Brian Eno Small Craft On A Milk Sea (Warp)
3/5
By: Stephen Maughan
The best Brian Eno records are masterpieces in understatement. Eno, it should be noted, is quite a brilliant musician who, yes, played keyboards and synthesisers on early Roxy Music LPs, and also remains a highly successful producer who U2 have called their fifth member. Perhaps most importantly, he’s the man attributed with the very idea of ambient music, a style he developed after recovering from being hit by a taxi in the 1970's, and has released some bafflingly intelligent minimalist albums that psycholinguists have successfully prescribed to their most stressed out patients.
When I was at university (yawn), I relied on Brian Eno to get me to sleep after my morning lectures. You know the score, you’re out all night in the union trying to impress the shy girl from France with long talks of Satre and Camus. You then get a couple of hours sleep before your 9am lecture, but once it's over and you are back in your flat your mind is overworked. You stick on a Brian Eno record, and quickly drift into a sweet dream, only to wake an hour later by the loud noise experiment final track. I think I've never heard the middle part of his celebrated Apollo album, for I've always been fast asleep by that point.
Not that Eno should take that as a criticism – and actually, Small Craft On A Milk sea, while containing some ‘classic Eno’ mellow moments, is more confrontational than much of his work. If the ambient 'Complex Heaven' has you sinking deep into your armchair in a state of utter relaxation, a few minutes later the roaring guitar based '2 Forms of Anger' will soon have you on your feet ready to join the student fees protest.
For these fifteen pieces are, deliberately, separate and disconnected from each other. Eno invites us to create our own landscape to each separate piece, a story to the haunting music. It's film music, it's theatre music, it's got some beautiful piano led pieces, and some really frightening tracks that might give you goosebumps and lead you to hit the “next” button.
This being a Brian Eno, it's more art than music. Of course there is a limited edition collector’s edition, currently up for sale for almost £100, which makes it seem more like buying a piece of sculpture rather than the actual music. But let's not forget Eno is an artist whose music is deeply inspired by minimalist painting (if not minimalist pricing). It's intriguing stuff, as is the case so often with this brilliant composer, who in his own words describes this album as “improvisations which are not attempts to end up with a song, but rather with a landscape, a feeling of a place...”
True, as many people will find it pretentious as will deem it breathtaking. But as far as I’m concerned, whilst this isn’t a game changer like Music For Airports or Another Green World, it’s great to hear a genius doing what he does best – and I can’t think of anyone else quite talented or indeed brave enough to make records as innovative, experimental, unnerving and calming as this one.
Brian Eno - Small Craft On A Milk Sea (pieces taken from the album) by Warp Records
Artists in this article: Brian Eno
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment