NEWS UPDATE: 16TH AUGUST 2023
Thanks to Dario, Rory, John, Richard, and EnoWeb's own newsbot Tom Boon in no particular order for these news items.
Netflix will be marking the fifth and final season of Top Boy with the release of an album of Brian Eno's music for the series on 1st and 29th September. Eno has provided music for all five seasons of the show right from the start when it was launched on Channel 4 (since rebranded as Top Boy: Summerhouse by Netflix to differentiate it from their production of seasons 3–5). Apart from two tracks included on Film Music 1976–2020 this will be the premiere release for the music, and it also includes two "Cutting Room" tracks that didn't make it to the television show.
As is traditional in this day and age, Eno's Top Boy album will be available in a variety of formats: digital (1st Sept), Compact Disc and vinyl (29th Sept): a "Brian Eno exclusive edition" of 500 copies in the form of silver coloured 180 gram audiophile 2xLP in heavyweight gatefold sleeve from EnoShop and AtTheMoviesShop, and (numerically unspecified) limited edition clear vinyl with the same specs from EnoShop and The Sound Of Vinyl. Track 4, Cutting Room I, has been released as a single; to EnoWeb's ears it shares some DNA with the track Distributed Being from the 1992 album Nerve Net.
Track listing:
Top Boy Theme
But Not This Way
Damp Bones
Cutting Room I
Floating On Sleep's Shore
Beauty and Danger
Beneath The Sea
Afraid Of Things
Waiting In Darkness
The Fountain King
Washed Away In Morocco
Overground
Watching The Watcher
Sweet Dark Section
Sky Blue Alert
Delirious Circle
Cutting Room II
Dangerous Landscape
The Good Fight
Brian said:
"From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer: making music and atmospheres, and then giving it to the film-makers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about – and from that I produce a lot of music, and say 'Here it is. Use it as you wish.' If you'd been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor... up the danger factor... all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what's happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up."
Light work
There are still a few days left to see some of Brian Eno's lightboxes paired with light strip works by Dan Flavin at Paul Stolper Gallery, 31 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH. The show closes on 25th August. The lightboxes are silent but music is provided by a Speaker Flowers piece called Filopendula.
While you're reading about Art, apparently you can have a Night With Brian at the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic) from 18th to 19th August (he's not there, it's just an opportunity to enjoy an ambient sleepover).
And booking is now open for the Gary Hustwit/Brendan Dawes piece Nothing Can Ever Be The Same in Venice in October.
- Paul Stolper
- Wallpaper review
- NAVE
- Hustwit/Dawes – new pic
Atmos no fear
A number of Brian's albums have been re-released digitally in Dolby Atmos (available via Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited). EnoWeb was initially sceptical about whether this would make much difference on headphones, but it really does: individual song components seem to have more space to breathe and the overall impression is a bit like looking through a window that's just been cleaned after rather too long. We probably prefer the density of the original "Big Ship" to the Atmos version though. The Atmos'd albums include Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World (where the difference is quite striking), and the Warp albums (though not the Eno • Hyde ones).
Eno's newsletter quoted him saying:
"What’s interesting about 3D music is the possibility of making an immersive space which is capable of sustaining much more detail than a 2 dimensional space (such as that presented by stereo listening). Our ears aren’t as directional as our eyes, but they are still capable of locating sounds in space, and listening in 3 dimensions this becomes a whole new compositional possibility. It allows a listener the experience of 'exploring' the musical space in much more intricate ways. It’s the step from 2-dimensional sound-painting to 3-dimensional sound-sculpting."
VIDEO AND TEXT
- Cambridge Audio clip
- RTE: The Luminous Image looks at Brian's Stedelijk light sculptures in 1984
- Peter Chilvers wonders about Generative Music
- A report on Face to Face for Bogota
- The Leisure Society & Brian Eno: "Brave Are The Waves"
- IAI: Brian Eno: Creativity and the Future
- Brian enjoys James Blake's singing
