LUX
Brian Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes. It suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard.
Although Brian Eno has been a strong collaborator since his early days with Roxy Music, he’s stepped up his bilateral work in recent years; the new millennium alone has seen the release of eight collaborative Eno albums featuring new partners like Rick Holland and old friends such as Robert Fripp and David Byrne. His…
Eno knows precisely what he's doing, even if Lux's structure and notation seem generated at random. There's a heart to it, but it's a tricky organ to get a handle on.
Brian Eno’s ambient touches can be heard in his own work as well as the numerous records he’s produced for Talking Heads,…
After two patchy outings on Warp, LUX finds Eno returning to purely ambient pastures with a suite based on a recent gallery installation. A cursory listen reveals striking similarities to his sublime 1985 work, Thursday Afternoon: both are built around reverberant, minimal piano figures, subtle electronic textures and distant drones, and both effortlessly nail Eno's ambient mission statement of "rewarding attention but not being so strict as to demand it."
It might cheer Brian Eno to think that his name, at this stage in an ever-evolving career, is synonymous with possibly nothing, thanks to his stature as a reliably trend-shrugging experimentalist.
Brian Eno's latest is a gentle antidote to hyper modern pop, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong>
Brian Eno's latest solo album is a pleasant sound-cloud of synth ambience, but there's not much substance to it, writes <strong>Caroline Sullivan</strong>
Brian Eno’s latest is the musical equivalent of slow food: something to savour in a state of quietude and away from the stresses of accelerated time. The ambient genre of which he was a pioneer has, in other hands, drifted into a kind of quality Muzak, background music to soothe the nerves of restless devotees of speed. With a subtle palette of soft-edged keyboard and string sounds, laden with reverb, Eno manages to stop time, avoiding the inevitably predictable tropes of narrative development, and gently drawing the listener into the presence of the here and now.