Features | Awards

The Oliver Stone Award for Continued Existence if Spotty Relevance

By Conrad Amenta | 7 December 2010

Brian Eno
Small Craft on a Milk Sea
(Warp; 2010)







Eno is living a charmed existence. He might be the most celebrated producer in music to still enjoy a sense of indie credibility; who else produces the biggest mainstream rock bands on earth and is still at home putting out an ambient record on Warp? The pairing is both intentionally appropriate, for the levels of symbolic tribute embedded within, and unintentionally so, in that a label that has lost its distinct personality in attempts to capitalize on indie rock is putting out an ambient record by the creator of modern ambient music. But Eno’s return to the genre is a return to something ambient artists have evolved beyond. Where in the years following Eno’s seminal releases, ambient resided on the margins of adult contemporary and Zen bullshit—relegated to either aesthetically sterile anti-music that sought to merely fill space, or the one-off meta project that does the same with a wink and a nod–artists like Tim Hecker, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Ben Frost, Emeralds, Mountains, White Rainbow, and William Basinski have reinvested the genre with post-millennial dread and contemporary political resonance. It seems like the return of the father figure of ambient, one with his ear very much to the musical ground, might have resulted in an alignment of the canon, such as it is, with a generation of new experimentalists.

Instead, Small Craft on a Milk Sea sounds like an ultra-polished reaffirmation of what was—an opportunity for the old guard to point knowingly, as they might when Fleetwood Mac or the Who reunite, and say “This is real music.” It seems like a spurious parallel, except that Eno dabbles so comfortably in massive, mainstream sounds, and is as much a brand, too (at least in the context of ambient music). He’s a referent, entrenched and established, and while his new album is not by any means a bad one, to invest more than is absolutely necessary in listening to it is to return to the infrequent and purely aesthetic rather than the sustained and developmental. Ambient music has been one of the most vibrantly accumulating genres in the last three to five years, perpetuated by easy-to-use (and afford) technology and a seemingly newfound attenuation to pure sound. Eno, for all of his nice-guy personality and obvious historical importance, represents the inaccessible and unattainable, the abstract and cerebral. There’s too much good ambient music right now to need this album.