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Night, deep night
The small streets of the city seem to wrap around you, merging with each other; the cold brushes against your fingers and wrinkles your lips. There is no light, nothing is visible, only voices.
Voices coming from your head. And then, finally, a melody
There must be music that describes all this... this moment.
Brian Eno's fundamental rule is that it's not the music that suggests the images, but the images that suggest the music. These are the famous "environments": vast spaces to fill with the most suitable sound; the notes are a simple embellishment, a delightful plaster in the imagination.
I like to think that for this "Drawn From Life", written in collaboration with Peter Schwalm, a young (and brilliant) German composer who enjoys ranging between electronic bases and percussion, the image suggesting the sounds contained within it is precisely the one described above: a dark and solitary metropolitan landscape.
The album, indeed, reveals a dark and urban soul; hypnotic and at the same time obsessive rhythms dominate: strings and voices will only intervene occasionally, small flashes of light in a sound landscape painted mostly in dark shades.
Examples of this particular musical combination are "Like Pictures", in which Laurie Anderson's delicate voice tries to emerge from the electronic sea created by Schwalm and Eno; the splendid "Persis", a little gem built around the intertwining of the pure and solemn sound of strings with the slow and enchanting percussion (electronic first, acoustics later); "Bloom", an enchanting final moment, once again dominated by beats, now contrasted with dreamy keyboard and violin sounds and "Rising Dust", an unsettling composition based on a sinister Vocoder sound.
"Drawn From Life" is the description of an image: it is the demonstration that it is possible to create "music for the eyes".
Eno succeeded once again.
Tracklist
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