Brian Eno has got a new record…and it comes out New Years Day. So 2017 should be…really effing great, judging by the legend’s track record.

The album is Eno’s most recent ambient project and he regards it to be his most sophisticated. His goals with ambient music is to create something that can be considered “endless” – it could literally last as long as you need it. In a quote, he likened it to “‘sitting by a river’: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing.”

Because of the limitations of physical music releases, Eno could never achieve that goal. But with advances in technology he has been able to produce the music on an app that allows for an endless, endlessly changing version of the record.

He continues:

“The creation of a piece of music like this falls into three stages: the first is the selection of sonic materials and a musical mode – a constellation of musical relationships. These are then patterned and explored by a system of algorithms which vary and permutate the initial elements I feed into them, resulting in a constantly morphing stream (or river) of music. The third stage is listening. Once I have the system up and running I spend a long time – many days and weeks in fact – seeing what it does and fine-tuning the materials and sets of rules that run the algorithms. It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like.”

That is deeply philosophical, Brian.

Fans of Eno can pre-order REFLECTION here, and have a happy, HAPPY New Year.