Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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The Financial Times NOVEMBER 9, 2012 - by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

BRIAN ENO: LUX

Latest recording from the ambient pioneer is a mellow hymn to technological Enlightenment

Brian Eno's first album for Warp, 2010's Small Craft On A Milk Sea, found the ambient pioneer using uncharacteristically abrasive music to pose nervous questions about ecological and technological change. But since then he has had an epiphany. As he told The Financial Times last year, life is actually "getting exponentially better" for the human species. Hence his return to the soothing electronic soundscapes that he devised in the 1970s, back when Music For Airports depicted the typical airport as a modern cathedral rather than the CO₂-spewing hellhole of lost luggage we now know it to be.

Named after the Latin word for "light", Lux unfolds in four suites over a leisurely seventy minutes with minimalist piano themes, twinkling synthesisers and graceful hints of violin and guitar. The result is a mellow hymn to technological Enlightenment, composed with scant regard to the speed of light.