BRIAN ENO
''THE SHIP''
APRIL 29 2016
47:31
**********
01 - The Ship 21:19 (Brian Eno)
02 - Fickle Sun (I) 18:03 (Brian Eno)
03 - Fickle Sun (II): The Hour Is Thin 02:50 (Brian Eno)
04 - Fickle Sun(III): I'm Set Free 05:18 (Lou Reed)
"Fickle Sun (III): I'm Set Free" is a cover of The Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free", from their self-titled third studio album The Velvet Underground.
**********
Leo Abrahams/Guitar
Nell Catchpole/Viola, Violin
Peter Chilvers/Keyboards, Programming, Software, String Keyboard, Vocoder
Matt Colton Mastering
Brian Eno/Instrumentation
Nuria Homs/Voices
Jon Hopkins/Keyboards
Peter Serafinowicz/Voices
**********
The Ship is Brian Eno’s first solo record since 2012’s Grammy-nominated LUX. Originally conceived from experiments with three dimensional recording techniques and formed in two, interconnected parts, The Ship is almost as much musical novel as traditional album. Eno brings together beautiful songs, minimalist ambience, physical electronics, omniscient narratives and technical innovation into a single, cinematic suite. The result is the very best of Eno, a record without parallel in his catalog.
**********
REVIEW/AMG
Thom Jurek
The Ship marks Brian Eno's first ambient album since 2012's Lux. Work on the album began as a 3-D sound installation in Stockholm, but altered to stereo when Eno realized he could sing in a low C, The Ship's root note. The Ship contains two works, the 21-minute title track, and the three-part "Fickle Sun." The title piece, a reflection on the sinking of the Titanic, recalls a moment in his distant past: He released Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic on his Obscure Music label in 1975.
The two could not be more different. Bryars' work, composed of a folk-like chamber melody, is evolutionary; it changes as the composer learns more about the event. The Ship is self-contained. It emerges from keyboard sounds and samples in a drone that unfolds in gently undulating waves until actual songs -- freed from the concept of fixed rhythm -- emerge. Eno's singing voice fronts a two-chord melody that sets his subject inside the frame of a rolling, undulant seascape. The narrative submerges individual stories under a loose but inextricably connected narrative. Softly played keyboards, synthesized strings (suggesting the ship's dance band), sonar sounds, sampled ghost voices from radio broadcasts, and a siren chorale (provided by the Elgin Marvels) allow sensory impressions from these fragmented stories to emerge. Eno's lyrics depict water, the boat, mortal transience, and the envelopment of it all into a vast, roaring, eternal silence. His singing recedes into droning chords and layers of ambient sound that all but consume spoken voices in Catalan and English. In the end, all that remains are his words, "wave, after wave, after wave."
By contrast, "Fickle Sun" begins dramatically. The first section, over 18 minutes, reflects on the "hubris and arrogance" of WWI. Swirling, nightmarish sine pulses, blurry vocals, and colliding keyboards create a dissonant, near-gothic drone. Eno's chant-like monotone delivery recalls Nico's doomsday singing. The track builds to a crescendo but it's subsumed by a stark, chilly ambience, sampled radio voices and his own, by a vocoder framed by fragmented noise. The feel is sinister and tense. The brief second part (subtitled "The Hour Is Thin") features a lone piano and is narrated by Peter Serafinowicz. It adds poignancy and emotional resonance contrasting sharply with the first. It crossfades into a reverential cover of Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free." Aided by Nell Catchpole's violin and viola, Jon Hopkins' layered keyboards, and Leo Abrahams' guitar, Eno's own instrumentation -- including drums -- and singing deliver a gorgeous reading. This pop note -- drenched in the haunted irony of Lou Reed's lyrics: "I'm set free/To find a new illusion" -- almost decenters the record but ultimately underscores it as a tender yet powerful commentary. The Ship is a memorial to and meditation on history and human foibles. Just as importantly, it places an exclamation point on Eno's career as curiosity, experimentation, chance, and form gel; his relentless sense of adventure remains undiminished by time.
**********
BIOGRAPHY/AMG
Jason Ankeny
Ambient pioneer, glam rocker, hit producer, multimedia artist, technological innovator, worldbeat proponent, and self-described non-musician -- over the course of his long, prolific, and immensely influential career, Brian Eno was all of these things and much, much more. Determining his creative pathways with the aid of a deck of instructional, tarot-like cards called Oblique Strategies, Eno championed theory over practice, serendipity over forethought, and texture over craft; in the process, he forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence.
