Brian Eno
Music For Films

"Would you be offended if someone called you an attempt?" I would ask this record, if it had ears to hear. With all the tact I am capable of, of course, so as not to hurt its self-esteem. On the other hand, being considered an attempt at something can't be the best feeling, even if this something is one of the absolute masterpieces of contemporary music.
Now, the curious thing is that, conceptually speaking, "Music For Films" has nothing to do with the mythical "Music For Airports". Ours in fact - and in this sense never was an album name more eloquent - exhibits a music still viscerally tied to the flow of images and scenes, mostly linked to the cinematic substrate. The songs, that is, have a evocative power that will completely disappear in "Music For Airports", where Eno revisits the very concept of soundtrack, studying it no longer for images but for environments (hence the birth of "ambient-music"). The very fact that the pieces have "usual" names - contrary to what happens in "Music For Airports" where the 4 tracks are identified by progressive numbers - suggests how, even in the "non-musician's" intentions, the albums were conceptually untethered from each other, in the sense I just explained.

However, despite the correct exegesis of the record disproving me, "Music For Films" remains, in MY very personal perception of things, if not exactly an attempt, as it lacks intentionality, a sort of rough draft, a sketch, or rather, notes taken in random order on a notebook, notes that await reorganization and elaboration into a complete and organic form that will in fact be "Music For Airports".
The album indeed presents itself as a mosaic of 18 discontinuous musical fragments, mostly of short duration and very different chromatic tones: with extreme ease, it transitions from the ethereal atmospheres of "From The Same Hill", with a slithering acoustic guitar that bursts in occasionally to create a unique suspense effect in its anticipation, to the soft and intangible sound textures of "Slow Water" and "Strange Light", passing through disturbing "interstellar" vortices like "A Measured Room" with its phenomenal bass loop, or "Quartz" or the menacing "M386", which seems to accompany the mechanical movements of an android approaching menacingly. The most intense and expressive episode remains, however, the romantic "Sparrowfall", which, in its three parts, spans just under four minutes, developing a few ideas but with a great pathetic effect, able to imprint itself in memory on first listening.

In short, the overall judgment of the album is positive, the quality of the music is decidedly high. However, the fragmentary nature of the work, its instability, and the merciless comparison with previous and subsequent works, of quite different artistic caliber, make it an episode not very exciting, inconclusive, and, to be frank, even negligible.