Legendary artist Brian Eno has announced his first-ever solo tour entitled Ships due to take place this October. Eno will sail around Europe in support of his 2016 solo album The Ship playing five concerts including one date in London.
Ships will be premiering on the 21st October as the centrepiece of the 2023 Venice Biennale Musica. Eno will then play shows in prestigious venues in Berlin, Paris, and Utrecht before closing the tour with two performances at 6:30 pm and 9 pm for the Royal Festival Hall in London on 30th October.
Tickets will go on general sale from Thursday 8th June. Members of the Southbank Centre can access the ticket presale from 10 AM BST on Wednesday 7th June. For more information see here.
Eno will be performing with Baltic Sea Philharmonic, orchestrated and conducted by Kristjan Järvi as commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia. At the Biennale Musica, Eno will be honoured with the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award “for his research into the quality, beauty and diffusion of digital sound and for his conception of the acoustic space as a compositional instrument” according to the event’s page.
#BiennaleMusica2023 @brianeno, this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, has just announced his first ever solo live concert tour, starting on October 21 at the @teatrolafenice, as part of the 67th International Festival of Contemporary Music. SHIPS is commissioned by… https://t.co/LPdDpiiY8f
— La Biennale di Venezia (@la_Biennale) June 6, 2023
Eno toured with Roxy Music in the 70s but has since rarely played live only playing one-off shows or at festivals. Brian and his brother Roger played together at Acropolis, Athens back in 2021 as part of the annual Epidaurus Festival. The concert was filmed and screened in cinemas across the UK for one night only on the 2nd March earlier this year.
Originally Eno didn’t plan on making The Ship a record. “The way the whole piece started out was not as a record but as an installation,” Eno told Entertainment Weekly back in 2016. When a friend of Eno’s asked him for a recording of the installation in Stockholm he started thinking of making The Ship an album. “It took me by surprise a little bit,” he continued. “I wasn’t planning it as my next record project when I started it.”
On the third track “Fickle Sun (ii) The Hour Is Thin”, Eno used a Markov chain generator to create the lyrics spoken by Peter Serafinowicz by mixing “dirty songs by First World War soldiers” with “accounts written from the lifeboats by people watching the Titanic sinking” and “part of a book about the blitz over London”. The result is an eerie and twisted lullaby. Listen to the track below:
Last month Eno collaborated with British DJ Fred Again.. on the surprise LP Secret Life. The album was released on electronic artist Four Tet’s label Text Records and was dubbed by the artist “the most beautiful album of 2023”.
The album Secret Life by Fred again and Brian Eno is coming out on my label Text Records on Friday
— Four Tet (@FourTet) May 2, 2023
Listen to the track “Trying” from the album below:
See below for Brian Eno’s Ships tour dates:
21/10/23 – Venice Biennale Musica – Venice
24/10 – Philharmonie Berlin – Berlin
26/10 – La Seine Musicale – Paris
28/10 – TivoliVredenburg – Utrecht
30/10 – Royal Festival Hall – London
