Brian Eno
Ambient 4: On Land

Remembering is building.

Eno's reflections on music and its relationship with the concept of space continue with "On Land", released in 1982. Ambient music, originally intended to be played in specific environments ("Music for Airports", designed to intoxicate, amidst distractions and inattentions, the endless airport halls, is its manifesto), acquires psychoanalytic connotations with this new work. In "On Land", which refers to the "Nature" environment, physical space becomes mental, turning into an inner landscape, a place not necessarily existing. The representation of a mood, a childhood memory, for instance. Or a possible future that will never materialize, or one of the many parallel presents that we daily choose not to live.

Federico Fellini's "Amarcord" is, not by chance, the "click" that activates the mechanism in Eno's mind and generates the reflections that lead to the paradigm shift: like memories, which do not faithfully reflect experiences, music becomes the creation of environments and not mere reproduction of them. After all, Eno, since the days of "Another Green World", was not exactly the quintessence of realism.

The recording studio as a place of creation and not reproduction.

The gentle song of crickets, the distant croaking of frogs, the remote roar of a storm. A microphone directed toward the vastness of the World, called to capture distant sounds, the grandeur of Nature, the silent voice of the Universe. Then in the studio, putting together the looted suggestions. Expanding them. Deforming them. Echoes. Delay. Reverbs. And with them the chimes and rustles of non-instruments: rocks, sticks, chains. Because what is played is nothing and nothing is who plays it, but it is the sounds that are everything. And with them the transfigured notes of Eno's synthesizers, the somber bass of Bill Laswell. And then the distant trumpet of Jon Hassell, the deformed guitar of Michael Brook. Mixed, relegated to retouches, embellishments, as nonsensical as crickets, necessary at least as much as frogs in the pond. Because man is dust in the Universe. And the mind is bigger than the entire Universe. Because the landscape is not an inert backdrop, but is as much a protagonist as the actors, is part of them, just as they are part of it. Nothing like the sense of Ascension in "Music for Airports". There is no escape in "On Land", there is no Totally Other to launch towards: in "On Land" it is the static-dynamic ballet of physical and psychic implosion processes that dictates the non-times of evolutions-involutions. Like in an elegant game of mirrors between mind and Universe.

Listening to "On Land" is like lying in the middle of a vast plain, overshadowed by immense mountains, under colossal clouds that transit titanically in the infinite night sky. Or alone with one's own thoughts.

The de-objectification of Music.

Listening to "On Land" does not mean listening to music, but listening to the world in a musical way. Poor is the musician who looks at his art as something that exists in itself, as if it had its own ontology, as if it were independent and imposed on those who listen. A poor stereo, the noise of a car passing outside, the listener's mood: multiple are the factors on which the reception of the Real depends, the world, but also the subject, its modes of perception. Because Reality does not unveil itself, Reality is built. Listen to it on a train, "On Land", while insensitive and indifferent landscapes rush by like memories; listen to it in a car on a desolate sunny day, watch how the world deforms, crumbles, slowly liquefies. How the Irrational is watching you with a mocking grin. (Could Eno have incidentally invented dark ambient too?)

Eno is "genius and regularity." A keen observer of the surrounding reality. A living laboratory in which inputs received from the outside ferment. Where reflections, strategies, innovative solutions develop. A scientist, more than an artist.

If Eno weren't all this, and if we weren't sure that behind these threatening environments, these landscapes filled with ominous omens, these places traversed by wild and terrifying forces, there was simply the miracle of one man's intelligence (and not the supernatural powers of a sorcerer intent on evoking the forces of Evil), one would truly be afraid to listen to "On Land". Or perhaps it is precisely for this reason that one is truly afraid to listen to it?

(Freely inspired by Eno's own observations regarding the work and its realization.)