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, England, on May 15, 1948. Raised in rural Suffolk, an area neighboring a U.S. Air Force base, as a child he grew enamored of the "Martian music" of doo wop and early rock & roll broadcast on American Armed Forces radio; a subsequent tenure at art school introduced him to the work of contemporary composers John Tilbury and Cornelius Cardew, as well as minimalists John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. Instructed in the principles of conceptual painting and sound sculpture, Eno began experimenting with tape recorders, which he dubbed his first musical instrument, finding great inspiration in Steve Reich's tape orchestration "It's Gonna Rain."
For Your Pleasure
After joining the avant-garde performance art troupe Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, as well as assuming vocal and "signals generator" duties with the improvisational rock unit Maxwell Demon, Eno joined Cardew's Scratch Orchestra in 1969, later enlisting as a clarinetist with the Portsmouth Sinfonia. In 1971 he rose to prominence as a member of the seminal glam band Roxy Music, playing the synthesizer and electronically treating the band's sound. A flamboyant enigma decked out in garish makeup, pastel feather boas, and velvet corsets, his presence threatened the focal dominance of frontman Bryan Ferry, and relations between the two men became strained; finally, after just two LPs -- 1972's self-titled debut and 1973's brilliant For Your Pleasure -- Eno exited Roxy's ranks to embark on a series of ambitious side projects.
(No Pussyfooting)
The first, 1973's No Pussyfooting, was recorded with Robert Fripp; for the sessions Eno began developing a tape-delay system, dubbed "Frippertronics," which treated Fripp's guitar with looped delays in order to ultimately employ studio technology as a means of musical composition, thereby setting the stage for the later dominance of sampling in hip-hop and electronica. Eno soon turned to his first solo project, the frenzied and wildly experimental Here Come the Warm Jets, which reached the U.K. Top 30. During a brief tenure fronting the Winkies, he mounted a series of British live performances despite ill health; less than a week into the tour, Eno's lung collapsed, and he spent the early part of 1974 hospitalized.
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Upon recovering, he traveled to San Francisco, where he stumbled upon a set of postcards depicting a Chinese revolutionary opera that inspired 1974's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), another sprawling, free-form collection of abstract pop. A 1975 car accident which left Eno bedridden for several months resulted in perhaps his most significant innovation, the creation of ambient music: unable to move to turn up his stereo to hear above the din of a rainstorm, he realized that music could assume the same properties as light or color, and blend thoroughly into its given atmosphere without upsetting the environmental balance. Heralded by the release of 1975's minimalist Another Green World, Eno plunged completely into ambient with his next instrumental effort, Discreet Music, the first chapter in a ten-volume series of experimental works issued on his own Obscure label.
Before and After Science
After returning to pop structures for 1977's Before and After Science, Eno continued his ambient experimentation with Music for Films, a collection of fragmentary pieces created as soundtracks for imaginary motion pictures. Concurrently, he became a much sought-after collaborator and producer, teaming with the German group Cluster as well as David Bowie, with whom he worked on the landmark trilogy Low, Heroes, and Lodger. Additionally, Eno produced the seminal no wave compilation No New York and in 1978 began a long, fruitful union with Talking Heads, his involvement expanding over the course of the albums More Songs About Buildings and Food and 1979's Fear of Music to the point that by the time of 1980's world music-inspired Remain in Light, Eno and frontman David Byrne shared co-writing credits on all but one track. Friction with Byrne's bandmates hastened Eno's departure from the group's sphere, but in 1981 he and Byrne reunited for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a landmark effort that fused electronic music with a pioneering use of Third World percussion.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
In the interim, Eno continued to perfect the concept of ambient sound with 1978's Music for Airports, a record designed to calm air passengers against fears of flying and the threat of crashes. In 1980, he embarked on collaborations with minimalist composer Harold Budd (The Plateaux of Mirror) and avant trumpeter Jon Hassell (Possible Musics), as well as Acadian producer Daniel Lanois, with whom Eno would emerge as one of the most commercially successful production teams of the '80s, helming a series of records for the Irish band U2 (most notably The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby) that positioned the group as one of the world's most respected and popular acts. Amidst this flurry of activity, Eno remained dedicated to his solo work, moving from the earthbound ambience of 1982's On Land to other worlds for 1983's Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, a collection of space-themed work created in tandem with Lanois and Eno's brother Roger. In 1985, Eno resurfaced with Thursday Afternoon, the soundtrack to a VHS cassette of "video paintings" by artist Christine Alicino.
