Small Craft On A Milk Sea

Music is meditation for Brian Eno, so it's fitting that portions of Small Craft on a Milk Sea – a collaboration with guitarist Leo Abrahams and pianist Jon Hopkins – sound like they're circulating air at a day spa.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

Another resplendent nonpareil from Eno (and a collaborative improvisation with Leo Abraham and Jon Hopkins), this is veritably a spontaneous soundtrack to an inferential film, one that is essentially revealed in the imagination of the listener.

Rather than anticipating something new, Small Craft on a Milk Sea ultimately feels like one of the final surges of a style and format that Eno himself is outgrowing.

Things move from melodic ambience to galloping sci-fi workouts and back again, the highlight being the sublime 'Emerald And Stone'.

There's no doubting that sounds are placed together, weaved and treated expertly and Small Craft On A Milk Sea can, save its more aggressive moments, flow over and around you therapeutically.

After all these years, he's still got it.

The likes of Emerald and Lime and the similarly named Emerald and Stone are trademark Eno, and lovely: music as thought-provoking, soothing balm.

Small Craft... isn't an album that's going to change the world forever, but listened to in the right environment it sometimes does just that for a few minutes at a time.

For the most part, Small Craft on a Milk Sea slots back into that forward thinking mindset, creating further realms of possibility for Eno to operate in.

Even when it seems a bit disjointed on close inspection, it's when you take a step back that this album really comes into focus.

The album may lack consistency, but it isn't short on order, each track bearing some indelible marker of Eno's touch.

Eno may be trading on his earlier developments in ambience, but Small Craft on a Milk Sea is a good and proper balance of curiosity and expression.

While most of the album is at least somewhat experimental in nature, Eno includes some reminders that he could probably compose a soundtrack for the afterlife if he felt the calling.

With assistance from fellow electronicists and past creative foils Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, this translates as otherworldly synthetic miniatures, rhythmic techno tension-builders and, on Forms Of Anger, a sudden rush of motorik rock menace. [Dec. 2010, p. 109]

Aficionados will hear a master ambient craftsman in his element. [Dec. 2010, p. 95]

With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: ambient and active.

Small Craft probably wouldn't make it as an art installation. It gets too diverse and obstreperous to make good musical wallpaper.

Though it might sound like a cold place, Eno's primordial milk sea is often choppy and warm, the kind of rough and imperfect environment where ideas ignite.

Small Craft is something different: a rhythmically aggressive Brian Eno album.

Like everything Eno touches, the album is riddled with baffling and stimulating forays into unexpected territories.

It's an uncharacteristically diverse album for the electronic-music pioneer-one that grew out of several years of improvising with previous collaborators Jon Hopkins and Leo Abraham-and it bears the stylistic fluctuations of a work long in development, with eerily plucked guitars and tense piano lines giving way to doomsday lasers, Aphex Twin skitter, and finally, refracted versions of earlier tracks à la Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror.

Eno's true strength has always been in his ability to constantly create, to constantly make good noise. Small Craft on a Milk Sea finds him doing exactly that, and the results are at worst incredibly listenable, and at best utterly invigorating.

Small Craft on a Milk Sea gives us the classically transportive experience that Brian Eno excels in creating.

Mr. Eno produced Small Craft on a Milk Sea from studio improvisations he shared with the electronica musician Jon Hopkins and the guitarist Leo Abrahams, blending their musicianly interactions with the impersonal, repetitive processes of loops and beats and blurring any distinction between human and mechanized.

The real triumphs come when beats make unexpected appearances, bringing to mind the left-field electronic music that his new label, Warp, was once revered for. Makes you wonder what Eno would come up with if he ventured into techno.

Small Craft is an attempt to puncture that bubble, but doesn't quite do it; but, hopefully, if Eno's focus is still there, the next one should. I'm at least optimistic that it will.

It's the kind of hair-raising music that one wishes occurred more frequently on this overly subdued collection.

It's at once more lithe and more aggressive an album than we've heard from Eno in years; and while sometimes the pieces feel too short (or, in some cases, just plain incomplete), Small Craft offers a promising sampler of sonic possibilities from an artist as immune to fashion as his music is to time.

Eno unleashes tempests of breakbeats ("Horse"), electro exotica ("Bone Jump"), even roiling post-rock ("2 Forms of Anger"), creating a perfect storm.

All this makes the album sound like an arid conservatoire experiment, but it's more than that. Many of its tracks, like Morricone-feeling "Written, Forgotten," are designed to drift into the background--upmarket mood music, if you will--but others demand your attention. [Dec 2010, p.89]

On Small Craft, the 62-year-old Eno has provided both sonic career overview, as well as an engaging experience for listeners wanting something both familiar and new. [Dec 2010, p.111]