BRIAN ENO: REFLECTION (2017)
1) Reflection.
It has been a long while since Eno last went
totally hardcore on us — or, at the very least, most of his «hardcore ambient»
output tended to be written for art installations rather than the regular LP
market. Reflection takes no such
compromises: released on CD and vinyl from the start, it is intended as a
purely musical piece, and with its rigid minimalism embodied in a single
54-minute track, the obvious and inevitable comparison is to Thursday Afternoon, and the obvious and
inevitable reaction is, «oh no! not again! why????...»
Well, first of all, the older Monseigneur de la
Salle gets, the more likely he probably will be to return to his meditative,
introspective, reflective side than to try and compete with the acid electronic
buzz of today (let alone any accompanying pop inspirations). And with so many
of his friends and colleagues dropping dead around him, the more inclined he
will be, naturally, to contemplate his own physical mortality / spiritual immortality.
Eno himself describes the record as a "psychological space that encourages
internal conversation", and he's not bullshitting you with this one —
except, I think, that it may have been vice versa: as the title itself
suggests, Reflection may have been a
reflection of an internal conversation that the artist happened to have with
himself during one of the days of the much troubled year of 2016.
And since everything is always understood
better in comparison, it is only natural to go back to Thursday Afternoon and trace the differences between the two. The
1986 exercise was, above all, an affair of The Light — the perfect soundtrack
of finding yourself slightly under the surface of the water with your eyes wide
open and experiencing the rays of sunlight penetrating that surface, here and
there, out of a skyline beset with rapidly, but gently moving white clouds. It
had this caressing, floating ambience of whiteness and purity to it that could
have served to illustrate any miraculous experience, from the resurrection of
Jesus to losing your virginity. The textures of Reflection, in comparison, are also gentle and soothing, but deeper
and darker, as if an invisible hand has firmly pushed you way down below the
surface, and any sources of light that you now have access to have to come from
the bottom of the sea — or, perhaps,
from the depths of your imagination — rather than from the top.
Here, too, there are two layers to the sound: a
basic rhythmic «hum», though less polyphonic in texture than the one on Thursday Afternoon, across which
minimalistic bits of keyboard melodies vary in pitch and timbre — cold and
emotionally detached, though, and you are probably not expected to experience
any basic human feelings over them; you are simply expected to revel in the
mystery, be it on your own microcosmic level or on the macrocosmic one — you decide if the music of Reflection is more about Outer or Inner
Space. I would probably opt for the latter one, because I think Eno is more
interested in what goes on within his own head now than whatever it is
happening to the universe at large.
Of course, as of 2017, there is nothing
particularly innovative about the concept, except for, maybe, the fact that
the project comes equipped with its own multimedia application, and apparently,
there is a «generative» plugin for this thing that allows the listener to tweak
the settings and modify the textures depending on the time of day and other
factors — something I do not really have the time to explore, although, perhaps,
this is where the real money value of
Reflection actually lies. Yet,
strange enough, as I briefly rewind my recollections of Brian's various ambient
projects, there is nothing there that sounds exactly like Reflection
— they are either too dynamic and melodic (yes, the ʽ1/1ʼ part of Music For Airports is like Beethoven
compared to this), or, on the contrary, even more radically minimalistic (like Neroli), or, as I said, create a
completely different atmosphere (Thursday
Afternoon). It's like you always saw this sort of record coming from Eno's
meditative mind, yet it still took him almost fifty years to achieve it.
I mean, I can understand him when he seems to
speak so proudly of this achievement — I'd never describe it myself as a
«culmination» or «catharsis» record, but it seems very much... like him, something like a perfectly faithful
sonogram of his internal state of mind, where most of his previous ambient
exercises sounded more like musical reimaginations of various things outside of
that mind, be it little fishes jumping in the water or the faraway craters of
the Moon. And since, after all, Brian Eno is only a man, it may well be so that
your internal state of mind is not
that far different from his — particularly if you, too, experience these
strange periods of «worried tranquility» where nervousness emanates from
complete calm and dissolves back into it. That's kind of what Reflection is for me, and it makes a
fine, healthy addition to the man's ambient catalog, even if I am probably
never going to listen to it again — not until my dying bed, at least.
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