Drowned In Sound 90

Reflection captures Eno at his best. His most recent output has been dominated by a series of collaborations alongside the likes of Karl Hyde, Jon Hopkins and David Byrne. Although 2016’s conceptual project The Ship touched upon some of the great, ambient qualities that defined his earlier output, in reality there hasn’t been an album of this intense deepness for over two decades. It is a pure form of Eno-esque ambience filled with emotive-colour that is reflective of his Music for Airports period. And purposefully so. Recorded as one track, at just under-one hour in length, Reflection is aptly titled, as the artist looks back on how his music in particular makes people feel, and the conversations it leads them to engage in. Recorded in one live take, built upon styles and musical processes that have been developed over the past few decades, Reflection almost feels like a gift – in which we are fortunate enough for Eno to have given us.

There are not so many artists out there who have been as influential as Eno. An artist who created his own genre – a style of ambience that set the tone for modern music as we know it. Writer Maya Kalev who crafted the term ‘power ambient’ to define the modern, revivalist sound that encompassed music from artists such as Lawrence English and Ben Frost – a sound which has been ever-present in today’s musical landscape. And as relevant and important as these artists are, Reflection sits as a body of work that provides a different perspective on contemporary ambient. It feels less urgent. It paints with melodies, allowing each and every listener to have their own relationship with the music. Just imagine a conversation between Eno and that of ‘80s producer Gigi Masin, and how it could sound, with their impressionist approaches to soundscapes.

'It’s the music that I later called "Ambient",' writes Eno as an accompanying note to the LP. 'I don’t think I understand what that term stands for anymore - it seems to have swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows - but I still use it to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.' Reflection is quintessentially Eno. A beautiful, thought provoking and introspective body of work that is composed in a way that is still as unique and as radical as the man himself.

Pitchfork 77

Ambient music is a funny thing. As innocuous as it may seem on the surface, it can often be seen as an intrusion, an irritant. Muzak annoyed as many people as it mellowed, to the point where Ted Nugent tried to buy the company just to shutter it. When Brian Eno teamed with guitarist Robert Fripp (planting the seeds that would lead to his epochal Ambient series), the duo played a concert in Paris in May of 1975 that eschewed their Roxy Music and King Crimson fame and was subsequently met with catcalls, whistles, walkouts and a near-riot.

Forty years later, Eno’s ambient works have drifted from misunderstood bane to canonical works. Eno’s long career has taken him from glam-rock demiurge to the upper stratospheres of stadium rock, from the gutters of no wave to the unclassifiable terrains of Another Green World, but every few years he gets pulled back into ambient’s creative orbit. And while last year’s entry The Ship suggested a new wrinkle, wherein Eno’s art songs inhabited and wandered the space of his ambient work like a viewer in an art gallery, Reflection retreats from that hybrid and more readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux.

Like those aforementioned albums, Reflection is a generative piece. Eno approaches it less like an capital-A Artist, exerting his will and ego on the music, and more like a scientist conducting an experiment. He establishes a set of rules, puts a few variables into motion and then logs the results. Reflection opens with a brief melodic figure and slowly evolves from there over the course of one 54-minute piece. It’s not unlike the opening notes of Music for Airport’s “1/1,” with Robert Wyatt’s piano replaced by what might be a xylophone resonating from underwater. Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.

Around the 18-minute mark, one of those wafting frequencies increases in mass and the piece turns shrill for an instant before re-settling. Another brief blip occurs a half-hour in, like a siren on a distant horizon. Between these moments, the interplay of tones is sublime, reminiscent at times of famous jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s weightless solos, time-stretched until they seem to be emanating from the moon rather than the earth. As smooth and unperturbed as Eno’s ambient pieces tend to be, these small events feel seismic in scale, even if they are short-lived.

Scale becomes the operative word for Reflection. While the physical editions of the album last just under an hour, Eno conceived of the piece to be the most realized version of his ambient music yet, one without parameters or end. Around 51 minutes in, the music starts to slowly recede from our ears, gradually returning to silence. But there’s a version of the piece for Apple TV and iOS that presents a visual component as well as a sonic version of Reflection that’s ever-changing and endless. As the lengthy press release the accompanied the album noted: “This music would unfold differently all the time–‘like sitting by a river’: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing.” In this instance, reviewing the actual album feels like taking measure of that river from a ship window; you can sense more changes occurring just beyond its borders.

Eno’s ambient albums have never seemed utilitarian in the way of many other ambient and new age works, but naming the album Reflection indicates that he sees this as a functional release, in some manner. Eno himself calls it an album that “seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation.” It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, darker than Thursday Afternoon. Playing it back while on holiday, it seemed to add a bit more gray clouds to otherwise sunny days. Maybe that’s just an aftereffect of looking back on the previous calendar year and perceiving a great amount of darkness, or else looking forward to 2017 and feeling full of dread at what’s still to come.

The Guardian 60

(Warp)
The ambient overlord returns with a magnificently peaceful album – which is also released in an edition that endlessly rewrites itself

“All is quiet on New Year’s Day,” U2 once sang. That was in 1983, before they became clients of Brian Eno – and, arguably, the last time anyone had any peace on the first day of the year. New Year’s Eve raves routinely spill over into the next evening. The ceaseless chirrup of social media precludes silence.

Into this clamour lands Reflection, the latest ambient work by Eno, the Roxy Music maverick who named this new genre in 1978 with Music For Airports, and whose cultural reach now spans the avant garde, Coldplay albums and generative apps. If your idea of an album is 12 or so tunes, Eno routinely bucks that set of strictures, even if his last album, The Ship – released last April – cleaved closer than most to tradition.

The more you let it wash over you, the more it sucks you in to reveal internal structures.

Related: Brian Eno: ‘I don’t get much of a thrill out of spending money’

The Guardian 60

(Warp)

If 2016 had you fleeing for a panic room or depopulated wilderness, this could be your perfect soundtrack: a chilly but mostly benign 54-minute piece of ambient music that gradually smothers your worried internal monologue. Bell-like tones fall jazzily on to a bedrock of sustained blurry chords like clusters of droplets, as electronic wind whistles and bass looms from the deep – all at a pace that makes La Monte Young sound like Major Lazer.

Those with Apple devices can download an edition that algorithmically generates an ever-changing version from these elements, fulfilling Eno’s long-held desire for “endless music, music that would be there as long as you wanted it to be”. This neatly shakes dust off the idea of a canonical album passed down by an artist on high, and rethinks the role of music as companion rather than entertainer. But it is ultimately pompous: this techno-utopian lift music, while captivating, is not exactly worthy of eternity. What one piece of music is?

Tiny Mix Tapes 50

Brian Eno
Reflection

[Warp; 2017]

Rating: 2.5/5