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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Echoes of Long Now, October 16, 2006
This review is from: January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (Audio CD)
Twenty five years ago, I awoke on a Sunday morning in Cevio, Switzerland. The previous night, a dinner party featuring fresh ravioli, butter sautéed Sage, beets and shell beans provided the background for strangers and friends to come together. After dining, the party walked down to the river to watch the full moon rise over the mountain valley while singing Italian Folk songs accompanied by a mandolin. The old caretaker with his pet crow sat quietly passing two bowls of coffee, one bowl bitter and one bowl sweet. Long after everyone had gone to bed, the church bells peeled in the dark damp early morning, bouncing giant waves of sound off the stone buildings and the rocky walls of the valley. Where the bells originated was indecipherable - the source indeterminate. Sound oozed in through the thick walls and rolled around the room in slow motion, reverberating deep and long, layer upon layer. This CD reminds me of the timelessness of that morning, in the foothills of the Italian Alps, slowly waking to the bells which seemed to resonate inside my mind, rippling through my awakening body as if my being were immersed underwater, my submerged self gradually surfacing. Eno's CD is a great addition to his catalogue - music for caverns, echoes of long now.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another way of being Eno, March 4, 2006
This review is from: January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (Audio CD)
One had never considered the bell, cast in metal, hung from a church tower, as a musical instrument at all. It was something more in the nature of a warning device, a chronogram, a delivery valve for sonic information. When carillons--massed bells--played Carols or Hymns or Alma Maters from a belltower, there was an element of novelty, as with musical saws or wineglass harmoniums, that seemed to preclude the idea of serious composition, let alone by a composer versed like Brian Eno in algebra and fire. But this record, a series of studies for possible bell-tones and carillons to accompany the slow ticking of the Clock of the Long Now through to the year 12006--music for the Future, that is--creates a sound structure that feels paradoxically old-fashioned, nostalgic, even ancient. There is a lot of urban space in it, old urban space in which you can't help inferring the presence of ox carts in the road, swifts diving above the bell tower, costers' shouts in the marketplace. And yet many of the bells you hear are entirely new creations, distortions, amalgamations that no bellsmith before Eno has ever cast, let alone considered. This music give a sense of the history of bells as something that runs far off in many directions, to past and future, to Europe and Asia, to real and imaginary. You feel, listening, that it is a lazy morning in a great city on some planet that is the local hub, the crossroads of a dozen strange races and cultures. You are lying in bed, listening to bells old and new, thinking about the churches, cults and temples scattered all across the city. It's a Sunday. You feel hopeful. Through amalgamation, through invention, through the preservation and repurposing of old casts and broken bells--through this bellmaker's craft--you hear, as no other instrument can quite get it across, the undertone of hopefulness, those optimistic words of a metal mouth, that are the special information of a bell.
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130 of 167 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Biased rave, July 11, 2003
This review is from: January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (Audio CD)
I find this new work of Brian Eno's as compusively relistenable as his famed "Music for Airports." I've observed others having the same response. Like all of Eno's ambient work, the music can provide a soothing background yet at the same time reward close and intense attention. My bias is that I'm a friend of Brian's and have been around for the two years of research and composition that went into the CD. Furthermore all proceeds from sales goes to The Long Now Foundation, where I'm president. The foundation is building the 10,000-year mountain Clock for which Brian created his bell sounds.
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