On Land
| Ambient 4: On Land | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Brian Eno | ||||
| Released | March 1982 | |||
| Recorded | September 1978 – January 1982, NYC | |||
| Genre | Ambient, dark ambient | |||
| Length | 44:35 | |||
| Label | EG | |||
| Producer | Brian Eno | |||
| Brian Eno chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Pitchfork | 9.7/10 |
| The Austin Chronicle | |
| PopMatters | neutral |
| Trouser Press | favourable |
Ambient 4: On Land is the eighth solo studio album by British ambient musician Brian Eno. It was the final edition in Eno's ambient series, which began in 1978 with Music for Airports.
On Land is a mixture of synthesizer-based notes, nature/animal recordings, and a complex array of other sounds, most of which were unused, collected recordings from previous albums and the sessions that created them. As Eno explained, "... the making of records such as On Land involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and "composting".
Eno actually found, in the three-year process of making the album, that the synthesizer came to be of "limited usefulness" and that his "instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones ... I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work".
Despite the music's dark leanings, it is in a sense still highly "ambient" in that the tracks tend to blend into each other and thus fulfill all of Eno's original expectations of what the term means. Nevertheless, there is still room for the occasional surprise, such as Jon Hassell's recognisable effect-laden trumpet in "Shadow". Eno, cognizant of the deeper aural qualities, said, "On the whole, On Land is quite a disturbed landscape: some of the undertones deliberately threaten the overtones, so you get the pastoral prettiness on top, but underneath there's a dissonance that's like an impending earthquake".
Eno also had something to say about how music—this album in particular—should be listened to. In the liner notes, he suggested (even going so far as to draw a diagram) "a three-way speaker system that is both simple to install and inexpensive, and which seems to work very well on any music with a broad stereo image".
The album makes reference to definite geographical places, such as "Lizard Point", named after the exposed, southernmost tip of mainland Britain, close to Land's End in South-West England.
"Tal Coat" refers to Pierre Louis Jacob (1905–1985), aka Pierre Tal-Coat, a proponent of the French form of abstract expressionism, Tachisme. This interest in painting is reflected in his statement that the album was "... an attempt to transpose into music something that you can do in painting: creating a figurative environment. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art because it was abstract, not figurative. In contrast, my intention in On Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without referring to the history of music – more to a "history of listening""
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Wikipedia