On Land

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Professional reviews
On Land

Studio album by Brian Eno
Released	April, 1982
Recorded	September 1978 – January 1982
Genre	Ambient
Length	44:35
Label	EG Records, rereleased on Astralwerks
Producer(s)	Brian Eno
All Music Guide link Pitchfork Media 9.7/10 link
Brian Eno chronology
Empty Landscapes (1981)	Ambient 4: On Land (1982)	Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983)

Ambient 4/On Land (released April 1982) is an album by the British ambient musician Brian Eno. It was the final edition in Eno’s ambient series, which began in 1978 with Music for Airports.

The album has a dark nocturnal atmosphere. It is a mixture of synthesizer, nature recordings and a complex array of other sounds, some of which are mixed in the far background. The track "Shadow" features Jon Hassell on heavily processed trumpet.

The album ends with an eerie guitar harmonic texture titled "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960". This track is named after the once prosperous sea-port of Dunwich, England which eroded into the sea over a period of three hundred years. This track is also Eno’s first collaboration with Daniel Lanois.

This album was recorded between 1978 and 1982 during which time Eno had released several other albums. The liner notes offer Eno's most detailed explaination of what he was trying to do with Ambient music.

I realised I had been moving towards a music that had this feeling; as the listener, I wanted to be situated inside a large field of loosely-knit sound, rather than placed before a tightly organised monolith (or stereolith, for that matter). I wanted to open out the aural field, to put much of the sound a considerable distance from the listener (even locating some of it "out of earshot"), and to allow the sounds to live their lives separately from one another, clustering occasionally but not "musically" bound together.

See the full text here.