Brian Eno appeared on The Colbert Report last Thursday, November 10. (Watch the episode at colbertnation.com.) It was a peculiar conversation, enjoyable for its peculiarity. It ran through highlights of Eno’s career, but not “the” highlights. With barely a nod to Eno’s most recent and prominent work (the latest Coldplay album, new recordings under his own name), Stephen Colbert focused on subjects that are of concern to an admirer.
One of the pleasures of Colbert’s show is figuring out where his parody of a talk-show host ends and where “he” begins. Complicating matters is that in both modes he likes to poke at the pretensions of his guests. In a way, Colbert’s hardcore fan-ness peeking out from inside his assumed identity makes a good parallel to the video that Eno put together a year ago, the one for which he interviewed himself under the guise of “Dick Flash of Pork Magazine.” Both videos invoke alternate identities, and both involve interviewers who go their own way.
Colbert spent no time spent on U2, but plenty on Roxy Music. (Eno talked about how he knew to quit the band when he found himself thinking about his laundry while performing.) No time on Coldplay, but on the “77 Million Paintings” project, which involves a generative approach to visuals. (Eno estimated it would take 400 million years to view the thing in its entirety, but gave no “guarantee,” as he put it.) As is his strength, Colbert managed to praise the work while providing mild ribbing. After comparing “77 Million Paintings” to a computer screensaver, he asked if flying toasters come across it. He asked about the Long Now project, about the giant clock that is at its heart, the 10,000-year clock, and proceeded to josh: He asked if it has an alarm. Eno reminded him it does have a chime. He asked Eno if he can sing the chime. He then reminded Eno of his work on the Windows 95 chime and asked could he sing that? Eno said he did 83 versions for that project, and he isn’t sure which they used. He said it’s his most popular piece of music ever. That’s a familiar line, as is much of what he said, but the absence of commercial pandering made the reiterated material feel less like he was on rhetorical autopilot (the talk-show-guest equivalent of thinking about the laundry), and more like Colbert was eager to run through the true fan’s greatest hits.
As a measure of Eno’s range, and of Colbert’s, they barely talked about music, and when they did, they talked about singing. (Eno’s growing interest in the human voice is a subject of his recent interview on the Sound Opinions podcast.)
And then they sang. Not immediately, but at the end of the show. They sang “Lean on Me” with Michael Stipe, whose band since 1982, R.E.M., recently announced it was breaking up. Their makeshift trio’s harmony was pretty strong, even if the lyrics got flubbed a little, and at times they weren’t entirely all sure who was leading, if anyone was, if anyone should be. (Perhaps Eno and Colbert were also distracted by the possibility that they were singing with Captain Beefheart, whom Stipe has eerily come to resemble.) They actually did the entire song. The show didn’t fade out midway through, as the viewer might have expected.
Once upon a time, the idea of Stephen Colbert, Brian Eno, and Michael Stipe singing “Lean On Me” on national television would have been surreal. Now it is simply television. Surreal, by the way, is reading the comments that appear on the show’s webpage, where all the subjects of the episode (the Occupy movement, Rick Perry’s inability to recall the name of the Department of Energy, the Eno interview) are tossed around like ingredients that resist coalescing into a salad.
The Eno interview (colbertnation.com) begins with an introduction by Colbert at 9:27.
Don’t pry the guitar from Marcus Fischer‘s cold, cold hands. Let him play. Perhaps when he strums that guitar, he isn’t getting quite the precision he desires, but he’s aware of the limitations, fully conscious of them and compensating for them, embracing them. The cold, in turn, reveals itself less as a detriment and more as a filter; the cold serves as a kind of natural dampener, restricting motion. It introduces unexpected sounds and unusual cadences. The best art comes from working within confines, self-imposed and otherwise. Fischer recently shared a track he titled “Guitar Improvisation (With Cold, Cold Hands) at a Room Atop a Tree,” which was taped under circumstances that its title lays bare. 
The title is Broken Dub, not Broken Beat. It’s named not for a plentiful if somewhat invisible genre but for a fledgling concept of a potential one (references to “broken beat” outnumber “broken dub” on Google by about 3,740,000 to 61,700). If the idea of a “broken dub” music can be thought to take its cues from “broken beat,” then it’s not surprising that the latter’s mark is heard on the former here, here being the recent Pablo Ribot album by that name on the Modisti netlabel. The strongest track of the album’s seven is titled “Disappointment,” and it’s the one that opens the set. There are broken-beat staples: rhythmic patterns that dissolve amid their own complexity, metrics that fall apart like a tinker toy solider that fatefully misses a staircase step. But there’s more to it: thick and brief piano lines, Bösendorfer thick, that plumb the depths; frazzled fritzes that illuminate the upper regions. Broken beat is the IDM of hip-hop, which is to say it’s concerned with what happens when the backing material is pushed past its functional purpose. To ponder broken dub is to first ponder the purpose of dub. 
The initial swell comes up quickly. Its brief, rapid rise is so at odds with the languorous, gauzy substance of the overall sound that the effect lingers. There remains a sense of implicit urgency, one that suffuses what otherwise seems like, in essence, the gentle overlaying of the sonic equivalent of passing clouds. The track is “Day When Spirits of the Dead’s Wrap You and Me” by Nobuto Suda, who is based in Kyoto, Japan, and who reportedly builds much of his ambient music from guitar. There is no particular evidence of guitar here: no attack, no bent strings, no instrument-specific texture or technique. What there is is a generous array of complementary sounds, and the occasional appearance of a stray one, like a comet crossing a thick night sky, or a thread of bright and incongruous material in an otherwise dense and nearly homogenous weave (