The brief but insightful liner notes to Brian Eno's Music for Airports serve as a kind of manifesto: they point the way past the feeble and derivative elevator music churned out by the Muzak Corporation to a new complex type of environmental or "ambient" music. His words and the album they accompany serve as a blueprint for a great deal of the next quarter- century's musical output.

Many are surprised to find the total absence of electronics on Brian Eno's pioneering album, because in all probability, they arrived at Music for Airports from a future in which ambient music has been subsumed into a greater spectrum of electronic music, and in which all the music they have ever heard that sounds like Music for Airports has been shrink- wrapped in a dippy holistic ideology of wellness and periodically complied on the newest installment of Virgin Records' Pure Moods compilation series.

We do no disservice to Brian's little brother Roger by exploring his music with some refraction through the work of Brian Eno. Roger Eno has consistently located himself, musically, in the flowering of serious environmental music that followed Brian's artistic lead, graciously dubbed neo- classical to designate the more high- minded of the new new age composers. Damage seems like an attempt to bring the spacious organic- veggie ambient of the new age scene around full circle with its hyper- technological substance- enhanced progeny.

Damage pairs Roger Eno with Drum Club DJ Lol Hammond, and the result is a pretty limp affair. It seems that the great failing of much new age music is that it cannot bear much scruntiny. Taken as a total environment, much of it can be passable or even truly illuminating, conducive to any number of deep, deep activities; however, intent listening often reveals the emptiness of the art or the mediocrity of the instrumentation. Damage suffers from both.

Without a spiritual or sexual endeavor to occupy your higher brain functions for the duration of the album, you begin to hear the aimless repetitiveness of Eno's piano playing. And unfortunately, Hammond's beats aren't thick or groovy enough to take your mind off it. Eno and Hammond have managed to unwittingly create the supermarket music of the new millennium: bright washes of synthesizer, half- a- dozen piano keys laced with sophomoric trip-hop beats, programmed hi-hat and the occasional easy- listening scratch work. (Yeah, you heard me right.)

Damage is perfect music to hide subliminal messages in: quit smoking, lose weight. I think I've actually been cursing less since my first few listens. In fact, "Sky Becomes a Loop" approaches self- parody with a barely audible woman whispering, "When the sky becomes a loop..." ad nauseum. That or the insufferable "Hip Hop Flipperty Flop" are just about all anyone needs to weigh this album's full potential. Think Vangelis remixed. Then meditate on something else.

-Brent S. Sirota