Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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The Financial Times APRIL 29, 2016 - by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

BRIAN ENO: THE SHIP

"The sail is down," a deep voice slowly intones, "the wind is gone." The first of The Ship's four tracks is becalmed in twenty-one minutes of synthesiser swells, radio static and sonar sounds, with Brian Eno, whose deep voice it is, as a Zen-like castaway entrusting himself to the ocean's command.

Fickle Sun (i) makes the album's Titanic inspiration clearer. An ominous passage of brass rears up halfway through its eighteen minutes; then the music subsides into eerie ambient drones and ghostly shanty song chants.

It ends with the actor Peter Serafinowicz reading a computer-generated poem and Eno crooning a dreamy cover of The Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free. It is a fine meditation on themes of randomness, technology and human agency.