Brian Eno has surprised fans with a new album. Last night, the acclaimed ambient composer released ‘Aurum’, a new album consisting of consists of 11 tracks and spans one hour and 19 minutes.
The prestigious producer’s 30th solo album, ‘Aurum’ has been released exclusively to Apple Music, due to their Spatial Audio feature, which delivers an immersive, surround-sound experience for the listener where it feels like the music is coming from all around you. It will not be available through Spotify and other streaming platforms. No singles were released prior to the album.
As well as the record, Apple Music have dropped a new interview between Eno and Zane Lowe. In the 43-minute video, the two conversed about ‘Aurum’, and AI technology.
Eno shared his mixed feelings on the topic of AI: “The biggest problem for me about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.”
Eno isn’t the first musician in recent years to have gripes with AI technology. Artists like Kate Bush, Paul McCartney and Thom Yorke have all expressed concerns over how it could affect the music industry.
But the godfather of ambient music also spoke about the creative possibilities that could come with the new technology: “Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for, because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about.”
“Distortion is a good example. Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music, a lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”
Brian Eno is widely credited with popularizing the term and genre of “ambient music”. Previously a member of British band Roxy Music, in the late 70’s he released “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”, a seminal work which set the tone for the genre. He defined it as music that could be “as ignorable as it is interesting”.
He’s had a prolific career, releasing over 40 albums of his own as well as collaborations with artists like Robert Fripp, Harold Budd and more recently Fred Again – their collaborative album ‘Secret Life’ gained positive reviews, with Triple J writing: “It seemed like a big call for Four Tet to say Secret Life is the most beautiful album of the year, but it really will be hard to beat.”
‘Aurum’ is available to listen via Apple Music here.
