New Brian Eno

you talk like ambient is a far(ce)t

http://brian-eno.net/

BRIAN ENO
COMING SOON ON WARP RECORDS

oooooo

please don't let it be boring midi space jazz

Details:

http://brian-eno.net/#headlines

please don't let it be boring midi space jazz

I still have nightmares about The Drop

He really needs to retire or start making shitty soundtracks like Hans Zimmer already.

The Pure Scenius stuff was okay, there'll probably be a CD of that put out before too long. The last Byrne and Eno record was great, and Drawn from Life was also good. But there are too many really weak releases of noodling like Curiosities lately.

I haven't heard Making Space but some of the same people on the new Warp record are on that one.

Pretty much all of his stuff from the past several years has been the product of passive collaboration (save "Another Day on Earth," which is lovely, and the Byrne). "Drawn from Life" was passive collaboration, "Spinner" was passive collaboration. This new one is the result of that live jam at the Sydney Opera House. The "recent" Fripp stuff was pretty spur of the moment, those "Curiosities" drawn from the vaults, and assembled by someone else, at that. Truth be told, I think studio-hogging bands like U2 and Coldplay take up a lot of his time, as do lectures, debates, etc. It perhaps makes sense that the last thing that engaged him creatively seems to have been programming AI/generative music, which if you think about it is not just the apotheosis of all his theories but a good exit strategy. But when people push him (not pull him along) he can still come up with the goods. I'm curious about the new one, for sure.

Too much thinking, not enough bizarro warp factor rocking.

it's gonna be a mess if
http://www.thewire.co.uk/images/artists/ride/nowhere.jpg + http://www.michelotter.nl/images/top312009/u2_nolineonthehorizon.jpg = http://static.brian-eno.net/images/warpcd207.jpg

hueg sorry

Generative/AI music just sounds like Cage-aping snoozefest wankery. And Cage sucks too.

Counterpoint:
http://991.com/newGallery/Brian-Eno-After-The-Heat-475340.jpg

rotate canvas

yeah, not holding my breath for this to be exciting, for some reason. And I really love Eno.

I have a Here Come the Warm Jets t-shirt and I won't even download this.

if this is like an instrumental version of Bebop Hurry ... yeah ... uh.

I do find it slightly disturbing that they are pushing the quality of the packaging and not offering any samples of the actual music.

New Eno track is here. Infinitely better than I was expecting. I love Eno, but like some folks above I wasn't expecting much from this at all...certainly not Branca-y guitars.

That track has seriously wetted my appetite for this, much more crunchy than I would have expected.

This has leaked.

well thank you

Sarcasm? Just spreadin' the word dude. Figured people would want to know.

so?

sourpatchcorpse, I was not being sarcastic, I was just thanking you for the heads up. what a mean world we live in. what a bitter, sour corpse you have become.

first impression -- standard issue eno instrumental album with occasional techno flourishes. the resemblance of the cover to the recent U2 album is misleading. i wanted something different, with some 'real songs,' more along the lines of another day on earth, his most under-rated album imho

The Turn-Off Assembley

*sp, see me

i quite liked another day on earth when i first heard it but i was really just wanting it to be good i think. i listened to it again recently and i was glad when it finished - except for one track it was very dull. i've liked the 2 streaming tracks i've heard so far on the new one but i imagine it'll have some similarities to the stuff from the recent gigs which i found underwhelming as well.

haven't given this a spin yet, but another day on earth...yeah, two tracks (under, which wasn't new, and bonebomb) are incredible and the rest just floats by me, not a patch on nerve net or wrong way up. if the new one is anything like shutov that would be great, as I think that's a highly underrated album.

the new one is like shutov assembly, definitely

i totally lost interest in eno after another day on earth. it wasn't bad but it wasn't good neither. lukewarm and boring and very predictable.

i've listened to this new one a couple of times now and it's quite ok - better than expected. there's one song that sounds like it was left over from "the drop" but he added some extra non-digital elements (a bit of guitar etc) over the top - which is what he should have done with most of that album, really.

all the energetic pieces are clumped in the middle and i think they're fine if a little formless. they're obviously based on improvs and worked upon (which i think is a great method) but the arrangements are a bit obvious.

the ambient pieces are all too digital sounding for me. i think he was trying for some of the effect of "on land" but they don't quite make it.

still and all, it's one i don't actually tire of hearing so far.

a man of many talents
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFry159gZw

http://brian-eno.net/drums-between-the-bells/

those aren't generative, they're loops!

