A new Brian Eno retrospective, including several never-before-heard tracks, will see release in April, timed to the U.K. opening of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Eno.
In conjunction with the announcement, the previously unheard instrumental “Lighthouse #429” was released on Feb. 19. Check it out below.
The Eno soundtrack album encompasses selections of the pioneering producer/musician’s work from the 1970s to the present, including collaborations with David Byrne (“Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”), John Cale (“Spinning Away”) and Fred Again (“Cmon”), as well as the previously unreleased “All I Remember.” It will be released on April 19.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Eno discussed the release with his customary strategic obliqueness, saying: “Picasso once said: ‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.' I don’t wait to be inspired: I start working and (if I’m lucky) I become ‘inspired.’ And if I’m not lucky I keep at it until my luck changes. I’m obstinate and confident that I will get it somewhere in the end if I keep at it.”
Best known for his early contributions to Roxy Music and his seminal solo albums Music for Airports and Another Green World, Eno has also done notable work as a producer for the likes of Talking Heads, U2, Grace Jones, Devo and Coldplay.
Eno (left) performs with Roxy Music in the 1970s.
Hustwit’s film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January, is billed as a unique “generative documentary,” utilizing AI to create a different experience every time it is shown. As the film’s description from Sundance explains: “Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of Eno is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live.”
Reviews out of Sundance were largely laudatory, with Rolling Stone calling it “a singular experience,” and Screen Daily’s Anthony Kaufman noting: “While it does not follow a conventional narrative or emotional arc, and some viewers might experience a soaring climactic montage sequence that sums up Eno’s ethos in the middle of the film rather than at the end, perhaps it does not matter too much. After all, Eno himself would tell you that humankind’s innate sense of pattern recognition will intuitively create connections to make things cohere anyway. As he says in the film, ‘The audience’s brain does the cooking.’ ”
'Eno' attracted mostly laudatory reviews from its Sundance premiere in January.
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IndieWire’s Siddhant Adlakha was less impressed by Eno's experimental construction, writing: “The film would have benefitted tenfold from its human editors taking a look at several different randomized cuts (or even intuiting the artificially-generated possibilities based on a single viewing) and putting a stop to the tomfoolery. … Eno is rife with unintended ‘emotional artifacts,’ thanks to its jagged editing that cuts scenes short as they’re just getting interesting — the result is disruptive, but not in the Silicon Valley sense; rather, it feels interruptive — or worse yet, thanks to the haphazard placement of emotional denouements.”
The film is scheduled to be released in U.K. theaters on April 20. A U.S. release has not yet been announced.
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