Finding Shore

If the actual product doesn’t always measure up to that quirky ingenuity--or if it is, on the whole, just a touch too chamber-music stately to reach the mind-expanding heights of Eno’s ’70s and ’80s team-ups with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, et al.--Finding Shore still contains moments that are plenty interesting, even downright beautiful. In those, it doesn’t really matter how they were created.

All of the transitions are perfectly timed, and the whole is a narrative through which minute but thrilling discoveries become regular events as each listen exposes them. This may not be the game changing statement The Ship was almost two years ago, but it demonstrates a fruitful inter-generational relationship in the making.

Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous.

The results are easy enough to digest, even if the process isn’t, with just enough repetition and structure to prevent attention drift.

Many avant-garde instrumental albums exist to strictly craft a mood, and Tom Rogerson and Brian Eno somehow seem to merge these moods, sounds and themes together effortlessly and radiantly on Finding Shore.

Like Ryuichi Sakamoto's async, Finding Shore seems to find magic in everyday objects and scenes.

If you sometimes miss Tigers’ unruly improv-tumult, the pay-off is an album of poised beauty with its own pocket-universe logic, exemplified by the softly searching communion of synthetic/organic sounds on Marsh Chorus.

Inspired by a shared affinity for the Suffolk landscape, these are mostly small, pastoral ambient pieces which drift, as the title suggests, over the shifting coastal flatlan.

It is in this record’s opening salvo and in its closing stages that its aim, of reflecting the natural beauty of eastern England, where both Rogerson and Eno grew up, comes closest to being accomplished.

A sprinkling of more angular, dissonant tracks, like the clanging Eastern Stack, may sail a little too close to his soi-disant "jazz that nobody asked for" for some tastes. [Jan 2018, p.96]