Releasing his first solo album since the Grammy-nominated LUX in 2012, Brian Eno delivers The Ship. With over 40 years of musical exploration in his glittering career in music, beginning with Roxy Music from 1971-1973, and then going on to release seventeen solo studio albums along with ten ambient installation albums, it is incredible that Eno still has that drive to challenge what is possible with music. Born out of experiments with three dimensional recording techniques and formed in two interconnected parts, The Ship is up there with the finest of Eno releases and will be showcased around the world in multi-channelled three dimensional sound installations which are certain to be nothing short of spectacular.

Sound is descriptive of moments. Whether it is reminding you of a forgotten time, telling a tale of personal emotion, a poignant memory, a bird tweeting with the rise of the morning sun, or conjuring up images in one’s mind. For Eno, The Ship was originally conceived by his fascination with the First World War.

He says; “It (WW1) followed immediately after the sinking of the Titanic, which to me is its analogue. The Titanic was the Unsinkable Ship, the apex of human technical power, set to be Man's greatest triumph over nature. The First World War was the war of material, 'over by Christmas', set to be the triumph of will and steel over humanity. The catastrophic failure of each set the stage for a century of dramatic experiments with the relationships between humans and the worlds they make for themselves.”

Throughout the four track LP (excluding the one cover), we see Eno narrate spoken words created by a text generator into which eyewitness accounts of the sinking Titanic, First World War soldier songs as well as random bits of cyber-bureaucracy were fed, then extracted and put into an order. In the eponymously titled opener, the words are secondary, as for all Eno’s vocoder tainted verse and distant murmurings which both float untethered to any rhythm, the only phrase that sinks in is the bleak “Wave. After. Wave. After. Wave. After….” which rolls out near the song’s end. ‘The Ship’ starts in a far brighter place with a glimmering and warm ambience, slightly shadowed by the chilling space which each sound is given. Electronic tones and occasional rousing string-synths ebb-and-flow like calm waves kissing a boat’s hull in a glistening low hung sun. With the song in no hurry, as in a lot of Eno’s ambient workings, we are given time to wade in and out of a meditative state, only to have consciousness revived by the building tension of unsettling bleeps, rings and rumbles.

With the first track being a little over 21 minutes, the remainder of the album is split into three parts. ‘Fickle Sun (i)’ a harrowing image of a dramatic dystopian landscape is evident from the start – the “vast dun Belgian fields where the First World War was agonisingly ground out, and the vast deep ocean where the Titanic sank” (as Eno noted in his press release). Nervousness and disquiet is clear. Deep foreboding bass notes and tangled electronic atmospherics set an uneasy and anxious scene – Eno harks; “The line is long /The line is grey / And humans turning back to clay / Right there beneath the fickle sun” before the song hits its crescendo of uncertain misery with cymbal crashes and violent guitar distortion, climaxing with an ominous bellowing horn and piercing whines. The remaining half of the 18-minute movement falls slowly back to the cold reality in a gloomy, sombre and dismal pace.

The poem in ‘Fickle Sun (ii) The Hour Is Thin’ is recited by actor Peter Serafinowicz in a bold, clear and upfront way, making every word hit hard and live long in the memory. This track, just three minutes long, sits as the centrepiece of the ‘Fickle Sun’ trilogy having only a simply piano pattern complementing it. The final track, ‘Fickle Sun (iii) I’m Set Free’, if far from what you might have expected on this album and from the master of ambient music. With pop melodies intact, Eno does an incredible cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Set Free’ that surprisingly rounds off the The Ship perfectly by beautifully relieving the listener of any subsequent tension.

Though recorded in three dimensions, the album still sounds phenomenal in stereo and will stand tall alongside the very best of his back catalogue. The Ship is extremely well balanced and feels utterly complete with each track complementing the last, demanding that you put aside the time and give your full attention to another triumph from Brian Eno.
Iain Lauder

Website: brian-eno.net