Brian Eno – “The Ship” —A vessel lost at sea
Brian Eno‘s The Ship (Warp Records) is like a libretti for Snowpiercer, or J. G. Ballard/Ben Wheatley’s High Rise – imagining society as a vessel lost at sea, forever drifting through endless, featureless landscapes. Trying to conceptualize or visualize society is a tricky business, especially in these uncertain mercurial times. Society changes in a nanosecond, never resting, always refreshing. With so many pieces and moving parts, it can seem like an impossibility to comment on even one tiny aspect of the world we’re living in, let alone the entire monolithic machine. Brian Eno likely needs no introduction for fans of atmospheric, imaginative electronic music, as the modern progenitor of Ambient music, via his ambient series in the ’70s. Eno’s always been concerned with removing the human from the scene, in an effort to truly free music from egotism and repetition, to create something truly futuristic. Eno’s ambient works are particularly adept at evoking landscapes/settings, like the austere, minimalism of an airport in Ambient 1: Music For Airports or a vast, menacing alien planet, on Apollo: …