by Shaun Lawton
If you didn't acquire or listen to Brian Eno's 25th studio album The Ship when it launched four years ago in late April of 2016, you missed out on an altogether extraordinary excursion with Capt. Eno at the helm. I did write a review of it caught in the midst of my first listen, which probably reads like the feverish diary entries of a madman trapped in a lighthouse. There would be good reason for that, considering this album takes you on a journey below the darkness of the subconscious and back into a fresh burst of light.
Brian Eno | The Ship (First impressions) by Shaun Lawton
As The Ship began streaming from my PC speakers the first thing I thought of was glass. A filament beneath fogged glass. A filament beneath fogged glass lighting up slowly. The light going from warm yellow toward white and then blending through the spectrum. The glass clarifies then liquefies then disappears altogether, leaving just the light to wallow in the vacuum. Pin pricks allow echoes to flower in the darkness. Deep below decks an engine switches on, muffled by steam engines behind sound proofed glass. The lights dance through the bricks of green glass slowly as more sounds come alive. A symphony wakes up from its coma to gradually stretch out and yawn. The Ship was sprung from a willing land. Echoes of gaseous vapors steam off the surface of a crystal sea. And there's a globe of powdered sand. We live in clothes we wore. Air bubbles elongate as they plummet and drown. The Time is still. The Sky is young. Drawn on towards the gulf of stars whispering. And we are as the undescribed. Reverberations coalesce into an uprising. A voice through a vibraphone speaks. Distant percussion keeps time. My desert in a grain of sand. My life within a day. So stew the storms that some tied. The black plague is sitting. But we are as the undefined. Reeking of the wind. Whispers begin emanating underneath the skin. Shimmering Cymbeline trapped beneath quiet ice. The sail is down the wind is gone. The sky is black with mold. A slave to hope and destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined. The waves about us roll. Spearheaded echos of crystal arrowheads repeatedly diminish triggering smaller fishes of their reflections. Awash in ambient protocols diffused in all directions. Sonar tones arise and sink. Submersibles arrive guided by phosphorescent headlamps. Deeper we go while more voices grow, probing our innermost thoughts. Penetrating the sunken canyons in our little dreadnoughts. The spotlights search left and right, revealing all the whispers in bone. The water is more like marrow here. Our thoughts are all we own. Memories ping and rebound off the inner rubber of our skulls. The pressure stretches these interlocking seams. Even deeper we fall further into fissures transformed to trenches. Microorganisms streaming by our windshield. The vibrations of our tectonic crust. Submerged under wave after wave after wave after wave. The last gossip gradually drowns in our skulls as the final light arrives to wink completely out.
It now sounds like I've been captured like a mayfly in a lighthouse. There's a fluctuating lozenge of light that narrows and winks out before flashing back brighter than before. Apparently I was already onboard the Ship and its since launched without my even suspecting it. I feel at the outset as if we've already traveled distances in terms of a fraction of a light year. As if gliding into another dimension crosswise through our solar system. As the clouds form into egg shapes before the dilated pupil of my eye another level of the submergence opens up to swallow us whole. Now I know we've traveled more strangely than I thought. Not backwards in time but laterally. Sending incandescent ripples reflecting intimate alternate opportunities wavering as if dreams offered up for selection. Everyone wakes up from the Ship, shedding its carapace. A single day focused upon through a milky grain of sand. But we are as the undefined breaking on the wheel. Eno's lower register singing conjures what almost sounds like a summoning. A slave to hopes of destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined, the waves about us roll. The keel of the song's cutting through the fog now as we seem to keep full steam ahead toward an unimaginable shore. Wisps of steam blur by on the surface of the water as the ship's prow cleaves through calm still surface of the sea.
|ed. note end side A
|side B The echoing timpani of voices drowning in an evaporating sonic cloud greets us as we're brought closer in tune with the Ship's navigational circuitry hidden behind sleek embedded panels unnoticed by the eye. The Ship's computer has awakened as a surge of power reboots it to artificial consciousness. It speaks in foreign, reassuring tones to what I can only conjecture must be the passengers in some remote area of the fuselage. There's a sense of passing through distant depths, of bells calling up a memory of having once been lost at sea. This is when you wake up talking to yourself. The memory seems to be dematerializing with signal decay. There's a sense of stretching across the dimensions. A feeling of having been unmoored and set adrift on a celestial current on course to an unfathomable destination. The question of the replenishment of oxygen fades from the mind like a fleet of disappearing ghosts. Our inner narrator, pacified to the molecular level, drifts off as he reports the wave after wave after wave after wave of his dissipation into the wind.
Side C "Fickle Sun" (i)
This is a new excursion or memory of one but the listener gets the sense he is captured in the belly of the whale this time set sail on a heretofore unprovoked course. And the living's done. We toiled away in the fickle sun. And all the day the wire is spun. And so the dismal work is done. This song reaches cascading depths of glorious sensurround turning into a drone guitar drifting off into the distance while a marvelous spiraling doom bass effect swirles around the speakers until it morphs into a flowering brass symphony of enveloping tones evoking a stentorian fulfillment of some dubious prospect or other. In the gently flowering aftermath of this destructive storm, all the boys are turned around, all the boys are falling down, fallen to ashes in the ground. Listening to this I can see how easy it would be to take it seriously. It seems to me that Eno is piloting us on the journey of life until death. In any case it doesn't matter--each listener may take away their own reflective experience from the music--there's a world of subharmonic sound effects filtered into this epic recording to make it a veritable microverse of detail by contrast to my pale remarks. Let me assure you all that this album charts new frontiers in terms of the conceptual space albums are ordinarily allowed to explore. Eno's taken the vision that's been evolving since pioneering ambient music and really directed a sophisticated example of audio cinema verite with The Ship, which by comparison to its visual counterparts evokes the clinical lensing and the shadow drenched noir cinema of my favorite movie directors yet in a thrill-a-second performance that keeps listeners on the cusp of their ears.
Side D "Fickle Sun" (ii) and (iii)
A reassuring male reporter capitulates on the events undergone, presumably, on the aforementioned Ship's odyssey, almost providing an epigraph for a fallen soldier in the aftermath of a war. Set to a languid yet hopeful piano theme. His final concluding words, "The universe is required. Please notify the Sun," segues directly into the Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free. A sudden wonderful cover song from out of nowhere as if we made it alive off the deck of the Ship's maiden voyage. Set free to find a new illusion. And here we have the reflective nature of Eno's tilt to the mirror he's provided, this periscope of a sonic terrain mapping out a virtually impossible journey across time in a shimmering homage to living the life of a dream chased after and found. There's a strange closure achieved in this simple cover, when he croons "let me tell you people what I have found. I saw my head laughing, rolling on the ground, and now I'm set free. I'm set free to find a new illusion." Really a refreshing finale to what has proven to be, upon repeated listenings over the last four years, a truly remarkable and unsettling visionary acoustical work that I'd almost venture to dub post-ambient because, why not? When the man who began the movement remains to continue mapping out the vectors it has previously pushed, watch out! There's a world of flesh, blood, and backbone not to mention a nerve net from whence that has evolved, which is my way of suggesting that Eno's work remains the real deal, the genuine article, and listening to this album is really a trip. It's getting me thinking "what other albums were conceived in order to transport the devoted listener on a journey?" so if anything comes up, maybe a compilation of said albums might appear in a future article here on the crossover vinyl site hidden among the leaves somewhere in the Blogdom of Thorns.
