brian eno

Small Craft On A Milk Sea (Double LP Edition)

**Double LP edition** This has to rank as one of the most hotly anticipated albums in Brian Eno's recent career - no doubt in part because it's his first release for Warp, and therefore marks the union of two of electronic music's most revered institutions. Small Craft On A Milk Sea (the first new Eno album since 2005's often song-based collection Another Day On Earth) takes the form of fourteen improvised pieces conceived to be "the mirror-image of silent movies - sound-only movies". Made in collaboration with long-term associates Jon Hopkins (previously to be found making records on Domino/Double Six) and Leo Abrahams (who has released solo music through the Bip Hop label), this record situates itself somewhere between a modernised take on Eno's classic ambient designs and a more organic style of composition that at times bears some resemblance to post-rock. There's a close marriage of keyboard and guitar-led melodies throughout the album, but an inventive production style gels everything together in a consistent and generally rather alien soundscape. One of the most immediately striking sections of this record is the run between 'Flint March' and '2 Forms Of Anger'; if these were sound-only movies they'd be accompanying action sequences of some sort. 'Horse' shudders with tension and percussive impetus while 'Flint March' is like a strange techno-styled accompaniment to a chase scene, but it's the second half of '2 Forms Of Anger', featuring screeching electric guitars and torrents of textural distortion, that takes us furthest away from the sort of sonic idiom we'd normally associate with Brian Eno. This shouldn't cause too much alarm to fans expecting something altogether more synthetic and experimental - there are plenty of beautifully designed vistas of electronic sound to be heard here, with the likes of 'Lesser Heaven', the dark, droning 'Calcium Needles' and album closer 'Late Anthropocene', which lays down an oddly hollow, translucent bed of tones while flickers of granular melodies are sprinkled around like shards of broken glass. He's always an artist worthy of your attention, but with this latest collection Eno has delivered one of his strongest solo albums for quite some time.