Brian Eno
Reflection

What does it mean to be truly 'experimental' and at the same time influential in the music world? Brian Eno, who undoubtedly has been and still is both, divides artists from this point of view into two categories. On one side, those he calls 'farmers', who choose a plot of land and cultivate it carefully, trying to grow the value of what they have planted over time. Then there are the 'cowboys', who are always on the lookout for new places and are always excited by the mere discovery of something new and by the freedom of being somewhere no one has ever been before. In practice, if we want, according to his definitions, both categories have in their favor certain significant characteristics and points of interest to be taken into account. Cowboys certainly have more enthusiasm on their side, while farmers, on the other hand, are of milder disposition, but only seemingly so. I mean, how could we consider 'mild' the constant and tenacious attitude of someone who establishes and carries out over time a long, rational, and well-thought-out work and artistic plan. How can we think that something like this is done without enthusiasm? It would be impossible to carry out such work for decades. It is impossible, and I think Brian Eno himself is aware of this. Of being a bearer of a strange, healthy madness.

A year after the release of 'The Ship' (Warp Records), a very peculiar album in the long sequence of his productions and a record he himself described as a special opportunity for what he called vocal experiments, Brian Eno returns with a new album that is certainly something more 'typical' according to his standards and particularly for those that are his most distinctly 'ambient' works (many claim the album actually has a structure very similar to that of 'Thursday Afternoon' from 1985, which although conceived as a record intended to accompany seven visual sequences, consisted in fact of a single long track over sixty minutes in length), but also something much more sophisticated (according to Brian Eno, the most sophisticated of all his ambient productions) and at the same time rational, balanced, reflective than his previous work.

'Reflection' (obviously), this is the title of the album (released on Warp Records on January 1st), is what can be defined in any case for the moment as the last episode of a long road that the British musician and producer began in the mid-seventies with his first album released under the name 'Brian Eno', that is 'Discreet Music' (1975), even though he himself somewhat struggles to date the beginning of his connection with 'discreet music', considering it as something that has always been part of his approach to music: a true concept, a sort of ideology on which he would then base his entire artistic production.

At the time 'Discreet Music' was published, Eno wanted to conceive the entire work as something that had to be revolutionary because it meant to him (and then to others) a new way of conceiving music, as if it were necessarily part of the environment and the considered ecosystem each time, 'just as the color of light and the sound of rain are parts of the natural world'. From this naturally derived the definition he still wants to apply to his music today, which is 'ambient', something that is thus not just a musical genre but a true extended ideological concept requiring necessarily to come into contact with music considering it in relation to the context and to space and time and likewise considering it as if it should in its own way determine these concepts. Music must therefore define the concepts of time and space and with this type of operation also give an emotional sense to what are the different events and interactions, describe situations and occurrences even only through the transmission of sensations and feelings.

Curiously, I was thinking about something like this a few days ago when, in front of the television, it must have been New Year's Eve, I watched the new version of 'The Jungle Book' by Rudyard Kipling (the film is also somehow deliberately a remake of the 1967 animated film) directed by Jon Favreau: essentially this too is an animated film and where the only 'human' presence is constituted by the boy (very talented) playing the part of Mowgli. But this is naturally a recurring thought and one that can generally be applied to cinema or visual and figurative arts and something that however at that particular moment I wanted to consider especially in regard to what could be defined as an audience composed of very young people. In the sense that, it is evident that a film of this type is primarily dedicated to children and, if we refer to very young children who might be at most, I don't know, three or four years old, it is clear that in these cases the role of music is the most determining element possible to give them an idea of what they are watching. They may not fully understand the dialogues, perhaps, even though it is a cartoon dedicated to children, because they are still too young, they may perhaps not fully grasp the plot, the different situations, and even the simplest twists that occur in the story, but they can perfectly understand all the emotions the film intends to convey and on which it is fundamentally structured and this happens for one single determining reason: the use of music. Sound, in general, is an element that we cannot overlook in defining any possible setting and/or situation.

'Reflection' takes inspiration from very similar considerations. Indeed, as I mentioned before, it is a very sophisticated work but also something that for Brian Eno required a long ideological effort in trying to expand the concept of 'ambient' music as he has meant it over the years and since he started making music. Regarding what he himself wanted to say about the album’s intents, we can understand its purposes as usually experimental in terms of the sensations this album arouses in himself firstly and subsequently in others. This long composition, lasting nearly an hour, like all his others, has been subjected to repeated and prolonged listening even for entire days by the artist and in different situations for the specific purpose of understanding, being able to perceive the different nuances depending on the moments and situations and likewise to see how it influenced the course of things. It is a sociological experiment. Once again music is applied to space, understood as a place containing people, a single person or a plurality of people, with the aim of understanding how it can help in creating a real 'psychological space' ideal that encourages what he has defined as internal conversations and/or social interactions. A sociological experiment that as such cannot be conceived as definable by statistical data, because a sociological experiment (I always think of the type made considering different people's behaviors and how they take a seat on the train or subway in relation to the presence of other passengers) is necessarily subject to what are probabilities and probabilities, to make sense, all of them must be put together over a long period. Only in this case can we then consider what its actual results are.

Evidently, it will have to be the same with this album. I mean, this is certainly the main reason for publishing an album of this type. Something that clearly anyone who does not love ambient music will consider unnecessary to listen to, but that many admirers of Brian Eno will not be able to help but listen to and derive great benefit from as well as possibly draw their own considerations regarding the concepts he has wanted to develop and experiment with over time and also on this occasion, keeping in mind that this is obviously a new significant chapter of a process that Brian Eno has been carrying on for forty years. In this sense, he has necessarily wanted to define himself as a 'farmer'. In my opinion, however, deep down, in every 'farmer' (thus also with regard to Brian Eno), at the base there is always what is a 'cowboy'. We all start that way.