Brian Eno is set to release new album 'The Ship' on April 29th via Warp Records.
It marks the legendary artist's first full release since the Grammy award nominated set 'LUX', and – if we're honest – it looks enthralling.
Brian Eno introduces the record thus: "Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia: the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we're permanently and increasingly under threat. At the zenith we realise we have to come down again… we know that we have more than we deserve or can defend, so we become nervous. Somebody, something is going to take it all from us: that is the dread of the wealthy. Paranoia leads to defensiveness, and we all end up in the trenches facing each other across the mud."
"On a musical level, I wanted to make a record of songs that didn't rely on the normal underpinnings of rhythmic structure and chord progressions but which allowed voices to exist in their own space and time, like events in a landscape. I wanted to place sonic events in a free, open space."
The album contains material inspired by the First World War and the sinking of the Titanic, ranging from a 21 minute opening cut to a cover of The Velvet Underground's 'I'm Set Free'. At one point Peter Serafinowicz pops up to read a poem…
“The poem read by Peter Serafinowicz was created by a Markov Chain Generator (software written by Peter Chilvers) into which we fed accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, some First World War soldiers songs, various bits of cyber-bureaucracy and warnings about hacking, some songs of mine, some descriptions of machinery, and so on. The Generator produced thousands of lines of text from which I extracted a few and then put them into this order.”
'The Ship' will be released on April 29th. Tracklisting:
1. The Ship
2. Fickle Sun
(i) Fickle Sun
(ii) The Hour Is Thin
(iii) I’m Set Free
