Hard News by Russell Brown

And, just for completeness, some of my shitty iPhone pics.

Great day and great crowd. Looking through the photos on FB there's nothing but beaming smiles from the man himself and everyone in the crowd.

Woah - missed the John Morales bit at the bottom. My favourite show of last year by a long shot. Excellent!

Woah – missed the John Morales bit at the bottom. My favourite show of last year by a long shot. Excellent!

It's just such lovely music.

there’s nothing but beaming smiles from the man himself and everyone in the crowd.

LOL.

Except me. I'm in one pic with a massive, almost theatrical, frown on my face! Lord knows what was going on there.

I thought the app was ridiculously expensive at first, but then I thought about how much Eno I'd listened to in the past couple of years on Spotify and YouTube (as well as albums I've had for years), and I realised that for me, he'd earned it. It has the same strengths as the album, with some subtle combinations that I don't think turn up in the fixed version. It's supposed to vary in balance and detail at different times of day, but I can't say I've noticed that. Nevertheless, I must have had it playing (as distinct from "listened to it") for more than 12 hours already, and I'll probably keep doing that.

One thing that puts me off is the occasional sine wave swoop/whistle that gets very grating in the upper octaves. Eno has a nice analogy for generative music: it's like looking at a river, which is always the same and yet never exactly the same. In these terms, that whistle is like watching the lazy vortices of a river, and just when you get into a nice mellow state, a bloody great dragonfly flies up and slams into your face.

I'd love it if the app had a few options, just so that you could balance some of the parts. If I could turn down these swoops a bit, then the app would be much more useful for one of the main things I like to use some of Eno's music for: as a "nap facilitator". But I know that creating a generative music system is far more difficult than just writing a track (it's far from the lazy option it's often seen as), so such options could easily destroy the balance that Eno's clearly worked so hard to achieve.

Thank you for the report. And I like Eno's river analogy.