Bleep

The Ship

Brian Eno returns to Warp with his new solo recording The Ship. An elegantly composed album split half in the vein of his Grammy nominated Warp album Lux and his early passage into background sound exploration, Ambient 1: Music For Airports and half in the more song-based experimentation first explored on his early albums Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) & Another Green World. Mapped out over four parts, these delicately laid out songs slowly pass between discreet passages and more vocalised pop tunes that forty-three years after his debut solo album show that Brian Eno is (not that there was ever any doubt whatsoever) is one of the finest musicians to ever grace a piece of vinyl.

Reflection

Returning to the grounds mapped out on Discreet Music, Music For Airports & Thursday Afternoon, Reflection is Eno's continuation of the theme of ambient; a term he coined in 1978 at a stage of his career that many consider to house his most creative output. Reflection is a long form track in the vein of Thursday Afternoon, but where the Atmospheres and Soundtracks of that piece focused on a shimmering synth texture with piano keys slowly dropping like icicles from a cavernous ceiling. Reflection strips back the sounds to a constantly evolving drone with the keys still falling into an unbroken ocean of sound, yet this time the atmospheres are reflecting something more dark thank shark. Mirroring perfectly Eno's idea that 'Ambient' music is a term "to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements". A truly captivating listen, the 54-minute duration has an effect akin to time being somewhat frozen, when digested in its entirety.

LUX

LUX is Brian Eno’s first solo album on Warp Records and his first solo album since 2005’s Another Day On Earth. It finds him expanding upon the types of themes and sonic textures that were present on such classic albums as Music For Films, Music For Airports and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Eno sees it as a continuation of his 'Music for Thinking' project that includes Discreet Music (1975) and Neroli (1993). LUX is one of Eno’s most ambitious works to date; it is a 75-minute composition in twelve sections that evolved from a work currently housed in the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria in Turin, Italy. The album is Eno's third for Warp, following Small Craft on a Milk Sea (with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams) and Drums Between The Bells (with Rick Holland).