Brian Eno
Thursday Afternoon

Despite his considerable and varied musical output, there has 
been an underlying consistency at the foundation of all of 
Brian Eno's work.  This consistency is the product of his 
curiosity about the nature of the medium in which he is 
working - a curiosity that has often succeeded in generating 
results just beyond current assumptions of what was possible.

This experimental attitude asks several questions: what can be 
done now that could not be done before?  What kinds of music 
does that suggest?  And what kinds of listening behaviour?  
These questions, in turn, point up a central assumption of 
Eno's work: not only is music always evolving new forms of 
structures, it is also continually changing its social
function, occupying new niches in the cultural landscape.  We 
make music in new ways, and we hear music in new places.  
Technological change is, of course, a major factor in this 
evolution.  The development of recording processes extended 
the cultural niche of music beyond live performance and into 
all sorts of times and spaces, turning music into a durable, 
transportable art in much the same way as writing transformed 
the spoken word.  And, besides extending those listening 
options, specific recording techniques have suggested entirely 
new ways of composing music.

Much of Eno's work is predicated on an intuitive response to 
this evolution.  "Music for Airports", for example, is a 
series of pieces that could only have been generated in a 
multi-track studio and which are designed to take advantage of
recently created listening spaces made available for 
background music.  As he has often done in his work, Eno 
recognised the unused capacity of a new cultural landscape and 
took advantage of it.  "Thursday Afternoon" is perhaps the 
first recording specifically for the compact disc and it 
utilized two new freedoms of that format: it is 61 minutes 
long (a duration that only the compact disc could accommodate) 
and its is occasionally very quiet (made possible by the 
disc's lack of surface noise).  It seems likely that, just as 
the 78-rpm record set the scene for the 3-minute song, so the 
compact disc will foster an interest among composers in 
long-duration pieces like this one.  Perhaps less predictable 
is how composers will respond to the prospect of silence 
within recording.  

Compositionally, "Thursday Afternoon" belongs to the family of 
works which also includes "Discreet Music" and "Music for 
Airports".  Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and 
contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and 
recur more or less regularly.  Each event, however, recurs 
with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece 
becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters.  Eno 
has characterised this style of composition as "holographic",
by which he means that any brief section of the music is 
representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any 
fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic 
image but with a lower resolution.  Eno's intention with these 
pieces is that they should function as tapestries; 
large-scale, non-intrusive atmospheres which lend a consistent 
mood to the environments in which they are heard.  Perhaps,
then, they should be seen as more closely related to painting
(and in particular that school of painting that verges into
environmental design) than to any traditional notion of music.

C. S. J. Bofop, August 1985