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Brian Eno - The Shutov Assembly Audio CD

A fair review of the Brian Eno "The Shutov Assembly" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Brian Eno reviews here, or go back to the Brian Eno tabs.

Brian Eno Band: Brian Eno
Title: The Shutov Assembly
Rating:
Release Date: 2005-06-28
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Triennale 2: Alhondiga 3: Markgraph 4: Lanzarote 5: Francisco 6: Riverside 7: Innocenti 8: Stedelijk 9: Ikebukuro 10: Cavallino

Pictures at an Exhibition


As dreamy as they are powerful in scope, Eno shows how he understands the vast potential of ambient music as art and delivers a masterpiece. Recorded between 1985 and 1990, Brian Eno creates 10 beautiful soundscapes that weave deeply-textured, highly-contemplative colors on each canvas.


Great album of typical Eno ambient atmospheres
If you like any of the other "Music for Airports" or "Ambient 1, 2, 3, 4,. . " albums, you'll appreciate this. "Ikebukuro" is an extended piece that works on its own on continue repeat mode. You won't be disappointed.


On Land And Floating Above It
Remarkable hypnotic shifting swirling depths and spaces that slowly emerge, coalesce then dissipate - usually around a core sound. A continuation and expansion of many of the moods and textures that made On Land so unusual.
I have been listening to this assembly for over a decade now (Have not yet heard the remastered version), but I can guarantee that if you appreciate On Land you will definitely want to include this marvelous recording in your collection. It just might be Eno's most perfect offering.


One of Eno's Best Ambient Albums
This one is just a scratch less than Ambient 4 or Thursday Afternoon, but is still one of the great ones. . very textured, peaceful, moody and ambiguous. This is one of the albums for which Eno realized he had to place a microphone out the window of his studio, because the birdsongs and other natural sounds had become a part of the thinking process for the music he was recording. Wonderful just to hear Eno solo. . . without a Lanois, Brook, Hassell, Jones, Laraaji or brother Roger in tow.

This album has had a strange afterlife. . . the best track on the album, Ikebukuro, was remixed and expanded with additional dubbing for Brian's album "Music for Civic Recovery Centre. " Eno has referred to this process as 'composting' - the act by which an older piece is digested into and tranformed by a new one. The original version from Shutov is 16 minutes in length, but the "Quiet Club" version runs 45 minutes and features spooky vocoder-treated voices and other surreal oddities. Actually, I found it a bit creepy for the intended use of playing it for people in rehab. . . but seek it out as it's the companion album to Shutov Assembly.


Not particularly interesting.
I've often found that Eno's ambient catalog is a bit mixed-- some of it is pioneering, exciting, and worth attention, and some of it is treading water. Revered by many (at least some of whom likely found this a good return to form after the techno/rock blast of "Nerve Net", released two months prior), "The Shutov Assembly" is sort of a business-as-usual ambient album in the Eno catalog. This is an album I largely put in the latter category.

Essentially ten pieces composed over a five year period that all have a unified approach, this sounds like a series of ambient experiments that never quite reached fruitition-- for each track, one could picture that an entire album could have been constructed in the same vein, and for some of the better ones ("Alhondiga", "Stedelijk"), this may have been a worthwhile endeavor. But for every interesting piece, there's a whatever pieces ("Markgraph", "Francisco", "Innocenti"). They're not bad, they're just rather hard to feel very excited about. Musically, most of the pieces include a brief loop (1-2 seconds in some cases) over which either longer loops or understated melodies are performed.

As one would suspect, this remaster is crisp and well balanced, although the artwork is not particularly exciting (it may be expanded, I don't have the original), no liner notes are included. Probably best left for fans and collectors, interested parties in learning more about Eno should start with "Discreet Music".


You can see a complete list of all Brian Eno discography, or go back to the Brian Eno tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.

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