Small Craft On A Milk Sea

During the first ten years of the new century, Brian Eno has released some albums that come close to his classics of the seventies and eighties, for example DRAWN FROM LIFE, with Peter Schwalm, or the brilliant song cycle ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH. Now, the creator of ambient music has released his first solo album on Warp Records, specialists for experimental, electronic pop. And he is working with some soulmates, Leo Abrahams (guitar, laptop, weird sounds) and Jon Hopkins (piano, electronics, strange sounds).

Good companionship for a purely instrumental record that reaches far out - and starts almost too beautiful, with the ambient sugar of EMERALD AND LIME. But even this soft starter has some grainy elements of total emptiness in it - the picture of a silent sea springs to mind (a picture Eno has often recurred to in his songs). The following three soundscapes belong to the 1000 places you will have to go to before you die. COMPLEX HEAVEN, SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA and the driving, irresistible rhythms of FLINT MARCH contain everything you expect from great Eno pieces, a sense of wonder, and an ambivalent field of emotion. On FLINT MARCH, the elastic drums add to an exercise of nearly uninhibited joie de vivre (but even here, as repeated listening reveals, some dark forces are working in the background).

This 15-track journey then continues with some wild pieces, a quiet foreboding of danger, and rough passages with frenetic guitar playing: sometimes Eno loves to push sounds to the verge of falling apart. The listener is getting lost in a very interesting way - between child-like moods, disturbing fields of sound, apparitions of naked beauty. And, finally, after some upheaval and dancing on a razorblade, the quiet atmospheres of the beginning re-enter the scenery: WRITTEN, FORGOTTEN & LATE ANTHROPACENE explore a quality of peacefulness and yearning beyond kitsch and wrong happy endings by just touching a deep zone of human experience.

This is definitely a record Eno-friendly minds and a lot of newcomers will return to again and again. SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA is so fresh, so full of wonder, so far away from being a repetition of any other Eno album. Of course, there are some spirits drifting: on COMPLEX HEAVEN Eno sounds like channeling his early piano treatments for Harold Budd. The first track, EMERALD AND LIME, has a kind of Roedelius flair. But, well, on this great work even the memories are inventive - playing tricks under a strangely coloured sky!

It's quite a while since I've been excited by the stuff that Eno's been releasing in recent decades. Either he's released more ambience into the world than it either needs,cares for, or can take, or the well modulated and controlled songs of Another Day On Earth. Though these have been nice additions to the lexicon, they elict no cigars. Only in his collaborative work, has there ever been some sense of exploration. But this has always been so, from Roxy through Talking Heads, Bowie and U2 on. Working with other peoples ideas in conjunction with his own loosens the creative reins of control, and something random and magically unexpected happens.

His work with Fripp having reached an impasse, it was only on Drawn from Life with Peter Schwalm, ( 2001 ) that we last saw Eno really breaking out of his neat oblique process. It surprises me that a process allegedly so experimental and changeable, can end up producing a body of recent work so uniformly consistent in character. Perhaps he has indeed become defined, if not confined, within his own category - Enoesque

Small Craft on a Milky Sea,however,does frequently gouge new grooves into Eno's undoubtedly broad range of recordings. Maybe this comes from the 'improvisatory' nature of the source material. On 'Horse','2 Forms of Anger,Flint March' 'Paleosonic' and 'Dust Shuffle'we hear an Eno I thought had almost become extinct, one with sharp, aggressive, harsh even discordant edges. Oh what great joy it is to hear these tracks!

Yes, there are still plenty of the recumbent, languid landscapes, as on 'Emerald and Lime' and the rather beautiful title track 'Small Craft on a Milky Sea, but these are rather contained,refined examples of the form. The album moves through a range of moods, suggestive of reflection, apprehension, anger or fearfulness, in equal measure. Just when you've relaxed into a dreamy imaginary sunset, comes an exultant storm of energy. Producing one of his most satisfying albums for quite some time.

I think it may be helpful to understand that this is a collection similar to "More Music For Films" and "Music For Films Vol 3", rather than "Music For Airports", "On Land: Ambient 4", "The Pearl" or "Thursday Afternoon". The tracks average 3 minutes, most with beats and quirky rythmns, so I'm unlikely to use it as a backdrop for when I'm working. When I listen to it, I'm hearing what I think are pieces of background music to a documentary on geology or something. The production quality is of a very high standard and it's interesting, but for me, not particularly enjoyable. I enjoy an awful lot of music that has Brian Eno's involvement so I'll keep going back to this, but if it disappeared from my collection overnight I probably wouldn't notice.