Praise be to ENO.
Just when the world needs contemplative, ambient music most, Brian (Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle) Eno — the man, the myth, the non-musician sex-maniac who invented the genre back in 1975 while bedridden — hath returned to shepherd us all into a state of careful, quiet reflection by announcing the impending release of a new “ambient” album, Reflection.
Due January 1, 2017 via Warp, Eno has stated that the new album “is the latest work in a long series” whose pedigree includes the luscious likes of Thursday Afternoon (embedded down below for your pleasure), Neroli, and LUX. In other words, it’s a pure, long-form ambient record, as distinguished by Eno himself from “pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.” He then goes on to muse that Reflection is so called, because it makes him think. “It makes me think things over. It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation […] and external ones actually — people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations.”
Of the highly-complex, probabilistic, and generative (read: freakin’ Eno-like) process that he relied on to create it, he says:
One rule might say ‘raise 1 out of every 100 notes by 5 semitones’ and another might say ‘raise one out of every 50 notes by 7 semitones’. If those two instructions are operating on the same data stream, sometimes - very rarely - they will both operate on the same note…so something like 1 in every 5000 notes will be raised by 12 semitones. You won’t know which of those 5000 notes it’s going to be. Since there are a lot of these types of operations going on together, on different but parallel data streams, the end result is a complex and unpredictable web.
It’ll be available as a CD (because CD’s still always just feel like a highly relevant format in which to listen to Eno records for some reason) “in case-bound sleeve with six-page booklet,” as well as in 2LP and digital versions, any/all of which you can pre-order now. And just in time, too, cuz after one hell of a 2016, we’ve all got kind of a fuckton of heavy thinking to do. Here’s the official soundtrack, y’all.
Reflection tracklisting:
01. Reflection (54:00)
More about: Brian Eno
