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.