Escape into his world
The legendary ambient composer, producer, visual artist and (non)musician, Brian Eno has released a five and a half-hour, six-disc collection called Music for Installations, of rare and unreleased music on May 4, 2018. This massive collection of sonic goodies for ambient enthusiasts falls onto a massive bed of Eno’s countless previous works. By coining the term “ambient music” and dedicating decades to making and expanding upon generative music, Eno drifted away from rock music into something much more left-field. He, along with minimalism innovators like John Cage and Erik Satie, began a musical journey that was headed more towards the background instead of the foreground as music previously tended to do.
At the center of the innovative sounds that he created was the spaces that surrounded them, both sonically and physically. His music, built upon sound recordings where he lets synthesizers and other electronic processes adjust and change into unrecognizable products, was what he described as generative. While innovating those sounds into something new and much subtler, Eno also kept in mind the importance of the relation that sound has with the space around it. As a visual artist, he created exhibitions all over the world that also played with the previously unnoticed abundance of space. He added lighting and shapes to contort to the empty space around it, not the other way around. His ambient music was perfect and often made for these delicately crafted spaces. Music for Installations allows Eno’s avid following to have a peek of what it is like to experience the senses his installations and exhibits provoke.
On the first disk of Music for Installations, Eno opens up with “Kazakhstan.” Named after one of the largest countries in the world, “Kazakhstan” pairs bright synths with a slightly sour ambient ringing. Each synth tone ripples through the sparseness with elegance and mystery, taking its time to move into seemingly randomized directions. The strings are glassy and graceful, perfect enough to be a simulated sound. These strings are solemn, contrasting with the wide-eyed effect that the synths have. While both these elements continue to play at their own slow pace, very electronic-sounding beeps follow one another in a train of rapid bursts of energy. There is also a rumbling in a background that sounds reminiscent of David Lynch’s ambient bursts in Twin Peaks, though it is uncertain who was inspired by whom. Slowly, Eno introduces watery splashes in the distance and romantic strums and plucks of a guitar. There could be countless other textures unaccounted for in this passage, but the beauty of “Kazakhstan” is that the track never feels cluttered – rather, each sound builds upon each other at such a leisurely pace that listeners can’t help but loosen up as well.
Music for Installations shows Eno’s versatility above all else. Though the ambient music that he has brought into the limelight has been stereotyped as forgettable and monotonous, Eno proves that this is clearly not the case. On “77 Million Paintings,” the recording he created for his installation of the same name, he uses screechy hums and gong-like echoes that are far more perturbing than “Kazakhstan.” Here, there are rounds of dizzying synths and echoing chimes that present themselves whenever the unsettling vocoder disappears. By the eighteen-minute mark, the vocoder stands out more than ever. This cyclical track continues on for 44 minutes, sending listeners out of their usual headspace into something that is unpleasantly relaxing. Eno sends these same listeners in the completely opposite direction by the time they reach “Chamber Lightness.” Deep strings are paired with ringing tones in a manner that almost appears folksy. “Chamber Lightness” uses lots of heavy and deep instruments and textures that somehow manage to lay as gentle and light as a feather onto the drones of ambient noises he creates.
The fourth disk’s “Dormienti” may contain the most emotional span of all of Music for Installations. Beautifully plucked strings playing a mysterious melody are shrouded by ringing, high-pitched beeps. These strings are ever-so-slightly modulated at seemingly random points, which couple perfectly with the lagging glitch of the bitter vocal sample. “Dormienti” is schizophrenic and technological, as simple beeps distort into endless drones. It is an unsettling lullaby to prepare listeners for surrealistic dreams and nightmares that might repeat the male and female voices overlapping in their gibberish murmurs. Though Eno may have intended for his music to be meditative – and this recording definitely still fulfills this rule – “Dormienti” is transcendental because of its ability to stimulate all of the senses.
Up until the end of the fourth disk, every single track was an epic that took its time to create the atmosphere around it. Being the innovator that he is, Eno disorients his listeners once again by showing his more percussive and fast-paced recordings on the fifth disk. Here, “Needle Click” taps on upbeat, shallow drums in a melody that sounds far from stereotypical ambient music. A rumbling from the same kind of drum twists around the main beat. Eno adds wooden clacks and eventually, electronic synth melodies that create a mesmerizing trace of music to dance to. The entire track vibrates with energy, once again proving Eno’s versatility. He then transitions into “Light Legs,” whose music box melody twinkles over bassy percussion. It is crisp and whimsical, a quick detour passing sugarcoated nostalgia. “All the Stars Were Out” heads back into the dance music realm with its consistent jittery buzz, bouncy beat and chiming synths. Its meandering synth melody chirps with excitement over the closest Eno has gotten to recreating pure bliss on “Music for Installations.”
By the time we reach Eno’s final disk, cheekily named “Music for Future Installations” and containing previously unreleased recordings, he steers his listeners back into the calm that was so characteristic of the first disk. “Surbahar Sleeping Music” pepper drones with metallic clangs, infusing one into the other until every sound is fluid. “Surbahar Sleeping Music” isolates its listeners from reality by creating drones from some pluck of some string instrument that is held out impossibly long. It fades out so slowly and incrementally that it is nearly impossible to tell when the fade-out even began. Similarly, Music for Installations never rushed itself.
Even as every recording and song was created with a specific installation in mind, they felt relative to one another because of the generative quality of Eno’s work yet individual enough to provoke varying emotions for each song. Each and every second of Music for Installations is an experience carefully crafted by Eno and the technology he collaborates with, flavoring his songs with a sheen of something that is more than just human. Eno has unloaded a massive treasure for his loyal admirers to bask in, and the title of the last disk implies that he has more where that came from.
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