Brian Eno
The Ship

Maybe you wouldn't expect to find a museum specifically dedicated to the two great ocean liners, the Lusitania and the Titanic, in the heart of Liverpool. Yet, this place exists. It is located on the banks of the Mersey and just a few steps away from one dedicated to the Beatles. It's called the 'Merseyside Maritime Museum' and it is obviously a maritime museum, but with a large section, practically the majority of the available space, dedicated to the disasters of the Lusitania and the Titanic.

The fact is that there are obviously lots of links and connections between the city of Liverpool and the history of these two ocean liners.

Did you know that Captain Smith of the Titanic was based in Merseyside for forty years? He lived near Liverpool before moving to Southampton, the city from where he would then set sail aboard what at his time was the largest ship ever built and on that journey that never ended towards New York City, USA. And it was an ocean liner of the Cunard Line based in Liverpool, the Carpathia, that carried out the rescue of all those who survived the disaster.

There are a lot of stories to tell. There's the one about a cellist named Fred Clarke, who lived at 22 Tunstall Street, Smithdown Road, Liverpool, and who started playing while the Titanic was sinking, and there's the story of Fred Fleet, the one who first saw the iceberg, the white lady. He was from Liverpool too.

Why am I telling you all these things? Because these are the first things I thought of when I listened to this record for the first time. I thought of the Titanic and the Lusitania, the British ocean liner that was bombed and sunk by the Germans on May 7, 1915. It was also registered at the port of Liverpool, like the Titanic, and it was precisely in Liverpool that it was headed (from New York City) on what was its final voyage.

Anyway, I wasn't wrong. I mean, apparently, in the end, Brian Eno would have chosen the title, 'The Ship' (Warp Records), precisely referring to the event of the Titanic's sinking. An event he wanted to define as the 'apex reached by humanity with regard to the overpowering of technique and destined as such to be the greatest triumph of man over nature.'

Well, frankly, I don't think any other words could better describe what the Titanic meant and why this whole story is still significant today. This explains why the Titanic and its sinking have become over the years a real myth: what happened was a disaster, but it was also a relevant episode in the history of the eternal struggle between man and nature, in which the former always tries to prevail. After all, the name of the ship, from Greek mythology, was 'Titanic,' and as such, it referred to the 'Titans': the fact that its sinking constitutes one of the greatest 'myths,' one of the greatest stories of the last century could at this point be considered ironic. I don't know. The fact is we'll continue to talk about it for hundreds of years. I'm sure of it.

Brian Eno initially worked on these tracks, which later became part of the album, as setup for a multi-channel sound installation. It was only later that he rethought his compositions and decided to modify their structures to include voices and create different atmospheres. What he set out to do was to record music that could be the background for some setting. He literally wanted to set sound events in a large, open, and boundless space. It came to him the idea of the first world war, which seems to be a recurring obsession and has always fascinated him because of what he defined as extraordinary cross-cultural madness resulting from the explosion and clash of different empires. And it was at this point that he thought of the Titanic, the unsinkable ship.

The two disasters, after all (the Titanic and the Lusitania), are both connected to the First World War. The story of the Lusitania's sinking has already been mentioned. What about the Titanic? It sank practically two years before the war began, and if you think about it, it's just so, it's as if the two events were somehow connected and consequential: humanity's history had reached a point of no return. What happened to the Titanic was the same as what happened with the outbreak of the first world war and then twenty years later, the second. The inevitable.

Could then the sinking of the Titanic be somehow a metaphor for talking about the first world war? The feeling when listening to the album, which consists of two sound compositions (the second divided into what we could define as three acts), is that its contents, the music makes you feel both agitated, anxious, as if something might happen to you. On the other hand, I've talked about this record and the feelings derived from it, saying that listening to it is like feeling, moving, floating slowly inside a placenta. And the placenta is the ship, of course. It is said that during the nine months we spend inside the mother's womb, we relive the whole evolutionary process of humanity from the origins of history until we become men. Sapiens, I mean. And I think that in a certain sense, Brian Eno wanted to convey this kind of message to the listeners.

You know. When I was a boy, I wanted to become a sailor. I have always been fascinated by the sea, that's for sure, but I think the main reason I wanted to become a sailor is that I actually didn't want to be anywhere in particular. I wanted to travel across the sea and from one continent to another without ever stopping, so as to be able to go everywhere and at the same time disappear, not be anywhere.

Listening to 'The Ship' gives you the sensation of being in a state of suspension where concepts of space and time lose all meaning. On a light background of droning sounds rises an indistinct yet evocative and reverberated voice accompanied by the sound of synths. Brian Eno seems to have decided to make this album for a particular reason: that is to experiment with regards to his voice, since discovering that he could sing in the low C key. A curious thing is that the voice, the cadence of the voice, made me think of a famous Velvet Underground song contained in their first album, 'All Tomorrow's Parties.' The thing is even more curious considering that the second composition, 'Fickle Sun', which, as mentioned, is divided into three movements, actually concludes with a cover of the Velvet Underground song, 'I'm Set Free.' A true homage by Brian Eno to a band he has always considered among the most influential of all time and which he reiterates he still considers very influential today.

'Fickle Sun' is a varied and heterogeneous composition and mostly instrumental. Wave after wave it partly resumes the tones of 'The Ship' to then unfold in three acts. Already mentioned the third, we must mention the second, 'The Hours Is Thin', which with the same emotional contents of the base composition introduces the sound of a piano and a recitation by actor Peter Serafinowicz, which was practically composed by mixing, using a computer, extracts of what are old recordings of announcements and/or verbal documentation of past navigations.

I know. Most listeners feel they have the right to expect from a pioneer like Brian Eno what we might define as 'the best' every time. Personally, I don’t know if with this work he has crossed some new frontier regarding electronic and experimental music. Certainly, it is not an album meant to be listened to while you're in an elevator. A mix of avant-garde music with a minimalist approach which Eno knows how to master, 'The Ship' is not just an elegant and composed ambient music album like 'Lux' could have been for example, but it is something with strong emotional content that, using his own words, stems from the fascination with the Titanic's sinking and what is the eternal struggle of man between arrogance and paranoia. So forget elevators then, here you need at least a submarine.