John Cale: Words for the Dying
After Eno produced John Cale's 1989 solo effort Words for the Dying, the duo collaborated on 1990's Wrong Way Up, the first record in many years to feature Eno's vocals. Two years later he returned with the solo projects The Shutov Assembly and Nerve Net, followed in 1993 by Neroli; Glitterbug, a 1994 soundtrack to a posthumously released film by Derek Jarman, was subsequently reworked by Jah Wobble and issued in 1995 as Spinner. In addition to his musical endeavors, Eno also frequently ventured into other realms of media, beginning in 1980 with the vertical-format video Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan; along with designing a 1989 art installation to help inaugurate a Shinto shrine in Japan and 1995's Self-Storage, a multimedia work created with Laurie Anderson, he also published a diary, 1996's A Year with Swollen Appendices, and formulated Generative Music I, a series of audio screen savers for home computer software. In August of 1999, Sonora Portraits, a collection of Eno's previous ambient tracks and a 93-page companion booklet, was published.
Music for Onmyo-Ji
Around 1998, Eno was working heavily in the world of art installations and a series of his installation soundtracks started to appear, most in extremely limited editions (making them instant collector's items). In 2000, he teamed with German DJ Jan Peter Schwalm for the Japanese-only release Music for Onmyo-Ji. The duo's work got world-wide distribution the next year with Drawn from Life, an album that kicked off Eno's relationship with the Astralwerks label. The Equatorial Stars, released in 2004, was Eno's first work with Robert Fripp since Evening Star, the 1975 follow-up to No Pussyfooting. His first solo vocal album in 15 years, Another Day on Earth, was issued in 2005, followed by 2008's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, another collaboration with David Byrne. In 2010, Eno signed to the Warp label, where he released Small Craft on a Milk Sea, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. The following year's Drums Between the Bells featured poet Rick Holland, as well as several vocalists. Eno returned to his ambient style of recording with Lux in late 2012. His next project was a collaboration with Underworld's Karl Hyde. Bonding over a shared love of Afrobeat, the pair worked on a bunch of intros Eno had lying around but had never been able to finish, resulting in a surprising collection of unusual pop songs. The finished album, titled Someday World, was issued in May of 2014, followed by the pair's second album, High Life, a scant two months later.
Ship
Eno went back to working solo for 2016's The Ship. Released in April, it was comprised of two long tracks totaling 47 minutes. The second, a three-part suite, concludes with a cover of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free."
**********
TO THE TOP
**********
''THE SHIP''
APRIL 29 2016
47:31
**********
01 - The Ship 21:19 (Brian Eno)
02 - Fickle Sun (I) 18:03 (Brian Eno)
03 - Fickle Sun (II): The Hour Is Thin 02:50 (Brian Eno)
04 - Fickle Sun(III): I'm Set Free 05:18 (Lou Reed)
"Fickle Sun (III): I'm Set Free" is a cover of The Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free", from their self-titled third studio album The Velvet Underground.
**********
Leo Abrahams/Guitar
Nell Catchpole/Viola, Violin
Peter Chilvers/Keyboards, Programming, Software, String Keyboard, Vocoder
Matt Colton Mastering
Brian Eno/Instrumentation
Nuria Homs/Voices
Jon Hopkins/Keyboards
Peter Serafinowicz/Voices
**********
The Ship is Brian Eno’s first solo record since 2012’s Grammy-nominated LUX. Originally conceived from experiments with three dimensional recording techniques and formed in two, interconnected parts, The Ship is almost as much musical novel as traditional album. Eno brings together beautiful songs, minimalist ambience, physical electronics, omniscient narratives and technical innovation into a single, cinematic suite. The result is the very best of Eno, a record without parallel in his catalog.
**********
REVIEW/AMG
Thom Jurek
The Ship marks Brian Eno's first ambient album since 2012's Lux. Work on the album began as a 3-D sound installation in Stockholm, but altered to stereo when Eno realized he could sing in a low C, The Ship's root note. The Ship contains two works, the 21-minute title track, and the three-part "Fickle Sun." The title piece, a reflection on the sinking of the Titanic, recalls a moment in his distant past: He released Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic on his Obscure Music label in 1975.
The two could not be more different. Bryars' work, composed of a folk-like chamber melody, is evolutionary; it changes as the composer learns more about the event. The Ship is self-contained. It emerges from keyboard sounds and samples in a drone that unfolds in gently undulating waves until actual songs -- freed from the concept of fixed rhythm -- emerge. Eno's singing voice fronts a two-chord melody that sets his subject inside the frame of a rolling, undulant seascape. The narrative submerges individual stories under a loose but inextricably connected narrative. Softly played keyboards, synthesized strings (suggesting the ship's dance band), sonar sounds, sampled ghost voices from radio broadcasts, and a siren chorale (provided by the Elgin Marvels) allow sensory impressions from these fragmented stories to emerge. Eno's lyrics depict water, the boat, mortal transience, and the envelopment of it all into a vast, roaring, eternal silence. His singing recedes into droning chords and layers of ambient sound that all but consume spoken voices in Catalan and English. In the end, all that remains are his words, "wave, after wave, after wave."
