Eno—the Rothko of ambient music
5
By Gary_P_Bagnall59
It is abstract, not quite minimalist or strongly serialist. Eno is a sound colourist with a pop musicians pulse. There is drama aplenty in these works, most previously unreleased, all spatially remastered for iTunes. Yet, like all good music from Beethoven to the present, it is the silences, the rests, the musical anti-matter of sound that make these works special. Extracted from their installation dimension one expects a redaction, a sense of fragmentation from the whole piece but that’s not the norm here. I am familiar with several of these works either from recordings or—like the generative ‘77 million paintings’—from the DVD release. Just as his recent work ‘Reflection’ is good but fractal in audio release, fabulous in audio-visual iOS App, so to ‘77 million paintings’ feels incomplete. Running in at over 44’, it clearly was intended to place in the public domain the audio in like manner to ‘Reflection’, as a stand alone work, but it’s more mood music and thus less interesting than the others collected here. ‘I dormienti’ is an old fav of mine and a go-to piece of ambience for writing or reading, like his ambient classic ‘Neroli’ (not in this collection). ‘Thinking music’ is still a good descriptor. I think it was the UK Guardian review that was unimpressed with the final set of music for ‘Future Installations’, caustically musing that it could have been composed in a few short minutes on an iPhone. I strongly disagree. There is much to savour in these pieces. Listen for yourselves, don’t take my word or the Guardian’s. As a painter I often hear the naïve snit that anyone could have produced that abstract art work. Not true of painting and not true of Eno’s ambient pieces. Structure may be superficially simple but it is microtonally and rhythmically complex. These pieces have a deep, reflective and richly rewarding heuristic through which the work is constructed. I strongly recommend this set as an introduction to Eno’s ambient works, rewarding of careful listening and as mood generating background. As Eno himself put it: ‘Children learn through play; adults play through art’. This is indeed playful, artful music.
