Brian Eno

Reflection (Border)

It’s almost impossible to describe how significant Brain Eno’s latest album Reflection is to music and art. It’s groundbreaking in so many ways. The genesis of it appears to lie in his 1975 album Discreet Music, which was generative sound with no apparent duration, even though it had a start and finish. With Reflection, Eno has taken the idea of ambience as a contemplative or active backdrop to our daily lives to a different level. At just more than 53 minutes in length, it is reminiscent of his single track album Thursday Afternoon. It’s nonintrusive yet actively engaging, impersonal yet thought-provoking, and is designed to be harmonically sympathetic to one’s inner and outer worlds. It is the downloadable app though that is the artistic masterstroke. It constantly changes tone and tempo to correspond with the time of day in any part of the world and creates an infinity of possibilities through an algorithm that constantly varies and evolves. Reflection is both artistically and literally an album of a lifetime. – Mike Alexander