By contrast, "Fickle Sun" begins dramatically. The first section, over 18 minutes, reflects on the "hubris and arrogance" of WWI. Swirling, nightmarish sine pulses, blurry vocals, and colliding keyboards create a dissonant, near-gothic drone. Eno's chant-like monotone delivery recalls Nico's doomsday singing. The track builds to a crescendo but it's subsumed by a stark, chilly ambience, sampled radio voices and his own, by a vocoder framed by fragmented noise. The feel is sinister and tense. The brief second part (subtitled "The Hour Is Thin") features a lone piano and is narrated by Peter Serafinowicz. It adds poignancy and emotional resonance contrasting sharply with the first. It crossfades into a reverential cover of Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free." Aided by Nell Catchpole's violin and viola, Jon Hopkins' layered keyboards, and Leo Abrahams' guitar, Eno's own instrumentation -- including drums -- and singing deliver a gorgeous reading. This pop note -- drenched in the haunted irony of Lou Reed's lyrics: "I'm set free/To find a new illusion" -- almost decenters the record but ultimately underscores it as a tender yet powerful commentary. The Ship is a memorial to and meditation on history and human foibles. Just as importantly, it places an exclamation point on Eno's career as curiosity, experimentation, chance, and form gel; his relentless sense of adventure remains undiminished by time.
**********
BIOGRAPHY/AMG
Jason Ankeny
Ambient pioneer, glam rocker, hit producer, multimedia artist, technological innovator, worldbeat proponent, and self-described non-musician -- over the course of his long, prolific, and immensely influential career, Brian Eno was all of these things and much, much more. Determining his creative pathways with the aid of a deck of instructional, tarot-like cards called Oblique Strategies, Eno championed theory over practice, serendipity over forethought, and texture over craft; in the process, he forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence.
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, England, on May 15, 1948. Raised in rural Suffolk, an area neighboring a U.S. Air Force base, as a child he grew enamored of the "Martian music" of doo wop and early rock & roll broadcast on American Armed Forces radio; a subsequent tenure at art school introduced him to the work of contemporary composers John Tilbury and Cornelius Cardew, as well as minimalists John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. Instructed in the principles of conceptual painting and sound sculpture, Eno began experimenting with tape recorders, which he dubbed his first musical instrument, finding great inspiration in Steve Reich's tape orchestration "It's Gonna Rain."
For Your Pleasure
After joining the avant-garde performance art troupe Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, as well as assuming vocal and "signals generator" duties with the improvisational rock unit Maxwell Demon, Eno joined Cardew's Scratch Orchestra in 1969, later enlisting as a clarinetist with the Portsmouth Sinfonia. In 1971 he rose to prominence as a member of the seminal glam band Roxy Music, playing the synthesizer and electronically treating the band's sound. A flamboyant enigma decked out in garish makeup, pastel feather boas, and velvet corsets, his presence threatened the focal dominance of frontman Bryan Ferry, and relations between the two men became strained; finally, after just two LPs -- 1972's self-titled debut and 1973's brilliant For Your Pleasure -- Eno exited Roxy's ranks to embark on a series of ambitious side projects.
(No Pussyfooting)
The first, 1973's No Pussyfooting, was recorded with Robert Fripp; for the sessions Eno began developing a tape-delay system, dubbed "Frippertronics," which treated Fripp's guitar with looped delays in order to ultimately employ studio technology as a means of musical composition, thereby setting the stage for the later dominance of sampling in hip-hop and electronica. Eno soon turned to his first solo project, the frenzied and wildly experimental Here Come the Warm Jets, which reached the U.K. Top 30. During a brief tenure fronting the Winkies, he mounted a series of British live performances despite ill health; less than a week into the tour, Eno's lung collapsed, and he spent the early part of 1974 hospitalized.
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Upon recovering, he traveled to San Francisco, where he stumbled upon a set of postcards depicting a Chinese revolutionary opera that inspired 1974's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), another sprawling, free-form collection of abstract pop. A 1975 car accident which left Eno bedridden for several months resulted in perhaps his most significant innovation, the creation of ambient music: unable to move to turn up his stereo to hear above the din of a rainstorm, he realized that music could assume the same properties as light or color, and blend thoroughly into its given atmosphere without upsetting the environmental balance. Heralded by the release of 1975's minimalist Another Green World, Eno plunged completely into ambient with his next instrumental effort, Discreet Music, the first chapter in a ten-volume series of experimental works issued on his own Obscure label.
