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MagnetJan 4, 2013With LUX, Eno continues to show off the theatricality of subtlety. [No. 94, p.54]
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Dec 31, 2012With its relaxing, wordless waves of pastoral hums and harmonies, LUX rightfully earns its place amongst such classic works by one of the great masters of sonic exploration.
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Dec 18, 2012It's an acquired taste, but is undeniably calming with its softly vibrating, reverb-rich piano and synth improvisations, enhanced by exotic Moog guitar from Leo Abrahams and treated violin-viola textures from Neil Catchpole.
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Nov 20, 2012Sure, it's beautiful on its own, but without any visuals (that is unless you create your own), LUX meanders while the listener potentially zones in and out.
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Nov 20, 2012Best to sit back and bask in the confident warmth of a job well done.
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UncutNov 19, 2012Lux works on a pragmatic and egalitarian level as more or less the ideal ambient record. [Dec 2012, p.66]
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Nov 15, 2012In short, Lux is exactly what one might expect from Eno in ambient mode, here manifesting with a blip of chaos in an opaque sea, like a drop of ink muddling a solution of milk.
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Nov 15, 2012The record accomplishes what Eno has proposed is ambient music's main purpose: to heighten one's sense of their surroundings while allowing their own narrative to fill the music with meaning and context.
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Nov 14, 2012The music is nice enough, beautiful in parts, and will set a perfect mood for those who can slow down long enough to take it all in.
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Nov 14, 2012There is great reward in actually focusing on what "happens" in this quiet landscape, because Lux betrays the implication of vastness and musical adventure just underneath its dulcet tones and restrained palettes.
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Nov 13, 2012It is also a daunting record--when is an hour and a quarter of ambience not?--but a thoroughly rewarding one.
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Nov 13, 2012Lux is a surprisingly rich experience that's difficult to fault. It's not the most startling record Eno's ever made, but it probably is his most successful ambient work.
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Nov 13, 2012It is killingly beautiful and doesn't do any more than it sets out to do, which is, in a sense, very little.
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Nov 13, 2012Lux is immersive, intriguing, delicate and evasive, like many an ambient record. And, inescapably, it doesn't resonate as much as Eno's groundbreaking works in the genre.
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Nov 13, 2012The detail of individual tracks is almost irrelevant, as the album drifts from sunrise strings to rise-and-fall synths to piano notes as delicate as foals taking their first steps. But it creates an undeniably compelling whole.
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Nov 13, 2012On one end, it sounds like a straightforward film score. In another instance, it's perfect headphone music for self-study or personal contemplation.
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Nov 13, 2012The whole thing is pretty, if a bit mild, suggesting not quite another green world, but something ideal for--as its cover art suggests--watching autumnal leaves turn.
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Nov 13, 2012Lux might not be breaking new ground, but given the beauty and resonance inherent in Eno's music when he sticks with what he does well--namely, gorgeous, slow moving ambience with plenty of breathing space and emotional impact--revisiting familiar turf is just fine.
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Nov 13, 2012It turns any living room into an art installation where interesting things may or may not happen, and its lack of direction and specificity is in its own way brave.
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Nov 13, 2012Whereas most 75-minute albums of short songs swiftly pall, Lux never bores because it's never making foreground demands on your attention.
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Nov 13, 2012Lux could be thought of as another reminder that music doesn't always need to engage the entirety of the brain, functioning as a welcome excuse for half-occupied reflection, a friendly companion for quiet evenings and Sunday afternoons.
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Nov 13, 2012LUX holds up to close listening and background work alike, providing material for deep thinking just as well as the scene in which a character thinks deeply.
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Nov 13, 2012Brian Eno is an experienced and mature producer at this stage of his career and that is evident in every note of this record. Though the instruments are few, the placement of their sounds seems very deliberate.
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Nov 13, 2012As one becomes passively invested hearing LUX for more than an hour, the recording settles deeply like the cerebral equivalent of a heartbeat, and while this may not initially seem a work built to directly engage, its subtleties can be arresting.
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Nov 13, 2012It is an engaging antidote to all the frantic maximalism that the future keeps springing.
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Nov 13, 2012Lux winds up being a haunting embodiment of one of Eno's greatest paradoxes: music made for specific times and places that captures nothing, evokes nowhere, and is porous enough for nearly any emotion to sift through.