Small Craft on a Milk Sea

Brian Eno | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 2, 2010)
• Original Release Date: 2010
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Warp Records
• ASIN: B0040V7J36
• Also Available in: Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,650 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

''The work in this collection is a result of an occasional collaboration between myself, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. The two of them are gifted young player/composers whose work, like mine, is intimately connected to the possibilities and freedoms of electronic music. Over the last few years we've worked together several times, enjoying exploring the huge new sonic territories now available to musicians. Mostly the pieces on this album resulted not from 'composition' in the classical sense, but from improvisation. The improvisations are not attempts to end up with a song, but rather with a landscape, a feeling of a place and perhaps the suggestion of an event. In a sense they deliberately lack 'personality': there is no singer, no narrator, no guide as to what you ought to be feeling. If these pieces had been used in films, the film would complete the picture. As they stand, they are the mirror-image of silent movies - sound-only movies.'' --Brian Eno

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Mission Under A Strangely Coloured Sky!, November 2, 2010

By 

song_x - See all my reviews

This review is from: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Audio CD)

During the first ten years of the new century, Brian Eno has released some albums that come close to his classics of the seventies and eighties, for example DRAWN FROM LIFE, with Peter Schwalm, or the brilliant song cycle ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH. Now, the creator of ambient music has released his first solo album on Warp Records, specialists for experimental, electronic pop. And he is working with some soulmates, Leo Abrahams (guitar, laptop, weird sounds) and Jon Hopkins (piano, electronics, strange sounds).

Good companionship for a purely instrumental record that reaches far out - and starts almost too beautiful, with the ambient sugar of EMERALD AND LIME. But even this soft starter has some grainy elements of total emptiness in it - the picture of a silent sea springs to mind (a picture Eno has often recurred to in his songs). The following three soundscapes belong to the 1000 places you will have to go to before you die. COMPLEX HEAVEN, SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA and the driving, irresistible rhythms of FLINT MARCH contain everything you expect from great Eno pieces, a sense of wonder, and an ambivalent field of emotion. On FLINT MARCH, the elastic drums add to an exercise of nearly uninhibited joie de vivre (but even here, as repeated listening reveals, some dark forces are working in the background).

This 15-track journey then continues with some wild pieces, a quiet foreboding of danger, and rough passages with frenetic guitar playing: sometimes Eno loves to push sounds to the verge of falling apart. The listener is getting lost in a very interesting way - between child-like moods, disturbing fields of sound, apparitions of naked beauty. And, finally, after some upheaval and dancing on a razorblade, the quiet atmospheres of the beginning re-enter the scenery: WRITTEN, FORGOTTEN & LATE ANTHROPACENE explore a quality of peacefulness and yearning beyond kitsch and wrong happy endings by just touching a deep zone of human experience. In his excellent review (NYT), Jon Pareles even suggests that these two final tracks play out like desolate elegies.

This is definitely a record Eno-friendly minds and a lot of newcomers will return to again and again. SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA is so fresh, so full of wonder, so far away from being a repetition of any other Eno album. Of course, there are some spirits drifting: on COMPLEX HEAVEN Eno sounds like channeling his early piano treatments for Harold Budd. The first track, EMERALD AND LIME, has a kind of Roedelius flair. But, well, on this great work even the memories are inventive - playing tricks under a strangely coloured sky!

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars King Eno continues his reign, November 2, 2010

By 

William Merrill "eclecticist" (San Antonio, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Audio CD)

The review of this new Eno album in Rolling Stone has the subheading "The godfather of ambient rocks out -- finally!" When I started listening to Small Craft for the first time, I thought "where's the rocking out?" In fact, there are more ambient style or otherwise atmospheric pieces on this all-instrumental album than rockers, but there are definitely also times where the godfather "lets loose" too. The first such "rocking" place comes four tracks in, with "Flint March" and its tribal beats. Then "Bone Jump" has a nice funky bass tone, but I wouldn't exactly call it a "rocker." "Dust Shuffle" gets a good groove going, and "Paleosonic" even has something like an electric guitar solo. Anyway, I very much enjoyed all of those cuts, but the spacey stuff is what I really go to Eno for, and Small Craft contains some of his very best work.

Take the two bookend pieces, "Emerald and Lime" and "Emerald and Stone." They're beautiful piano/synth reveries - heavenly. For a more classic "ambient" sound, listen to the nearly eight-minute-long "Late Anthropocene" which closes the album. There, sustained tones overlap and weave in and out of each other in a sublime swirl of electronics, punctuated by mysterious artificial percussion noises that add background color to the piece. Marvelous! There are many fellow practitioners of this electro-instrumental genre (ex., Trent Reznor), but nobody does it as superbly as Brian Eno. Long may he reign!

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bring Dramamine When You Board. The Milk Sea Features Some Turbulent Tides., November 2, 2010

By 

Starr S. (Portland, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Audio CD)

Poetic, peaceful, intense and completely imbalanced. In one moment, you're floating along gently and in the next, there's a storm in that milk sea and you're gettin' whipped around on HIGH like a Dairy Queen Blizzard in the blender.

Brian Eno is a master of the Electronic/Ambient realms of contemporary music and he has a cult following when it pertains to his peaceful and looped Ambient works. This time out, there are also some louder elements presenting. Tracks #5, "Horse" & #6, "2 Forms of Anger" are respectively tribal-ish and Drum and Bass-ish, putting forth more aggressive vibes, especially with the latter building up into a crescendo of Eno as I've never heard him before. I'll stand behind my opening descriptors and WILL SAY that this one might cause you to wanna skip a track or two, especially the aforementioned titles with their more "headbanging" sonics.

If you're expecting to be lulled to sleep a la "Music For Airports" or "Plateaux of Mirror," there are places here which certainly support this, but as I have previously mentioned, there's something new happening here too; or OLD. Somehow, the more "techno" moments of "Nerve Net" come to mind, but on a much noisier level.

All in all, it's still Eno with the same degrees of concentration on the Ambient, but with some additional dabbling in the "experimental" and may take a few listens to fully digest and appreciate. Bring dramamine when you board. The milk sea features some turbulent tides.