Brian Eno — Reflection (1st January, 2017) 
♠°♠ “It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like.”
♠°♠ Available from 1 January on Apple TV and iOS, the premium versions of ‘Reflection’ reflect Eno’s decades long work in music, visual and generative arts. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Chilvers, the pieces feature generative sonics and imagery, an extension of landmark Eno software projects such as ‘77 Million Paintings’ and ‘The Ship’.
♠°♠ Reflection follows in the lineage of Brian Eno’s long~running collection of ‘Ambient’ recordings that started with his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, (No Pussyfooting) and 1975’s Discreet Music.
♠°♠ Consisting entirely of one long form composition, Reflection mirrors perfectly Brian Eno’s idea that ‘Ambient’ music is a term “to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements”.
♠°♠ Due for release on January 1st, Reflection promises to be a much~needed catharsis at the start of a brand new year.
Born: 15 May 1948 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England
Birth name: Brian Peter George Eno
Album release: January 1, 2017
Record Label: Warp Records
Duration: 54:00
Tracks:
1 Reflection 54:00
Editorial Reviews
♠°♠ “Reflection is the latest work in a long series. It started (as far as record releases are concerned) with Discreet Music in 1975 (or did it start with the first Fripp and Eno album in 1973? Or did it start with the first original piece of music I ever made, at Ipswich Art School in 1965 ~ recordings of a metal lampshade slowed down to half and quarter speed, all overlaid?)
♠°♠ Anyway, it s the music that I later called Ambient. I don t think I understand what that term stands for anymore ~ it seems to have swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows ~ but I still use it to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.
♠°♠ The pedigree of this piece includes Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (whose subtitle is Thinking Music IV) and LUX. Ive made a lot of thinking music, but most of it I ve kept for myself. Now I notice that people are using some of those earlier records in the way that I use them ~ as provocative spaces for thinking ~ so I feel more inclined to make them public.
♠°♠ Pieces like this have another name: they re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic (often taking the form perform operation x, y percent of the time) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings. CD in case bound sleeve with 12 page booklet.
Brian Eno:
♠°♠ “REFLECTION is the most recent of my Ambient experiments and represents the most sophisticated of them so far. My original intention with Ambient music was to make endless music, music that would be there as long as you wanted it to be. I wanted also that this music would unfold differently all the time~“like sitting by a river”: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing. But recordings–whether vinyl, cassette or CD–are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. REFLECTION in its album form–on vinyl or CD–is like this. But the app by which REFLECTION is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music.
♠°♠ The creation of a piece of music like this falls into three stages: the first is the selection of sonic materials and a musical mode–a constellation of musical relationships. These are then patterned and explored by a system of algorithms which vary and permutate the initial elements I feed into them, resulting in a constantly morphing stream (or river) of music. The third stage is listening. Once I have the system up and running I spend a long time–many days and weeks in fact–seeing what it does and fine~tuning the materials and sets of rules that run the algorithms. It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like.
♠°♠ Reflection is so called because I find it makes me think back. It makes me think things over. It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation. And external ones actually — people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations.
♠°♠ When I make a piece like this most of my time is spent listening to it for long periods — sometimes several whole days ~ observing what it does to different situations, seeing how it makes me feel. I make my observations and then tweak the rules. Because everything in the pieces is probabilistic and because the probabilities pile up it can take a very long time to get an idea of all the variations that might occur in the piece.
♠°♠ One rule might say ‘raise 1 out of every 100 notes by 5 semitones’ and another might say ‘raise one out of every 50 notes by 7 semitones’. If those two instructions are operating on the same data stream, sometimes ~ very rarely ~ they will both operate on the same note…so something like 1 in every 5000 notes will be raised by 12 semitones. You won’t know which of those 5000 notes it’s going to be. Since there are a lot of these types of operations going on together, on different but parallel data streams, the end result is a complex and unpredictable web.
♠°♠ Perhaps you can divide artists into two categories: farmers and cowboys. The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before. I used to think I was temperamentally more cowboy than farmer… but the fact that the series to which this piece belongs has been running now for over 4 decades makes me think that there’s quite a big bit of farmer in me.”
Peter Chilvers:
♠°♠ “Moving the composition into software allowed an extra opportunity; the rules themselves could change with the time of day. The harmony is brighter in the morning, transitioning gradually over the afternoon to reach the original key by evening. As the early hours draw in, newly introduced conditions thin the notes out and slow everything down.”
Notes:
♠°♠ In Autumn 2016 he became elected member of the 12 person Coordinating Collective (CC) of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), together with Noam Chomsky among other world~famous activists.
Solo studio albums:
♠°♠ Here Come the Warm Jets (1974), Island
♠°♠ Taking Tiger Mountain (1974), Island
♠°♠ Another Green World (1975), Island
♠°♠ Discreet Music (1975), Obscure
♠°♠ Before and After Science (1977), Polydor
♠°♠ Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Polydor
♠°♠ Music for Films (1978), Polydor
♠°♠ Ambient 4: On Land (1982), EG
♠°♠ Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983), E.G.
♠°♠ More Music for Films (1983), E.G.
♠°♠ Thursday Afternoon (1985), E.G.
♠°♠ Nerve Net (1992), Opal
♠°♠ The Shutov Assembly (1992), Warner Bros.
