Brian Eno- Music for Films

Cindy Sherman did a series of photographs in which she dressed up as various characters from films that don’t exist. And yet they kind of do exist, since the genre of each photo is recognizable: noir, melodrama, etc. Brian Eno seems to have set himself a similar task here: to create pieces of music that evoke the mood of certain films without being connected to any one in particular. But while Sherman made a name for herself showing how the roles of women are so constricted as to be stereotyped, Eno doesn’t have quite have such a lofty goal in mind.

If I had to guess, and it is just a guess, I’d say that Eno was interested in this project because it would allow him to create music that evoked a mood. We know he was interested in that because of his production of the ambient records around the same time. But these aren’t ambient. They’re more like short motifs that might play as the two main characters see each other for the first time, say, or when they say goodbye for the last time. The genres are unclear, but the music does do a good job of evoking the mood of a scene.

I didn’t connect with this project. I got it, I got what it was about and it just didn’t do anything for me. Which is what brings us back to Cindy Sherman. Sherman had a statement to make about feminism as well as genre, but Eno just wants to set a mood. And I suppose he does set moods, but he doesn’t let them sit for very long before moving on to the next one. I think I would have liked this album much more if he had let the tracks breathe a little bit.

2/5 If you don’t like his ambient music, you won’t like this. If you do, you might. This is somewhere in between pop and ambient, and that might be perfect for some people, but not enough for me to encourage people to seek it out.