Following four years after The Drop, Drawn From Life sees Brian Eno collaborating with German DJ J. Peter Schwalm. (Music for Onmyo-Ji, a previous Eno/Schwalm work from 2000, was released in Japan only.) Those who soured at the distant crispness of The Drop will find this to be a more inviting listen, even more so than Eno's 1996 collaboration with bassist Jah Wobble on Spinner. Jazzy, shuffling rhythms and strings that sway from cutting to sighing lay the foundation of most of the tracks, with some repetitive nonmusical effects often falling somewhere in the mix. If there is a fault of the record, it's that the vocals often get in the way of some fine background listening. If you don't have an affinity for Laurie Anderson's voice, you might be troubled that "Like Pictures, Pt. 2," which otherwise happens to be one of the record's most melodic and tranquil tracks, is interrupted by her intonations…
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…
This is Eno's crowning achievement as a soloist. This album has both the pop songs and ambient pieces we expect from Eno…It was here that Eno first began to experiment with abstract soundscapes, to employ a greater spatial element and the ethereal synthesizer effects that presaged an entire movement of ambient music. While most of the tracks are instrumental, the numbers that feature Eno's peculiar, affectless voice and free-associative lyrics seem to blend into the fabric of the album. Superior guest musicians include John Cale, Percy Jones, Robert Fripp and Phil Collins. From the brain-bending riff of "Sky-Saw, through the elemental creeping of "Sombre Reptiles;" from Robert Fripp's looping solos in "St. Elmo's Fire" to the dark swirl of "Spirits Drifting," ANOTHER GREEN WORLD creates a superb series of sonic atmospheres that are rhythmic, expansive, strange and beautiful.
The instrumental version of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, Brian Eno’s critically acclaimed 2022 album, is to be released exclusively for Record Store day 2023. With FOREVER VOICELESS he has removed the voice, moving the focus back onto the core music for this special 2023 Record Store Day vinyl exclusive. These instrumentals reveal the starkly dramatic and delicate tones that set these shifting moods. The album’s theme, a reaction to the ongoing climate crisis, is now laid out clearly in this hypnotic, sonic landscape.
On his third offering for Warp, Brian Eno returns to ambient music once again. He displayed it on his label debut, 2010's Small Craft on a Milk Sea, but the various pieces on it were either rejects from The Lovely Bones soundtrack or developed with Leo Abrahams on the Everything That Happens Will Happen Today tour. The music on Lux is a single, 75-minute composition divided into four segments that are just over 18 minutes in length or under 20. They were composed to accompany an exhibit of Eno's visual art in Turin. While the music on Lux adheres to his ambient principle of making music that is "rewarding attention but not being so strict as to demand it," and there is an elemental drift in all four parts of this work, that's not all there is.
Before and After Science is really a study of "studio composition" whereby recordings are created by deconstruction and elimination: tracks are recorded and assembled in layers, then selectively subtracted one after another, resulting in a composition and sound quite unlike that at the beginning of the process. Despite the album's pop format, the sound is unique and strays far from the mainstream. Eno also experiments with his lyrics, choosing a sound-over-sense approach.