The name Brian Eno conjures up any number of ideas as to who, or what, Brian Eno is. The seminal Music For… series of ambient albums. Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy. Roxy Music. Collabing with David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Nokia ringtones. Dude has been out front for so long it’s easy for us to take his genius for granted.
One of his most recent projects is a documentary film called Eno. Directed by Gary Hustwit, they collected 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of archival footage. Sounds pretty standard, right? Sure. Until they partnered with Teenage Engineering1 to create hardware that then allowed them to use custom generative software to ensure that every playing of the film is a unique combination of footage, though still leveraged in a way that makes narrative sense. Because of course they did. Why wouldn’t you? Does it sound pretentious? A little. Does it sound innovative and interesting? Yeah, it does.
The vinyl release of the soundtrack includes 17 compositions, 14 from Eno’s extensive catalog and another three previously unreleased – so there’s something here for both Eno newbies and the heads. Sonically the pressing is crystal clear, as it needs to be when listening to music such as Eno’s, where quiet and even silence are leveraged as if they were instruments. Eno (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is a nice entry point to Eno’s work, though the one challenge is presents is that many of his albums are intended to be complete works, so listening to a single track without the context of the whole can result in a listening experience different than what the artist originally intended. But have no fear – while the songs are somewhat different stylistically the way the soundtrack is organized creates a new kind of “whole”, a new way of experiencing Eno’s oeuvre.
- I use Teenage Engineering’s Medieval Synth in creating some of my own music as Abandoned Graves. ↩︎