Brian Eno - Drums Between The Bells

[Lisnaholic]

Released July 2011, this new Eno album incorporates words by Rick Holland, whoever he may be.
Sorry, I don`t know how to post a pic of the album, but this link has some info about it, and you get to hear three of the tracks too, so I hope that`ll do instead :-

Brian Eno Official Store - enoshop.co.uk

On the basis of those three tracks, this sounds like a punchier album than some of Eno`s trademark, musically austere efforts, but I found the spoken-word overlay rather distracting.
Anyway, this is the track list :-

1. Bless this space
2. Glitch
3. Dreambirds
4. Pour it out
5. Seedpods
6. The real
7. The airman
8. Fierce aisles of light
9. As if your eyes...
10. A title
11. Sounds alien
12. Dow
13. Multimedia
14. Cloud 4
15. Breath of crows

Anyone else have an opinion on this one ?

[Lisnaholic]

^ Thank you, Lisnaholic. Your post is very interesting !

BTW, do you know how many permutations there are for a 15-track album played on shuffle mode ?
Brian Eno has the answer for us :

Drums Between The Bells.

July 21, 2011 Running Orders.

We spent a lot of time listening to the tracks on this album in different sequences...trying to find a good sequence in which to present it. This is a traditional issue in record-making - because a song can flatter or kill the one following it. It was easier in the days of vinyl, because you were dealing with two distinct suites of music - Side 1 and Side 2 - and it was relatively easy to divide the material into two groups of say 5 or 7 songs. But when CDs came along, you suddenly had a continuous stream of up to 80 minutes of music to deal with.

Now we're in a different era again, where many people are downloading tracks individually and you really have no idea in what order (or in what company) they're going to be listening to the works. Nonetheless, as though downloading didn't yet exist, we put in a lot of time trying to come up with an order that sounded good if you played it through from beginning to end.

To give you an idea of the dimensions of this problem: I was working with a band once on an album of 15 tracks, and we were starting to wonder about how to sequence them. Someone in the band said "Couldn't we just listen to all the alternatives?". I decided to work out how long this would take. The number of sequences is 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1.... which comes to a magnificent 1,307,674,368,000 - or approximately 1.3 trillion possible sequences. If each of these sequences takes an hour to hear, that amounts to about 150 million years of continuous listening. If you'd like to sleep and have a social life, you should multiply that by 3, which would take it up to 450 million years - so you'd need to have started listening around the middle of the Paleozoic Era, surrounded by puzzled very early life forms, to have met the deadline of early July, 2011 in the Holocene Era.

Clearly, for us mortals, going through all the alternatives isn't an option. So Rick and I, both unfortunately mortal, listened on 'random shuffle' - just let the CD player throw the tracks out in any order, and paid attention to combinations which made sense (or sounded dreadful). That's how we built up the running order, but there was one fly in the ointment: BREATH OF CROWS. Whatever we seemed to do, that one didn't seem to sit comfortably. It really wanted to be all alone, separated from everything else. That's why we put the one minute silence in...so that, for those listening to the album as a continuous experience, there'd be a hiatus before it started. ( It isn't a silence actually - I put some white noise, fake tape hiss, in there...to make a psychological cue that something was still happening.)

My suggestion is to occasionally listen to the album on random shuffle. It produces some nice surprises, like suddenly noticing a track you hadn't really noticed before.

[Ashbery]

I was really excited to hear this when I read an interview with Eno in the LAtimes, but ultimately I was a bit disappointed and don't think he achieved what he was going for. My favorite music/poetry collaboration remains Tuatara & Coleman Barks - The Here and the Gone.

[debaserr]

I keep meaning to hear this. I'm a terrible new release procrastinator.