Before and After Science
After returning to pop structures for 1977's Before and After Science, Eno continued his ambient experimentation with Music for Films, a collection of fragmentary pieces created as soundtracks for imaginary motion pictures. Concurrently, he became a much sought-after collaborator and producer, teaming with the German group Cluster as well as David Bowie, with whom he worked on the landmark trilogy Low, Heroes, and Lodger. Additionally, Eno produced the seminal no wave compilation No New York and in 1978 began a long, fruitful union with Talking Heads, his involvement expanding over the course of the albums More Songs About Buildings and Food and 1979's Fear of Music to the point that by the time of 1980's world music-inspired Remain in Light, Eno and frontman David Byrne shared co-writing credits on all but one track. Friction with Byrne's bandmates hastened Eno's departure from the group's sphere, but in 1981 he and Byrne reunited for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a landmark effort that fused electronic music with a pioneering use of Third World percussion.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
In the interim, Eno continued to perfect the concept of ambient sound with 1978's Music for Airports, a record designed to calm air passengers against fears of flying and the threat of crashes. In 1980, he embarked on collaborations with minimalist composer Harold Budd (The Plateaux of Mirror) and avant trumpeter Jon Hassell (Possible Musics), as well as Acadian producer Daniel Lanois, with whom Eno would emerge as one of the most commercially successful production teams of the '80s, helming a series of records for the Irish band U2 (most notably The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby) that positioned the group as one of the world's most respected and popular acts. Amidst this flurry of activity, Eno remained dedicated to his solo work, moving from the earthbound ambience of 1982's On Land to other worlds for 1983's Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, a collection of space-themed work created in tandem with Lanois and Eno's brother Roger. In 1985, Eno resurfaced with Thursday Afternoon, the soundtrack to a VHS cassette of "video paintings" by artist Christine Alicino.
John Cale: Words for the Dying
After Eno produced John Cale's 1989 solo effort Words for the Dying, the duo collaborated on 1990's Wrong Way Up, the first record in many years to feature Eno's vocals. Two years later he returned with the solo projects The Shutov Assembly and Nerve Net, followed in 1993 by Neroli; Glitterbug, a 1994 soundtrack to a posthumously released film by Derek Jarman, was subsequently reworked by Jah Wobble and issued in 1995 as Spinner. In addition to his musical endeavors, Eno also frequently ventured into other realms of media, beginning in 1980 with the vertical-format video Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan; along with designing a 1989 art installation to help inaugurate a Shinto shrine in Japan and 1995's Self-Storage, a multimedia work created with Laurie Anderson, he also published a diary, 1996's A Year with Swollen Appendices, and formulated Generative Music I, a series of audio screen savers for home computer software. In August of 1999, Sonora Portraits, a collection of Eno's previous ambient tracks and a 93-page companion booklet, was published.
Music for Onmyo-Ji
Around 1998, Eno was working heavily in the world of art installations and a series of his installation soundtracks started to appear, most in extremely limited editions (making them instant collector's items). In 2000, he teamed with German DJ Jan Peter Schwalm for the Japanese-only release Music for Onmyo-Ji. The duo's work got world-wide distribution the next year with Drawn from Life, an album that kicked off Eno's relationship with the Astralwerks label. The Equatorial Stars, released in 2004, was Eno's first work with Robert Fripp since Evening Star, the 1975 follow-up to No Pussyfooting. His first solo vocal album in 15 years, Another Day on Earth, was issued in 2005, followed by 2008's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, another collaboration with David Byrne. In 2010, Eno signed to the Warp label, where he released Small Craft on a Milk Sea, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. The following year's Drums Between the Bells featured poet Rick Holland, as well as several vocalists. Eno returned to his ambient style of recording with Lux in late 2012. His next project was a collaboration with Underworld's Karl Hyde. Bonding over a shared love of Afrobeat, the pair worked on a bunch of intros Eno had lying around but had never been able to finish, resulting in a surprising collection of unusual pop songs. The finished album, titled Someday World, was issued in May of 2014, followed by the pair's second album, High Life, a scant two months later.
Ship
Eno went back to working solo for 2016's The Ship. Released in April, it was comprised of two long tracks totaling 47 minutes. The second, a three-part suite, concludes with a cover of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free."
**********
TO THE TOP
**********
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