(note: I own two buddha machines and the throbbing gristle buddha machine-inspired box)

Largely true, but have you heard Another Day On Earth?

sp: "the crap they play there"

btw the last brian eno i enjoyed was 2010's "small craft on a milk sea". the big advantage compared to the new one is that it varies quite a lot. from more introspective, dreamy tracks like the first two or three to more rhythmic pieces up till harder, noisier stuff like "two forms of anger". i neiter liked the songs nor the singing on "another day on earth". there were neither enough adventurous experiments nor gripping tunes on it. for an eno album it was pretty predictable and dull.

I'd really like to hear more passive collaboration stuff from Eno and whomever, sort of like that Jah Wobble disc in reverse. Like, Eno is given someone's draft and basically has at it.

So I heard the first track off the new Eno/Hyde record High Life in my local shop today and bought it. Is this something people are talking about?
Doesn't sound like any Eno I have heard lately, really.

Briefly talked about here -- Brian Eno & Karl Hyde - Someday World (May 2014)

I prefer High Life to Someday World. High Life was recorded live with a room full of journalists then edited later for release. Think that accounts for it sounding more vibrant and exciting than Someday World. There's only one duff track on High Life.

It's a much better album than Someday World, although, listening to it made me go back and I appreciate Someday World more now somehow. High Life is probably my favorite eno release in 20 years or so.

The first track really grabbed my attention when I heard it in the shop. Of course, now having listened to the whole thing, I recognize it as an Eno record. I was completely unaware of Someday World.

someday world comes across much more of a hyde album than an eno album. but I don't like it nearly as much as his actual solo album from last year.

Someday World is like a b-sides companion to Hyde's Edgeland (which is a great album and has a nice Eno remix)
High Life is something different altogether and - like said - more of a jam record. opening track is awesome, rest is sort of ok. definetely worth checking. I need to test hypothesis about Someday World though :)

Return and Lilac both have a great guitar groove. Reminds me of classic Talking Heads.

New album The Ship to be released in april, includes VU cover

It features a cover of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free," which Eno described as "even more relevant now than it did then" in a press release.

Come again?

“Written in the late sixties, Lou Reed's song “I'M SET FREE” seems even more relevant now than it did then. Perhaps anybody who's read Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS will recognise the quiet irony of 'I'm set free to find a new illusion'...and its implication that when we step out of our story we don't step into 'the truth' - whatever that might be - but into another story.”

I believe the "I'm Set Free" cover dates from the Another Day On Earth sessions. Perhaps it's more relevant today than it was then?

Review in the upcoming Mojo – sounds pretty interesting:

David Sheppard

BRIAN ENO: THE SHIP

Dystopian ambient song forms, with lyrics inspired by WWI and Titanic tragedies.

Initially, Eno's first solo album since 2012's art installation/ambient collection Lux feels like its close cousin - the sprawling opening (title) track commencing with familiarly tremulous, slow-motion synths inexorably rising and falling, oscillating between exquisite consonance and transient dissonance. Things change with the belated entry of Eno's vocoder vocal, pitched down to an unearthly basso profundo, his ominous narrative awash with oceanic metaphor ("The sail is down / The wind is gone") - the decelerated, portentous flipside to Before And After Science's blissfully adrift Julie With... The ensuing three-movement Fickle Sun suite heaves through yet darker synthetic soundscapes, with Eno and, sporadically, Peter Serafinowicz delivering disconsolate, Great War-referencing lyrics (created by feeding in relevant text references to something called a Markov Chain Generator), while the contrasting finale delivers redemptive relief in the shape of Lou Reed's I'm Set Free, rendered as a gracefully soaring, multi-harmony hymnal.

1/1/17 – Reflection
https://www.facebook.com/brianenomusic/photos/a.556181867729342.141504.148573968490136/1477189158961937/?type=3&theater

Pieces like this have another name: they’re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I’m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic ( - often taking the form ‘perform operation x, y percent of the time’) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings.

wish eno would set up a website dedicated to neverending performances of his generative pieces. let it unfold and fold and unfold again in perpetuity

Would be cool to do via the Long Now Foundation he's a part of:

http://longnow.org/

As long as he doesn't sing. Please don't ruin another album with your voice, Brian.

hahaha gtfo with that (said as somebody who loves/owns most of his non-vocal recordings)

I suppose we each have our preferences.

so you think he ruined his first four albums?

