apparently the unreleased material could fill a whole album, the band decided instead to reissue the 1997 album with three new tunes integrated into the existing track sequence. Out October 6 on Gronland Records, this shizz is not to be missed, folks, especially since Harmonia has made it clear that they have no intentions of reforming for a new album or tour.
Tracks & Traces tracklist:
1. Welcome #
2. Atmosphere #
3. Vamos Companeros
4. By the Riverside
5. Luneberg Heath
6. Sometimes in Autumn
7. Weird Dream
8. Autumn
9. Les Demoiselles
10. When Shade Was Born
11. Trace
12. Aubade #
# - Previously unreleased.