A Sense of Doubt blog post #2218 - Brian Eno - Apollo Extended Edition - Musical Monday for 2103.15

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2218 - Brian Eno - Apollo Extended Edition - Musical Monday for 2103.15

Finals week grading push, so just a share of review for this great album that came out back in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

You know I love Brian Eno.

Check my Brian Eno category. After this post, the most recent was just last Monday!

Here:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2211 - Various links raided from ENO - MUSICAL MONDAY for 2103.08





http://ambientmusicguide.com/blog/best-albums-2019-apollo/

Best Albums of 2019: Brian Eno
‘Apollo: Extended Edition’

By Mike GDecember 1, 2019The Ambient Music Guide blog

BRIAN ENO with DANIEL LANOIS & ROGER ENO
Apollo: Extended Edition (1983, reissue on UMC/Virgin)

Awe. That’s what the deeper tracks from ambient pioneer Brian Eno’s spacemusic classic Apollo still evoke, most of them from the album’s first half, and profoundly so. Pieces like “Under Stars”, “Drift” and “The Secret Place”. Glistening, shifting tones, mysterious dissonant noises and quietly epic drones, the soundtrack to a 1983 documentary about the NASA’s Apollo space missions. Now to mark 50 years since the first moon landing we get this extended reissue of an album on which Eno and his collaborators were attempting, in Eno’s words, to make sounds that captured a mix of emotions never before experienced by humans. The jaw-droppingly beautiful synth/choral progression of “Ascent” remains the album’s pinnacle, even though its unfathomable cosmic power has since been misused multiple times by Western film directors who shoehorned it into films and scenes where it didn’t belong.

The more structured and obviously melodic tunes that comprise most of the original album’s second half evoke more of a sense of gentle wonder than awe, and they have also aged beautifully. I always wondered how the country and western strains of Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel guitar made it onto an album like this and the answer came in an excellent new short documentary by Vice magazine. Some of the Apollo astronauts were Southerners and took cassettes of country music songs with them into space, and Eno liked this allusion of frontier music played in a new context.

And speaking of new, For All Mankind is a companion album of new pieces created by Lanois and brothers Eno for this extended edition. Let’s get one thing out of the way: it doesn’t sound like Apollo. There are no deep drone pieces like “Under Stars” here; overall it’s less floaty music with less blurry sounds. The better way to approach these 11 tracks is as a standalone collection of synth-based instrumentals by the trio, with occasional echoes of the spacious, elegant melodies and pedal steel guitar colours of the original. On that count it’s just fine, and occasionally quite sublime. “At The Foot Of A  Ladder” is a perfectly hypnotic space waltz, while “Under The Moon” with Roger Eno’s piano sounds like one of the better Budd/Eno pieces.

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Best Albums of 2019 Reviews Index

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http://undertheradarmag.com/reviews/apollo_atmospheres_soundtracks_-_extended_version

Web Exclusive

Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks - Extended Version

UMe

Jul 19, 2019 WEB EXCLUSIVEBy Matt the Raven

n honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, Brian Eno’s classic 1983 album has been re-mastered and re-released with an additional whole album of new music. Featuring co-producer and ethereal guitarist Daniel Lanois and pianist Roger Eno (younger brother of Brian), the album has withstood the test of time and remains one of ambient music’s most influential releases.

Apollo‘s compositions are well-developed and surprisingly lively considering the artist’s propensity to create supremely tranquil soundscapes. The liveliness is courtesy of brother Roger’s chamber-like keyboards and Lanois’ richly layered guitar tones. Make no mistake though; Apollo has plenty of the shadowy and textural sonic soundscapes that rendered Eno the Godfather of ambient.

Perhaps without even knowing it, most listeners are already familiar with the tracks on Apollo as some were heavily used in films, television shows, and commercials. So the real appeal here is the 11 new collaborative tracks.

