the shutov assembly - brian eno

I have loads of ambient albums by Brian Eno, most of which are designed to be played very quietly, some almost at the very threshold of listening. But last night I played The Shutov Assembly through headphones, and turned up the volume. And, some of it actually works rather well when played loud.

Some of the tracks are really bassy, but the main thing you notice is how much detail is present, detail that you entirely miss when listening to this music passively. The other thing I realized is that surely much of The Shutov Assembly actually dates from much earlier than the 1992 release date.

Although the track titles all relate to places where Eno had set up audio/visual Installations in the 1980s and early 90s, virtually none of the music, bar “Ikekuburo”, was actually used in those installations. Instead most of the pieces, it sounds to me, appear to date from the early / mid 1980s and many closely resemble the Apollo tracks in sound and construction.

About half of the Shutov tracks had previously appeared on the 1989 promo album Textures (although they all had alternative titles on that record). For example the opening Shutov track “Triennale” was entitled “Planet Dawn” on Textures which is a better title for a piece that really does sound like an Apollo leftover.

“Lanzarote” was previously available in 1984 as the flexi disc only rarity “Glint (East Of Woodbridge)”, so it’s clear that the Shutov titles are pretty irrelevant, and this is something of a shame, as most Eno music is usually titled so well, so descriptively, that to have these bland titles named solely after places, despite the lack of relevance, seems rather disappointing.

Anyway, the music is, on the whole, very very good. And I especially like the extremely pretty closing “Cavallino”.