#649 Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea

When you first put this on you'll get what you likely expect from Brian Eno: carefully crafted, visual-evoking soundscapes that split the difference between his truly minimal ambient work and his rock-oriented solo-era ambient pieces. Everything is rather soft and nice (I challenge you to hear Emerald and Lime without seeing a sunrise).

And then Flint March charges in like an attacking army and it is all tension, nearly unbearable, full of decidedly modern hits and ticks and clicks, whirring, basal noise, followed by Horse, continuing the assault, sounding like the apocalypse itself, sounding like impossibly massive machinery crumbling, like the sky turning red, like swarms of cockroaches descending, and suddenly you remember this is on Warp and feel like you should have known it wasn't going to be another Another Green World. It is actually stunning, especially the way it comes on so suddenly and powerfully, there is a real sense of landscape and narrative.

We are in Atticus Ross territory, where the noise is dense and menacing and ever-shifting. I could list visual metaphors for hours. Its all sounds unknowable of source, and then suddenly, in the middle of track 3 of the blitz an honest to god guitar rings out and descends like a world-crushing blade from the sky and everything ends.

Things get less epic, but no less weird, where Bone Jump rings like the dub version of the overworld theme from a long lost Fight Club nintendo game, Dust Shuffle streaks like a cybernetic jaguar, and Paleosonic drowns guitars in glitch, and we are decidedly not in ambient terrirory anymore.

But then we are, and everything gets a bit quieter, but in an ominous voice, one that can't forget what it's seen.

Which is all to say that this is an expansive, massive, adventurous album where Eno has thoroughly considered where experimental music has been and used its best moves in his own ways. Its not a lot of fun to listen to, brutal and terrifying and effective, but its a work worth hearing that will likely reward repeated and close listens 4/5