Brian Eno To Release New Ambient Album

Brian Eno is back with another ambient record. Called Reflection, it's due out Jan. 1 on Warp Records and consists of a single, 54-minute track. While Eno isn't sharing any samples of Reflection for now, he says it's similar to his 1985 album Thursday Afternoon, a moody, meditative record that was one 60-minute track.

In a prepared statement, Eno describes Reflector as a "generative" work because the sounds "make themselves."

"My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them," Eno says. "I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I'm happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic (often taking the form 'perform operation x, y percent of the time') the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings."

Eno's description of this generative method for making music echoes how he originally described his first ambient album, Discreet Music, released in 1975. He later followed with similar records, including Ambient 1: Music For Airports and More Music For Films. Eno's most recent album, The Ship, included vocals and came out in April of this year.