A listener familiar with the pedigree of the albums of Brian Eno might assume that Virgin/Astralwerks' release More Music for Films is merely a re-packaging of Music for Films II, a bonus album included within the LP boxed set Working Backwards. Such an assumption would be incorrect, as More Music for Films represents a new spin on a variety of soundtrack material made by Eno in the years 1976-1983, including some tracks drawn from Music for Films II, others from Eno Box I: Instrumentals, and at least six selections never made public before. According to Virgin, these are taken from the limited-edition promo LP of Music for Films, a two album set pre-dating the familiar EG release by two years and only circulated to filmmakers and journalists.
Continuing the twisted pop explorations of Here Come the Warm Jets, Eno's sophomore album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), is more subdued and cerebral, and a bit darker when he does cut loose, but it's no less thrilling once the music reveals itself. It's a loose concept album – often inscrutable, but still playful – about espionage, the Chinese Communist revolution, and dream associations, with the more stream-of-consciousness lyrics beginning to resemble the sorts of random connections made in dream states.
The basic core of tracks making up Brian Eno's Music for Films was originally assembled in 1976 for inclusion in a promotional LP of prospective cues sent to film directors. In early 1978, a bit before Music for Airports, Editions EG released Music for Films with little more than Eno's cryptic comment: "some of it was made specifically for soundtrack material, (and) some of it was made for other reasons but found its way into films." As with most things Eno, this led to a good deal of speculation and controversy. One filmmaker long ago stated, "All of that is crap – this music was never used in any films," and another film student who had tried out some of the cues: "this is the worst music for films ever.
Four subtle, slowly evolving pieces grace Eno's first conscious effort at creating ambient music. The composer was in part striving to create music that approximated the effect of visual art. Like a fine painting, these evolving soundscapes don't require constant involvement on the part of the listener. They can hang in the background and add to the atmosphere of the room, yet the music also rewards close attention with a sonic richness absent in standard types of background or easy listening music.
The second in Brian Eno's ambient series, The Plateaux of Mirrors fuses the fragile piano melodies of Harold Budd and the atmospheric electronics of Eno to create a lovely, evocative work. In sharp contrast to the exaggerated pieces found on his debut, The Pavilion of Dreams, this record finds Budd delivering sharp shards of piano notes pregnant with meaning and minimal in the best sense of the word. Eno's unobtrusive electronics add a resonance and atmosphere that draw from the ambient textures found on Discreet Music, Music for Films, and Evening Star.
On Land represented a significant move away from the strategies Brian Eno had employed in earlier ambient releases such as Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Instead of using a specific process to generate music with minimal interference from the composer, he here opts for a more gestural and intuitive approach, creating dreamy pictures of some specific geographical points or evocative memories of them. It's quite easy to imagine these works as soundtracks to mysterious footage of imprecisely glimpsed landscapes.
A universally acknowledged masterpiece, Another Green World represents a departure from song structure and toward a more ethereal, minimalistic approach to sound. Despite the stripped-down arrangements, the album's sumptuous tone quality reflects Eno's growing virtuosity at handling the recording studio as an instrument in itself (à la Brian Wilson). There are a few pop songs scattered here and there ("St. Elmo's Fire," "I'll Come Running," "Golden Hours"), but most of the album consists of deliberately paced instrumentals that, while often closer to ambient music than pop, are both melodic and rhythmic; many, like "Sky Saw," "In Dark Trees," and "Little Fishes," are highly imagistic, like paintings done in sound that actually resemble their titles.
Apollo - Atmospheres and Soundtracks is an Ambient album released in 1983. It was written, produced, and performed by Brian Eno, his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois. Music from the album appeared in the films 28 Days Later, Traffic and Trainspotting, whose soundtrack sold approximately four million copies.
Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon is included in his Original Masters "Soundtracks Works" edition as it is, after all, a soundtrack to a video that Eno himself made in 1984. It consists of seven practically immobile shots of a nude or semi-nude model filtered through a variety of video effects, shown "vertically" with the TV set turned on its right side. Thursday Afternoon debuted at a high profile art gallery in New York, and at that time Eno's cadre of boosters proclaimed that he was going to do for visual art what he'd already done for music.
Hearing Budd's piano slowly fade in with the start of "Late October" is just one of those perfect moments – it's something very distinctly him, made even more so with Eno's touches and slight echo, and it signals the start of a fine album indeed. Acting in some respects as the understandable counterpart to Ambient 2, with the same sense of hushed, ethereal beauty the partnership brought forth on that album, The Pearl is so ridiculously good it instantly shows up much of the mainstream new age as the gloopy schlock that it often is. Eno himself is sensed as a performer on the album, if not by his absence then by his very understated presence.