Brian Eno – Ambient 4: On Land LP Cheap

Standard 180g Vinyl Edition

On 1982 s Ambient 4 (On Land) – the final edition in Brian Eno s ambient series – his palate shifted from electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain, sticks and stones. One of the big freedoms of music had been that it didn t have to relate to anything – nobody listened to a piece of music and said, ‘What s that supposed to be, then? , the way they would if they were looking at an abstract painting; music was accepted as abstract. I wanted to try and make music which attempted to be figurative, for example by using lots of real noises, he recalled to Mojo.

In a pioneering early incarnation of what later became widely-known as remixing, Eno explained, I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work making ‘On Land , which involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and composting. Conventional instruments do occasionally feature however, including Jon Hassell s trumpet and Bill Laswell s bass. The album also features contributions from Michael Brook and Daniel Lanois.