Like the small craft in the title, Brian Eno’s latest offering of tasteful ambient electronica spends most of its time drifting around aimlessly. In contrast to most of Eno’s albums, Small Craft On A Milk Sea consists not of a handful of extended suites, but of sixteen disparate miniatures. Earlier works like 1978’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports were unified by recurrent motifs, but this is more of a haphazard collage.
The nature of the album’s genesis will therefore come as no surprise. Eno’s stated ambition was to make an album that resembles a film soundtrack in its ‘incompleteness’: each track is in effect a tableau that evokes a shifting cinematic landscape, to which the music is no more than an accompaniment. To achieve this, Eno built some of the tracks from his rejected soundtrack to Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, others from randomly generated chords, and others yet through improvisation.
The result is inconsistent. Some of the tracks are as atmospheric as the ozone layer: best of all is ‘Written, Forgotten’, a Johnny Greenwood-esque arrangement of brooding strings set against barely audible whispers and animal cries. Others are dated experiments in electronic textures: opener ‘Emerald And Lime’, which sounds like the underwater music from Super Mario 64, is as glossy and lifeless as the name suggests.
Small Craft is Eno’s first release on Warp Records, a label that owes a lot to the artist’s pioneering electronic music of the seventies and eighties. The album certainly fits into the Warp catalogue: it sounds like early Eno refracted by Aphex Twin and Radiohead. As rough in conception as its production is polished, it is an imperfect but worthwhile update of the ambient Eno sound.
