Brian Eno with Rick Holland

Add Date: July 12 

Artist: Brian Eno and the words of Rick Holland 

Album: Drums Between the Bells 

Label: Warp 

Genre: Defies classification 

Comments: To say that a Brian Eno album "defies classification" seems especially redundant, or perhaps just misguided--as if one were expecting his next work to be full of guitar-centric indie rock or bouncy synth pop. That would imply that there weren't any new avenues for this mastermind to explore, and it's simply impossible to imagine Eno running out of ideas. His latest work is a collaboration with the English poet Rick Holland, in which various voices--including Eno on several tracks and, on "Fierce Aisles of Light", the poet himself--read or sing Holland's work over Eno's signature electronic soundscapes, which range from ambient to crunching electronica.

"We are all singing," Eno recently told The Los Angeles Times. "We call it speech, but we're singing to each other... I thought, as soon as you put spoken word onto music, you start to hear it like singing anyway. You start to develop musical value and musical weight, and you start to notice how this words falls on that beat, and so on." It's a fascinating concept, and as usual with Eno's music, the results are equally captivating. Start with tracks 2, 14, 5 and 8.