Those are not Ambient albums. He definitely ruined The Ship with his voice, for me at least.

I liked his voice on that album, personally

brian eno's thirty-year project of turning himself into a computer has done little to impress me.

you forgot to post a picture of a stern guy with his arms crossed and add "hmph" to the end of that

but i don't have any pictures of brian eno

xps oh OK I get that sentiment

LOL – we have come full circle with the "Brian, why don't you sing anymore?" stuff.

hahaha

Kinda pissed that the app version of this is available for iOS and Apple TV but not the desktop Mac OS.

whaaat

https://pitchfork.com/news/lee-scratch-perry-and-brian-eno-share-new-song-here-come-the-warm-dreads-listen/

sounds good. reggae and eno fit together.

Kinda shocking Eno, Sherwood and Perry have never worked together before, afaik.

i'm not an eno afficionado or anything but i like this! brian sings on it, backing beatie.

brian eno, beatie wolfe - play on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdsxPOC-SXI

are the albums any good?

I haven’t heard either of the Beatie Wolf collabs as of yet. But the man has been incredibly prolific over the last decade or so. In addition to about a dozen albums and collaborations, he’s had a bunch of singles and installations.

There’s even more music on his hard drive that’s not just sitting there. Watched a few videos with him at his computer playing random tracks for studio interlopers a couple of years apart. His archive went from being ~5K tracks long to >10K in the space of about 4 years or so. Obviously a lot of it is just experiments – I’m not sure how far back it goes. And I’m sure the pandemic was a productive time for him.

But as he explained to Zane Lowe (h/t to wherever pointed that out on the C or D thread), he’s tasked Peter Chilvers of Bloom app fame with coding software that generative mixes different elements of the tracks together – creating a new track every time out of existing material.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR4JAonAR4g

https://www.gq.com/story/brian-eno-wants-to-know-if-youre-listening

long, interesting profile of Eno. Details about his Tuesday night sing-alongs in his home studio, his archives, his work with Beatie Wolf, Robert Fripp, U2, and others, his political activism for Gaza and other causes

Grayson's long been one of my favorite writers, but he did an especially good job with that.

That’s a really terrific piece. I’d love to hear the full Enofied Devo album, but that ain’t going happen.

Yeah that was fantastic, thanks for posting it.

so many amazing links inserted throughout the profile as well, kudos to the writer and editors here

Hopkins recalls, for instance, a round of very productive sessions two decades ago, with Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Squarepusher on bass. The music was electrifying, Hopkins says, but neither Eno nor Hancock wanted to spend time sorting through the mountain of material, making something to release. (Abrahams did make an edit, Hopkins says, that was “really cool,” but there are no current plans to issue it.)

what?

Terrific article, thanks for sharing (it's hagiographical, but that was kind of the point). What a life.

FWIW, Peter Conheim (Devo's archivist) had this to add to what Gerald Casale mentions in that article:

As one of the few people outside of the band who has heard the multi-track....... at the very least, I can tell you that what Eno layered in to Space Junk which wasn't used is absolutely amazing. Fantastic shortwave (I think)-derived noises. They leak a little into the final mix, but when I played them LOUD I smiled.

weird that this stuff hasn't come out given how much other devo archival work has been released.

Hopkins recalls, for instance, a round of very productive sessions two decades ago, with Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Squarepusher on bass. The music was electrifying, Hopkins says, but neither Eno nor Hancock wanted to spend time sorting through the mountain of material, making something to release. (Abrahams did make an edit, Hopkins says, that was “really cool,” but there are no current plans to issue it.)

Well, look forward to years of crazy archival releases after they're gone.

Has Squarepusher ever talked about the experience of playing with Herbie Hancock? You would think that would come up (unless they were overdubbing and not in the room together, which is very possible).

Probably the best piece I’ve read that delves into the intersection between his approaches to music and activism. Everything I’d read about the latter until now had more or less kind of just conveyed his activity and not much on how it might relate to his theories about expression. Very compelling stuff with lots of great stories to boot.