Brian Eno: The Shutov Assembly

I've been looking forward to listening to this album for some time. Mainly because, though I love Eno in general and have followed pretty much all his work for the last quarter of a century, I've noticed that I've been a little bit sniffy about many of his albums on Music Arcades.

I was looking forward to this one because I knew I could be unreservedly positive about it. It feels somehow like a distillation of the best bits of that 'first' wave of ambient music (before the likes of Aphex Twin and the illbient people and other Warp guys took it off to different places; and before we pulled the historical lens back a bit and realised that there, as Eno acknowledged all along, there had been ambient music before (No Pussyfooting) and Discreet Music). Several previous albums had provided an index of possibilities, but The Shutov Assembly feels like the culmination of that, a gallery of actualities.

The longest track, Ikebukuro is my favourite: that gently returning swishing sound that could be a filtered lawn sprinkler, or could be next door's washing machine with a slightly wonky axle. All the tracks have one-word, nine-character titles, but Wikipedia explains each has a real-world referent. For Ikebukuro, it's the Tokyo district of the same name, where Eno did an installation in 1989. Riverside was part of the soundtrack for Eno's Place #11 installation at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith (mentioned previously). In those days you might find out about the installation via a brief mention or small ad in the NME, and if you wanted details like opening times or the exact location of the venue, you'd have to get their phone number from Directory Enquiries and then call them up. Riverside Studios is on Crisp Road, I was told. "Is that 'crisp' as in…?" I was about to say "as in salt and vinegar" when the gentleman at the other end spoke across me, "… as in Quentin, yes."

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The installation was in a dark room, lit only my Eno's slowly shifting light scultpures. As my eyes adapted, I realised how many people were all round me, and was grateful that I'd only bumped into one of them. Once I was used to the environment, it was rather lovely — much better than Eno's more recent 77 Million Paintings.

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