From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc,rec.music.synth,rec.music.cd
Subject: Pointer to an array of pieces: Brian Eno's "The Shutov Assembly"
Date: 10 Nov 92 03:45:46 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

Well, it's Monday and the thing's sat on the platter for a couple of 
extended bits of time and the rest of you can buy it tomorrow morning.
Nothing here about passing folks in the corridor in this review, either.

Just to encourage folks that he's not abandoning his crown as king of the
"endless cosmic space as toxic wasteland tracked over by the dozy audiophile"
crowd, Brian Eno has forsaken the EMF drumloops and borrowings from
"On The Corner" period Miles and issued an "ambient" album hot on the
heels of his recent "Nerve Net" release - "The Shutov Assembly" [named
for a young Russian artist whose work BE likes...or rather method of
working]. The plan to release a "song" album followed by an instrumental
project had been sitting on the burner since the '90 goodwill lecture
tour. Basically, it's Eno being Eno for 10 cuts which will either drive
you completely around the bend waiting for the muffled drumloops [if you
are the Orb type] or drive you around the bend hunting for tonal centers
[in at least 4 or 6 of the cuts] if you listen for structure or drive you
completely mad trying to total up all the FM patches flying back and
forth throughout the entire record [Yamaha should have underwritten this
recording in an attempt to bolster the market for used "older" DX-7
synthesizers.

In short, this is a real Rorschach of an album. If you're at all happy
with the post-"Thursday Afternoon" ambient music that Eno's done for
lots of recent film projects [Some of the music from the "Imaginary
Landscapes" documentary is here, and I think that some of the work that's
here also shows up on that PAL video of film footage from Lapland that
the domed one did the music for], you'll be in heaven....with the caveat
that some of the pieces seem to be arbitrarily truncated [at between
3 and 15 minutes, depending on the piece] recordings from the "8 simultaneous
tape loops of slightly different durations running out of synch with 
each other" school. For my money, some of the shorter pieces should have
been longer, and the 15-minute "Ikebukuro" sould have been shortened.
Those of you who really liked the Artforum flexidisc "Glint (east of
Woodbridge)" will be happy to know  that it [or its identical twin] is
happily residing here under a new name ("Lanzarote"). With very few 
exceptions, the piece names are taken either from places where BE has
done video installations, or cities in which the musea were located.
My own experience suggests that at least some of the pieces are perhaps
simply recordings of the "systems" which accompanied the video installations
rather than more "composed" or "ordered" pieces (al la "Music for Films
Vol. 3). One possible suggestion for this comes from the fact that I
made a site recording of a piece of his "Place #19" installation in 
Bari, Italy in the late 1980s, and the basic grammar of the piece 
appears almost sound for sound [though reordered] on this disc as
"Ikebukuro." It's also true that he's cross-borrowed and "recycled"
his audio stuff from installation to installation, so it seems likely.

Interestingly, three of the cuts on this disc are lifted from the
Opal "Work in Progress" cassette which went along with BE during his
lecture tour (you heard it over the P.A. at the intermission if you
were there). They all have different names ["Ripples in Time"-"Innocenti",
"Her Enchanting Coldness"-"Cavallino", and "Planet Dawn"-"Triennale."],
but their inclusion suggests that, however much the project "My Squelchy
Life" may have changed on its way to becoming "Nerve Net", this disc
seems to have changed little from its original starting point.

I resist calling this a review because I'm not even remotely attempting
to be objective here. Apart from a few darker moments, I found few 
surprises here; it's the Ambient Eno in spades [or in smaller doses]:
the bloopy underwater electric pianos, the steely whines spreading across
the deep space of the soundfield, all that. I'm honestly not sure that
this'll rope in any of the young fans of the second generation of ambient
stuff; it may simply be too different in intention and construction,
with its corners cut too squarely for the muffled industrial crowd.
--
-The world exhausts everything except my eyes/because it is a long walk to the
world/begun before I was born. In the far corner/the dead woman bows off stage
The television/crumples into a white dot as the last/train of the evening - my
train, is announced/I lived in one place. I want to die in another 608-828-3385