Search - Brian Eno :: January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now

Biased rave

Stewart Brand | Sausalito, CA USA | 07/11/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I find this new work of Brian Eno's as compusively relistenable as his famed "Music for Airports." I've observed others having the same response. Like all of Eno's ambient work, the music can provide a soothing background yet at the same time reward close and intense attention.My bias is that I'm a friend of Brian's and have been around for the two years of research and composition that went into the CD. Furthermore all proceeds from sales goes to The Long Now Foundation, where I'm president. The foundation is building the 10,000-year mountain Clock for which Brian created his bell sounds."

Beautiful yet somehow unimportant

Sander Wolff | Long Beach, CA United States | 08/28/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Eno has captured my attention and imagination with a number of his diverse works. I never expect to find the same thing from him yet, with this particular departure, I never felt that it was a musical work but, rather, a series of bell studies. The title indicates this, so I wasn't surprised.



Listening to the CD, found myself distracted by the slightest thing yet, when my attention was focused, the material is wonderfully beautiful. I think my biggest reason for purchasing this frighteningly expensive disc is that the proceeds go to support the Clock of the Long Now foundation. Their efforts are, in my humble estimation, very important.



If you're new to Eno, this is not the place to start. If you're an avid fan, you might feel compelled to have this disc in your collection. For me, in the context of his other works, this felt, somehow, unimportant."

Another way of being Eno

Michael Chabon | Berkeley, CA | 03/04/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"One had never considered the bell, cast in metal, hung from a church tower, as a musical instrument at all. It was something more in the nature of a warning device, a chronogram, a delivery valve for sonic information. When carillons--massed bells--played Carols or Hymns or Alma Maters from a belltower, there was an element of novelty, as with musical saws or wineglass harmoniums, that seemed to preclude the idea of serious composition, let alone by a composer versed like Brian Eno in algebra and fire. But this record, a series of studies for possible bell-tones and carillons to accompany the slow ticking of the Clock of the Long Now through to the year 12006--music for the Future, that is--creates a sound structure that feels paradoxically old-fashioned, nostalgic, even ancient. There is a lot of urban space in it, old urban space in which you can't help inferring the presence of ox carts in the road, swifts diving above the bell tower, costers' shouts in the marketplace. And yet many of the bells you hear are entirely new creations, distortions, amalgamations that no bellsmith before Eno has ever cast, let alone considered. This music give a sense of the history of bells as something that runs far off in many directions, to past and future, to Europe and Asia, to real and imaginary. You feel, listening, that it is a lazy morning in a great city on some planet that is the local hub, the crossroads of a dozen strange races and cultures. You are lying in bed, listening to bells old and new, thinking about the churches, cults and temples scattered all across the city. It's a Sunday. You feel hopeful. Through amalgamation, through invention, through the preservation and repurposing of old casts and broken bells--through this bellmaker's craft--you hear, as no other instrument can quite get it across, the undertone of hopefulness, those optimistic words of a metal mouth, that are the special information of a bell."