Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Spectrum Culture APRIL 22, 2025 - by J Simpson

BRIAN ENO: AURUM

Separating a "major" Brian Eno album from a "minor" one is a fool's errand. Some of Eno's most enduring works, like 1975's Discreet Music or 1978's Ambient 1: Music For Airports, seem as intangible as streaks of sunlight playing across an earthen wall, despite their historical relevance. Others are records of ephemerality, fleeting moments captured on tape to be transported to some ineffable future like some sort of time capsule. Some of Eno's most iconic creations aren't even music, per se. It'd be hard to argue that the minimalist ping of the Windows 95 startup tone hasn't been just as influential on the way we think about and envision - and hear - the future as any of his iconic ambient compositions, art rock and sound art.

Aurum is Eno's first solo album since 2022's ForeverAndEverNoMore, following 2023's collaboration with Fred again.., Secret Life. It was released on March 20 of this year as a surprise release on Apple Music, designed to take advantage of the streaming platform's Spatial Audio Technology, promising to deliver the holy grail of lossless audio rendered in full, detailed, immersive surround sound that streaming has been seeking for the last decade. It's a fine fidelity for Aurum, which is some of the most patient, minimalist work of Eno's entire career.

Like most of Eno's ambient output, Aurum is all about the subtle variations. It feels positively austere compared to ForeverAndEverNoMore, which seems busy and dense as an opera compared to its harmonies and melodies, its poetic content and constantly shifting structures. Aurum strips away the figurative almost entirely, leaving only abstraction and impressions. If ForeverAndEverNoMore is a detailed architectural drawing dismantling in real-time, Aurum could be the twilight Mark Rothko color field where the dissolution takes place.

Changes take place, but there's less to suggest they're driven by human agency. The wavering, bell-like chimes of album opener Fragmented Film seem more like sunlight falling on polished metal than decisions made on staff paper, more like watching shadows dance across a surface, light refracting off a golden pond like so many sapphires. Gorgeous Night glows like phosphorescence as filters sweep through its rarefied air, rendered indigo and ultramarine in its uncanny half-light.

The Dawn Of Everything, the longest song at an impressive almost-16 minutes, has the same lonesome, antigravity feeling of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, its changes triggered by galactic dust striking solar panels rather than the personal. The Understory somehow manages to be even more minimal still, stripping away melody almost entirely, leaving only an ethereal, ominous drone and the shivering husk of a locust to wander its hallways. There's a human quality, yes, but it's a humanity in the face of the awe and sublimity of the unknowability of nature.

A more human side opens up after this drawn-out atmospheric opening, though, which is more likely to appeal to listeners who like music where something actually happens. Lamented Jazz is a moody noirscape played out in half-time, shadows creeping with ill intent while tin cans shiver with anxiety down a long midnight corridor. Material World glides by like a lonesome passenger train, chimes counting down senseless hours lost on everyone. Lonely Semi-Jazz is an existential 8-bit cut scene, full of aimless dialogue and a sea of stars. Cascade is a metaphysical Ry Cooder dustbowl with a guitar player automaton caught in a loop.

The action seems to cease for the last two songs, all traces of the human fading, leaving only an ambient environment. It's like a snapshot from some dusty, desolate stage set in some murky, unknowable theater, the flash briefly illuminating ghostly drop-clothed furniture, hobby horses and oversized dice discarded seemingly at random, their purposes as forgotten as their maker. It's a lonesome, forgotten world, but one that's occasionally as beautiful as an abandoned greenhouse or space station.

Aurum's release coincides with Eno's biographical phase, with numerous recent works in various media - most notably, last year's Eno documentary, which changes ever-so-slightly every time it's played, as well as his recent book, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, released earlier this year on Faber & Faber. Like these other works, Aurum finds Eno exploring and pondering various questions about art, community, technology and culture, largely in the form of an interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, which dropped at the same time as the album. In the interview, Eno opens up about his feelings about new forms of creative technology, particularly the specter of AI. According to Eno, the problem isn't with AI, per se, but rather the way it's owned and implemented. "The biggest problem for me about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It's to do with the fact that it's owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been. I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time. It's possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it's done to societies, it's been a catastrophe."

Despite his fondness for technology, Eno's allegiance turns out to be the natural and the human. Later in that same interview, Eno describes to Lowe how happy accidents and human unpredictability, not tech or finance, have driven culture and creative industries forward. "Distortion is a good example. Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music, a lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That's quite a bizarre thought, isn't it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn't do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness."

Despite the often chilly textures and alien harmonies he's often known for, there's a warmth and heart hidden beneath the plasticine exteriors of his ambient compositions. Although they can be disorienting and more than a little surreal, Eno's futuristic soundscapes at least strive for beauty, serenity and tranquility. It seems almost impossibly optimistic in a world where technology and capital threaten to rip our entire way of living to pieces every single day. As things get more extreme, more quickly, it's more important than ever to find the inflection point to roll things back to, should we get the chance. The future may no longer be what it once was, sadly, but it has the potential to be so much more, provided we live long enough to find out.