♠°♠ Neroli (1993), All Saints
♠°♠ The Drop (1997), Thirsty Ear
♠°♠ Another Day on Earth (2005), Hannibal
♠°♠ Small Craft on a Milk Sea (2010), Warp
♠°♠ The Ship (2016), Warp
♠°♠ Reflection (2017), Warp
Website: http://www.brian-eno.net/
Label: http://warp.net/
♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠♠°♠°
♠°♠ Available from 1 January on Apple TV and iOS, the premium versions of ‘Reflection’ reflect Eno’s decades long work in music, visual and generative arts. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Chilvers, the pieces feature generative sonics and imagery, an extension of landmark Eno software projects such as ‘77 Million Paintings’ and ‘The Ship’.
♠°♠ Reflection follows in the lineage of Brian Eno’s long~running collection of ‘Ambient’ recordings that started with his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, (No Pussyfooting) and 1975’s Discreet Music.
♠°♠ Consisting entirely of one long form composition, Reflection mirrors perfectly Brian Eno’s idea that ‘Ambient’ music is a term “to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements”.
♠°♠ Due for release on January 1st, Reflection promises to be a much~needed catharsis at the start of a brand new year.
Birth name: Brian Peter George Eno
Album release: January 1, 2017
Record Label: Warp Records
Duration: 54:00
Tracks:
1 Reflection 54:00
Editorial Reviews
♠°♠ “Reflection is the latest work in a long series. It started (as far as record releases are concerned) with Discreet Music in 1975 (or did it start with the first Fripp and Eno album in 1973? Or did it start with the first original piece of music I ever made, at Ipswich Art School in 1965 ~ recordings of a metal lampshade slowed down to half and quarter speed, all overlaid?)
♠°♠ Anyway, it s the music that I later called Ambient. I don t think I understand what that term stands for anymore ~ it seems to have swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows ~ but I still use it to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.
♠°♠ The pedigree of this piece includes Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (whose subtitle is Thinking Music IV) and LUX. Ive made a lot of thinking music, but most of it I ve kept for myself. Now I notice that people are using some of those earlier records in the way that I use them ~ as provocative spaces for thinking ~ so I feel more inclined to make them public.
♠°♠ Pieces like this have another name: they re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic (often taking the form perform operation x, y percent of the time) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings. CD in case bound sleeve with 12 page booklet.
Brian Eno:
♠°♠ “REFLECTION is the most recent of my Ambient experiments and represents the most sophisticated of them so far. My original intention with Ambient music was to make endless music, music that would be there as long as you wanted it to be. I wanted also that this music would unfold differently all the time~“like sitting by a river”: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing. But recordings–whether vinyl, cassette or CD–are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. REFLECTION in its album form–on vinyl or CD–is like this. But the app by which REFLECTION is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music.
♠°♠ The creation of a piece of music like this falls into three stages: the first is the selection of sonic materials and a musical mode–a constellation of musical relationships. These are then patterned and explored by a system of algorithms which vary and permutate the initial elements I feed into them, resulting in a constantly morphing stream (or river) of music. The third stage is listening. Once I have the system up and running I spend a long time–many days and weeks in fact–seeing what it does and fine~tuning the materials and sets of rules that run the algorithms. It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like.
♠°♠ Reflection is so called because I find it makes me think back. It makes me think things over. It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation. And external ones actually — people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations.
♠°♠ When I make a piece like this most of my time is spent listening to it for long periods — sometimes several whole days ~ observing what it does to different situations, seeing how it makes me feel. I make my observations and then tweak the rules. Because everything in the pieces is probabilistic and because the probabilities pile up it can take a very long time to get an idea of all the variations that might occur in the piece.
♠°♠ One rule might say ‘raise 1 out of every 100 notes by 5 semitones’ and another might say ‘raise one out of every 50 notes by 7 semitones’. If those two instructions are operating on the same data stream, sometimes ~ very rarely ~ they will both operate on the same note…so something like 1 in every 5000 notes will be raised by 12 semitones. You won’t know which of those 5000 notes it’s going to be. Since there are a lot of these types of operations going on together, on different but parallel data streams, the end result is a complex and unpredictable web.
♠°♠ Perhaps you can divide artists into two categories: farmers and cowboys. The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before. I used to think I was temperamentally more cowboy than farmer… but the fact that the series to which this piece belongs has been running now for over 4 decades makes me think that there’s quite a big bit of farmer in me.”
Peter Chilvers:
♠°♠ “Moving the composition into software allowed an extra opportunity; the rules themselves could change with the time of day. The harmony is brighter in the morning, transitioning gradually over the afternoon to reach the original key by evening. As the early hours draw in, newly introduced conditions thin the notes out and slow everything down.”
Notes:
♠°♠ In Autumn 2016 he became elected member of the 12 person Coordinating Collective (CC) of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), together with Noam Chomsky among other world~famous activists.
Solo studio albums:
♠°♠ Here Come the Warm Jets (1974), Island
♠°♠ Taking Tiger Mountain (1974), Island
♠°♠ Another Green World (1975), Island
♠°♠ Discreet Music (1975), Obscure
♠°♠ Before and After Science (1977), Polydor
♠°♠ Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Polydor
♠°♠ Music for Films (1978), Polydor
♠°♠ Ambient 4: On Land (1982), EG
♠°♠ Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983), E.G.
♠°♠ More Music for Films (1983), E.G.
♠°♠ Thursday Afternoon (1985), E.G.
♠°♠ Nerve Net (1992), Opal
♠°♠ The Shutov Assembly (1992), Warner Bros.
♠°♠ Neroli (1993), All Saints
♠°♠ The Drop (1997), Thirsty Ear
♠°♠ Another Day on Earth (2005), Hannibal
♠°♠ Small Craft on a Milk Sea (2010), Warp
♠°♠ The Ship (2016), Warp
♠°♠ Reflection (2017), Warp
Website: http://www.brian-eno.net/
Label: http://warp.net/