For those folks who were raised being delighted by Brian Eno's sonic innovations, the fantastic man appeared to have lost his lustre around ten years ago. You should definitely providing big, bland, blustery, stadium-rock productions for Coldplay and U2, he was collaborating with such cutting-edge mavericks as Andrea Corr, Jools Holland, Natalie Imbruglia, Belinda Carlisle and Dido. His "song-based" albums, both single and with famous brands David Byrne, were becoming tasteful, characterless and anaemic. The wonderfully perverse producer-conceptualist who got transformed Bowie, created ambient music and designed no wave appeared to have converted into a rather uninteresting hack.
However, as it happens that Eno never actually ceased making interesting ambient data - it's that they only acquired enjoyed at conceptual fine art exhibitions. This six-CD place assembles a few of them: from a discordant, doom-laden, 20-minute dronefest for a gallery in Venice in 1985 to a glittering 21-minute soundscape registered for an unit installation in Kazakhstan this past year.
This may be music that is superficially clean and nominal but, at its best, you'll listen to the toil and work underneath the apparently frictionless floors - like considering the surface of any geometric Malevich or Mondrian painting and witnessing the thick, unusual, textured levels of engine oil on canvas. Lightness, constructed for a St Petersburg museum in 1997, can be an appealing group of smooth, dissonant but gradually resolving drones and swooping noises. 77 Mil Paintings, a 44-minute part made for a 2006 Tokyo exhibition, can be an immersive mixture of gamelan bell shades and heavily cured vocals. The Making Space Compact disk from 2010, saved with guitarist Leo Abrahams, sometimes veers near blandness, but monitors such as Light Hip and legs (displaying an endlessly arpeggiated glockenspiel-like audio) and the haunting Hopeful Timean Intersect are superb.
Sometimes the laziness resurfaces. Because of the software that Eno himself helped to build up, now you can create this type of ambient music on your cellphone, with algorithms turning your alternatives into generative soundscapes. A few of these pieces, specially the rather lazy-sounding last Compact disk, Music for Future Installations, audio as if these were made with an iPhone and got less time to create than they are doing to hear.