Small Craft On A Milk Sea

 

 

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Brian Eno's first commercial album on the Warp label ( he also releases privately recorded works through his website ) is an intensely dynamic recording that runs the gamut between highly aggressive, beat-driven electronics and the unbelievably still but absolutely pregnant-with-detail ambience he is known for. An album of striking contrasts, compelling musical imagination, tremendously "Masculine" workouts and profoundly "Feminine" delicacies, "Small Craft on a Milk Sea" is really fine composition in itself. It forms a classic arc, from ambient to beats and back to ambient, all with tremendous range and vision.

On "Small Craft" Eno is joined by his protege Leo Abrahams on guitar and guitar-based effects, and electronica artist and producer Jon Hopkins. Abrahams has been close by Eno's artistic side for at least 6 years now and is a masterfully skilled and imaginative guitarist. Hopkins' own electronic work bears a nice affinity with Eno's but very much has it's own personality. He produced the Platipus Label's 2nd ambient collection called "The Art of Chill 2", which included Eno's track "And Then So Clear". The three artists work very, very well together here on "Small Craft".

Recently I found myself wishing that Brian Eno would do another more aggressively electronic album like 1992's "Nerve Net" and voila, I spot "Small Craft" on Amazon. While the present album fulfills that, in part, it is nevertheless good to hear Mr. Eno flex his considerable muscles once in a while. But Small Craft" goes beyond the purely "masculine", if you will. While some pieces literally rip right out of the speakers, others show an intensely awake contemplation and attention to detail that no one yet, has equalled. I was at first really impressed with the tasteful sensitivity of Abrahams' guitar work and how well it merged with Eno's electronics. Tracks 1 to 3 are classic Eno ambient pieces and they form a first movement of hushed subtlety and detail. They are gorgeously haunting and moody pieces of ambience that hark back in timbre to the sort of airy and luminescent atmospherics of Eno's 80's recordings like "Prophecy" and "Under Stars". Then, watch out!...

Track 4, "Flint March" comes hissing in like so many flagellating insect-wings and we're off to some extremely oblique, very intense rythmic work, a solid techno beat and eery sonic textures. This is REALLY juicy, meaty stuff! "Flint March", "Horse" and the intense "2 Forms of Anger" form the thundering heart of "Small Craft". On these tracks Abrahams' guitar is as powerful and demonic as anything Robert Fripp, a longtime Eno confrere, would come up with - a great testimony to his impressively broad range. Indeed, these intense, metallic tracks sound more like the full-throttle thrusts of leviathan machines than diminuitive boats on placid waters!

After that set of really powerful and muscular work, a few tracks of cybernetically funky pieces, very much in the vein of Eno's "jazz" albums, "Spinner" and "The Drop", come forward to show yet another dimension to this darkly magical, even perplexing album. "Dust Shuffle", "Paleosonic" and "Slow Ice, Old Moon" take the pulse beat down notch by notch and the album returns once more to elegant ambience with "Lesser Heaven".

"Calcium Needles", so utterly Brian Eno in name and form, could easily been a track from "January 07003 - Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now" with its tintinabulating, ring-modulations and descending figures. Spooky and irresistibly fascinating at the same time. It bears an interesting kinship to Nick Mason's "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" on Pink Floyd's "Ummagumma".

"Emerald and Stone" is virtually 'hymnal' in tone and offers a soothing waft of beautifully melodic shaping, contrasting in a sonic chiaroscuro between its two surrounding tracks. And this is one very evident and beautifully realized detail of the album, it's very carefully planned flow that smoothly moves, with gigantic or gentle grace, between lights and darks, stillness and frantic insanity. This is the first time Eno has arranged the tracks in arc format, usually preferring to go from very active pieces at the beginning and graduating downwards to a hushed ambience at the end. Time to shake it up a bit.

"Small Craft" is a great body of work. It may have been 5 years since "Another Day On Earth" but this was really worth the wait. Always surprising, ever-amazing, Brian Eno's work never fails to achieve successively greater standards of achievement, setting those levels even higher with each new release. Eno always re-sets the goal posts and just when you think you can bank on what to expect from him, the parameters have been reconfigured. And yet as great as he is, indisputably, this album could not have been realized to such a fantastic degree without Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams. For true Brian Eno fans will remember that his early modus operandi was to cull many divergent, individual musicians from various sensibilities and get them all to follow his instructions and imaginings, then assembling it all in gob-smacking pastiches that exploded and re-defined the parameters of just about everything in music. "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy", "Another Green World" and "Before and After Science" are prime examples. And his work with Talking Heads, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, Daniel Lanois, Peter Schwalm, Laurie Anderson, Karl Hyde, Devo, and even Paul Simon only further enriched his impressive musical vocabulary. So collaboration is neither anything new to Eno, nor a diminishing of his mastery, it has often been a catalyst for it.

If you're a long-time fan of Eno's work or enjoy exploratory instrumental music from ambient to aggressive, "Small Craft on a Milk Sea" is a real treat. A puzzling and unsettling body of fascinating work from the man whose career has largely set the stage for the 21st century.

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