Brian Eno
Sisters

Brian Eno himself specified the situation with an announcement on his Facebook page: essentially, the release of this album (released exclusively in digital format) would be tied to political-economic reasons.

A consequence of Brexit which practically resulted in an immediate increase in prices throughout the UK for all Apps (the work also had a visual content created by programmer Peter Chilvers) and consequently increased the price of 'Reflection', an album or rather a genuine project that he intended to build for the experimental purpose of verifying what emotions the album would evoke in himself and others.

A real sociological and at the same time 'spatial' experiment in the sense of considering how the music listened to in a given space affects the emotions of the different subjects present in it, depending on the number of subjects involved.

We are obviously not on the same levels as 'Rhythm 0' by Marina Abramovich, the artist's performance in 1974 that lasted for a duration of six consecutive hours where the artist, voluntarily deprived of any will (it might sound like a play on words, yet...), completely put herself at the disposal of the public, which had 72 objects to interact with her body as they deemed appropriate.

Clearly, after an initial hesitation by the public, the experiment degenerated into more or less violent and scabrous manifestations, thus revealing the most degenerate nature of the human being and how it is easily excitable when part of what we might define as a 'mass'.

I sincerely doubt that listening to 'Reflection' could lead to such consequences, but it's self-evident that, being an experiment (including a sociological one), the work was intended to be listened to by as many people as possible.

'An experimental music album destined for the masses' and apart from this, what has been considered since 'Lux' in 2012 as the continuation of what someone has wanted to consider as the second golden age of one of the most influential artists of all time, not only regarding electronic and avant-garde music.

The consequence of all this reasoning was ultimately to release 'Sisters' just one month later, downloadable for free for all those who had bought 'Reflection', and in practice composed of four sessions (four 'sisters': 'Hannah', 'Irial', 'Darla', 'Anya') each lasting 15.14 minutes and created with the same type of algorithms previously used.

In practice, nothing more than an appendix to what 'Reflection' was, built on the same premises and through the same sonic combinations, only with a different formula.

Rather than questioning the musical content of the work, which is self-evident and derivative in relation to the main project, it is legitimate to question how much the concept that the artist wanted to develop as a whole really makes sense in light of the current functioning of the record market.

Certainly, having released 'Sisters' for free to those who purchased the main work is commendable and makes sense if correlated to the fundamental objective of further expanding the bases for what he wanted to propose as an experiment. But what sense does this experiment have when correlated to the functionality of downloadable visual apps on smartphones? This indeed makes the fruition of the work as a whole even more something exclusively individual.

But after all, proposing audiovisual installations to be taken around the world is something demanding and, at the same time, too ambitious. How much could something like this become of 'massive' interest and attract the attention of a large number of people? Brian Eno proposes sensations dictated by intellectual and reflective ambient music, so far from the instincts of any kind that the vision and total 'availability' of a human body, as in the case of Marina Abramovich’s experiment, can trigger.

The final sensation is that perhaps the effect achieved by works like these, although commendable and indisputable on a 'technical' and artistic level, is to contribute to an isolation of the individual that can be even greater. In addition to what we can define in most people as indifference, total passivity. Immobility... But on the other hand, we cannot exclude that this is precisely what Brian Eno ultimately intended to demonstrate.