More Music For Films

It appears that when the newly transferred tracks for the master of this album were being compiled, tracks 18 and 20 were mistakenly repeated (the song "Approaching Taidu" was duplicated while the song "Climate Study" was omitted). A new master was prepared and corrected stocks of this album were shipped in the US by the third week of April 2005. Here is a link to the mispressed version. Plangent, suspenseful, reflective and elegaic, these instrumental recordings made by Brian Eno since the latter half of the 1970s are amongst his most refined and bewitching compositions. They are of considerable significance, too, in the development of Eno's own music and his enduring influence upon the broader progression of contemporary art and culture. Throughout his career as an artist, systems-maker, musician and writer, Eno has explored the potential of music in its broadest possible sense. What happens if you dismantle and question the received wisdom of studio recording techniques, for example? Or how might a piece of music rearrange our experience of its environment, or its wider context -- or even of time itself? For a listener coming to these 'More Music For Films' pieces for the first time, they will find a musical landscape which is at once richly atmospheric, but filled with sudden surprises, musical double-takes and subtle alterations of perspective. As such, these pieces reflect the fluidity of film itself -- each a short sequence, so to speak, with its own poised allure, charm or painterly shading. Within the canon of his recordings, Eno has at times favoured groupings of material, and his 'Music For Films' pieces are no exception, with various selections of tracks being released under their generic title, and new pieces added. Originally distributed in the UK in 1976 (as EGM1), in a limited edition of five hundred copies to film-makers, musicians and selected journalists, the first 'Music For Films' LP immediately advanced Eno's development of ambient music, in the form of viscerally intense individual pieces and fragments. As later recounted by Eno in his sleeve note for the 1978 general release of 'Music For Films', (Polydor, EGED5, co-produced by Rhett Davies): "Some of it was made specifically for use as soundtrack material, some of it was made for other reasons but found its way into films; most of it is previously unissued in any form." It also declared the template for much post-punk electronic-based music, in Britain, Europe, and America. Since 1978, the progression of Eno's music has shown a constant consolidation and advance of what has gone before -- while retaining the pared down energy and assertive newness of his founding ideas. As such, the cumulative resonance of 'More Music For Films' is effortlessly secure within its timeless contemporaneity. It has been Eno's particular brilliance to transpose the concepts and creativity of progressively experimental or avant-garde art-making to the outside world of popular and mainstream culture. Today, one can hear the influence of Eno's 'Music For Films' -- as much as his iconic 'Ambient' series of recordings -- right across the defining sensibility of contemporary electronica, minimalism and musical scoring for films. As scenes or sequences, still life or landscapes, these fleeting, mesmeric pieces enfold you within the varied enchantments of their world. And as described by this current release, it is perhaps the acute tension which Eno achieves in his recordings, between systems and aesthetics -- between art and science, if you like -- which ultimately grants his music its sheer sensory pleasure, and wholehearted generosity towards the listener. Michael Bracewell, December 2004.