It’s a lot to take on board, we know, but it’s there all the same. EMI have just reissued a small four-part collection of ex-glamster, Brian Eno’s film scores and public ambient announcements. This is in addition to the half-dozen or so album they released last year chronicling the early phase of his solo career as pop-surrealist to his middle years as daddy of all that is ambient. So let’s get started with the main bulk of the material.
Produced in collaboration with Daniel Lanois in 1983, Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks was originally recorded as soundtrack to a documentary of NASA’s US Space Program. Is it what you’d expect? Largely perhaps, yes, although it’s the first half of the album that grabs all the likeliest graphic suspects; floaty, otherworldly, ethereal, foreboding, unearthly, spectral. It’s all of these of course, but it’s seldom as predictable as you’d imagine, having a natural human warmth and a subtle canopy of peril attached to it too. It’s also surprisingly moving, the choral and purring timbre of more celebrated tracks like ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ providing obscure source code for the fabulously well-stocked tear-banks of Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’. Side-two of the album is ostensibly the more familiar and accessible, tendering as it does a range of sunburst instruments and pretty melodies; the saturated flange guitar and light relief of ‘Silver Morning’, the serene wonder and gentle rumbling ebullience of ‘Deep Blue Day’ – complete with mischievous Hawaiian guitar – and the equally mischievous and suggestive American pedal-steel twangs of ‘Weightless’. A clever celebration of the Yankee doodle dream? You betcha. The last half of the album couldn’t be any more evocative of the Yanks and the New World if you had stuck a feather in it’s cap and called it macaroni. But it’s to its credit rather than it’s detriment. It shows the human side of space exploration as opposed to the strictly mechanical, the album being more suggestive of some kind of cosmic pollination than scientific exploration per sae, with an undesirable, if attractive, imperialist slant to the endeavour.
Music For Films from 1978 and arguably the most influential of the lot, is a tidy little 18 track collection of songs that did and didn’t make it onto film and features musicians as diverse (and unfortunate) as Phil Collins, Robert Fripp, Dave Mattacks, Percy Jones and John Cale. Eno’s concern wasn’t whether these little audio triggers actually got onto film or not, it was simply designed to replete the listener’s own imaginations with spontaneous movie images taking shape in the listener’s head. To get any inclination of what’s like, you really have to listen it, as much of the album exists well beyond the grasp of word, the emphasis very much on the loose, the fragmentary and the downright indulgent. As a casebook for early electronica though, it’s startling given that it’s only two years after ‘Rumours’ was recorded and a contemporary of the suitably named Dire Straits.
Designed and produced exclusively for the then new Compact Disc format (at 61 minutes only the Compact Disc format could actually accommodate it) 1985’s Thursday Afternoon formed a part of the evolutionary works that also included albums like ‘Music For Airports’ and ‘Discreet Music’ and specialised in the use of long hiss-free silences. Yes, any idiot without an idea could specialise in silence but Eno turned it to his advantage. Pretentious? Absolutely. And his exploration of holographic musical events was even more so (different ‘cyclic frequencies’ recurring and unfolding as sonic clusters, no less).
Adding either value or further anguish depending on your point of view is the fourth release, the largely unheard More Music For Films, which gathers together music from the limited edition Director’s Edition of the original album, plus Music For Films II.
Like we said, it’s a lot to take on board, but if you fancy dipping into a bit of even-textured, spacious and contemplative mood music, it’ll work just fine.