Brian Eno has 25 new tracks “built entirely out of stems and samples from his own material” coming your way
Written by WOM writer on September 14, 2023
Fans of Eno, you’re in luck.
Ambient legend Brian Eno has announced the upcoming release of 25 (yes, 25) new songs “built entirely out of stems and samples from his own material”.
Described as “the first of its kind from Eno”, the release features tracks that are retrospective and totally new at the same time, pieced together from the massive catalogue of sounds and songs the producer has built over the last 50 years.
As Eno explains, his archive features “a lot of sonic experiments that I didn’t think anybody else but me would be interested in hearing – such as, for example, a sine wave that slides through an octave in 30 minutes, or several attempts to synthesize the sound of rain or the soundlessness of snow.”
Sharing how the whole thing came together, Eno says that it began after his longtime colleague Peter Chilvers wrote a new archive software to replace his iTunes — which he previously used to review his archive.
“I can play randomly picked items from the archive one after the other — whole tracks, or slices as small as a second (or 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, 60 seconds),” Eno explains. “It can choose to start at any point within a track, and it remembers what it has played so I can trace them. That way I get to review my archive, sometimes hearing things I haven’t listened to for many years.”
More importantly, the software allows him to play (up to 5 tracks) “simultaneously, one on top of the other”, which lends to some pretty interesting results.
“As you would expect, this can be a tangled car crash, but it often produces entirely new pieces of music that I would never have dreamed of making,” he says, adding that, “The works that result are collages from the last 40 years or so of my musical life. I hear them as new pieces but they may contain a piece from 1992, another from 2011, a third from 2014, and a fourth from 2022.”
“In my mind I think of this process as ‘chunking up’ – simpler systems intertwine to make more complex ones, like the interaction between prokaryotic cells that Lynn Margulis proposed.”
The tracks will be released via Eno’s Sonos Radio station, The Lighthouse. The station is available exclusively for Sonos Radio HD listeners via the Sonos app.