The space-themed song titles on disc two more than hint at the music that lies within and could act as descriptions; “The End of a Thin Cord,” “Under the Moon,” “Strange Quiet,” “Clear Desert Night,” and “Last Step From the Surface” are the best examples. Following in the footsteps of disc one, the trio show off their creative ambitions with slowly shifting waves of meditative, hypnotic, and majestic harmonies and even an occasional melody. The enchanting instrumental pieces never stray too far into the nebulous stratosphere and are well worth the price of admission. (www.brian-eno.net)

Author rating: 7.5/10
https://spectrumculture.com/2019/07/21/brian-eno-apollo-atmospheres-soundtracks-extended-edition-review/

Brian Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks – Extended Edition

By Scott Wilson 

 

Posted on July 21, 201

https://echoesanddust.com/2019/07/brian-eno-apollo-atmospheres-soundtracks-extended-edition/

Pale and shaky Ewan McGregor dives into the worst toilet in Scotland and emerges into a shimmering underwater world of narcotic bliss. This surreal cinematic moment is perfectly accompanied by the soft calm of ‘Deep Blue Day’.

Even assuming a complete unfamiliarity with Brian Eno‘s work and myth you’ve probably encountered it or perhaps others from this album particularly ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ which recurs across films and documentaries galore. Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks can stake a fair claim to being the most widely known ambient album by the man most widely associated with the term. Remastered and reissued in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing this is a classic album by an acknowledged modern master. If you don’t already have a copy then now seems as good a time as any to fix that and make your life a little bit better by having it around to turn to. Apollo is beautiful and still, human and otherworldly, a dream of what an ambient record should be and a reinvention of that hazy ideal.

Originally recorded in 1983 as a soundtrack to ‘For All Mankind’ a feature-length documentary on the Apollo moon landing featuring the astronauts own commentary by some mysterious count Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks is considered Eno’s ninth solo album. This excludes some of his previous collaborations and sidesteps the fact it is itself also one, with his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois. This new extended edition offers a second album of new material, a ‘reimagining’ of the soundtrack called For All Mankind that sees the three of them working together for the first time since 1983. It’s hard to assess a new addition to a beloved old classic unless it’s an out and out disaster and we can all rest easy because they have avoided that potential tragedy. They’re still faced with the impossible task of living up to the original album of course and although there’s some lovely stuff on the new disc I think it’s safe to say it’s destined to live in its older brother’s shadow.

Apparently Brian brought five of these new compositions to the project, the others three a piece. Although I’m not completely sure you could tell. If the file sharing, processing, long distance, nature of the collaboration is unclear, the whole hangs together well, inhabiting the same kind of sonic and emotional space as the original without simply mimicking or revisiting it. ‘Clear Desert Night’ has a hint of Blade Runner in the air while ‘Capsule’ could be a melancholy afterword to a post rock storm. I would perhaps have liked to hear more of Lanois’ liquid guitar in the extraordinary ambient country vein of ‘Silver Morning’ but the general sense of being close but not too close to the earlier pieces works well. Perhaps it will take time to reveal it’s own discreet charms, with each listen it’s subtle hooks get deeper into your skin. Although one of the great things about Apollo is its seductive immediacy in a genre that rarely deals successfully in such things. The first track ‘The End Of A Thin Cord’ and the final one ‘Like I Was A Spectator’ are perhaps closest to achieving that.

There’s an argument to be made that Apollo sees the end of Eno’s golden run of albums, pretty much everything up to this point is, in some way, wonderful. After this he began to focus more on collaborations, installation works and production. He and Lanois famously colluding in U2’s lamentable blare across the cultural sky. Still, nobody’s perfect. There are still great things to be found in his later records and in recent years he has once again returned to producing a more steady stream of ambient work. A reissue of a classic with an understated bonus disc of new material seems a fitting way to proceed. Meanwhile one of his more famous collaborators is being honoured with a Barbie Doll to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his own ‘Space Oddity’. Barbie Stardust in signature cherry red platform boots. The nice thing about Eno is that although he most likely wouldn’t agree to being made into a doll, he is probably both envious and amused. I suspect he’s got one on order.

Eno inhabits a unique space, largely of his own making, in the cultural landscape. His remarkable contributions to music and the ways in which we think about it have become an inevitable waymarker on the paths of generations of music obsessives pointing out previously unforeseen directions. If you’re coming to him for the first time Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks is as good a place as any to start. Its accessibility moving towards an easy familiarity over the years as its influence has spread. Weightless but never meandering, melodic but never saccharine it conjures up the vastness of space and yet retains delicate earthly ties.

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- Days ago = 2082 days ago

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