Spinner

Like many of Brian Eno’s projects, Spinner started its life as a soundtrack—in this case, for Glitterbug, an autobiographical film that British director Derek Jarman completed just before his 1994 death. Eno felt the soundtrack didn’t quite hold up apart from the film, so he employed another of his favorite tactics, which was to invite one of his favorite musicians to alter the existing tapes with new sounds. For this occasion, that collaborator was former PiL bassist Jah Wobble, who radically reworked some of Eno’s original tracks and left others, like the austere “Garden Recalled,” untouched. Wobble’s taste for tense, cyclical rhythms elevated songs like “Spinner”—which sounds like a heir to classic recordings by the great Krautrock ensemble Can—but the best songs are those that luxuriate in the earthen tones of dub reggae, which was Wobble’s primary musical obsession. “Like Organza,” “Marine Radio,” and the epic closer “Left Where It Fell” exemplify the bassist’s ability to invest Eno’s otherworldly soundscapes with the apocalyptic pleasures of tectonic Jamaican basslines.