Thursday Afternoon

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Thursday Afternoon
Thursday Afternoon cover
Studio album by Brian Eno
Released 1985
Recorded 1984 & 1985
Genre Ambient
Length 61:00
Label Polydor
Producer Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Daniel Lanois
Professional reviews
Brian Eno chronology
Begegnungen II
(1985)		 Thursday Afternoon
(1985)		 Hybrid
(1985)

Thursday Afternoon is a 1985 album by the British ambient musician Brian Eno consisting of one 61-minute composition of the same name. It is the rearranged soundtrack to a video production by the same title made in 1984.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Since recording Discreet Music in 1975, Eno has shown a strong interest in creating music that can influence the atmosphere of the space in which it is played, rather than be focused on directly. The video was conceived as a series of “video paintings” which can be looked at in passing without demanding full attention from the viewer. It consists of seven segments of video depicting simple imagery that has been treated with visual effects, much in the same way as Eno's music is often made up of simple instrumental performances which have been treated with audio effects.

The music on this album consists of multiple tracks of processed piano and electronic textures. The layers of the composition are phased so that their relationships to each other are constantly changing in a way similar to Ambient 1/Music for Airports. This album is also the first to take advantage of the extended running time of the compact disc format, containing only one 61 minute track.

[edit] Track listing

  1. "Thursday Afternoon" – 61:00

[edit] The video

The original video, made at the request of, and released by the Sony Corporation of America, was filmed in San Francisco in April 1984, and treated and assembled at Sony in Tokyo. Produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, it featured "seven Video Paintings" of actress and photographer Christine Alicino, a friend of Eno's. 82 minutes long, it was filmed in "vertical format" which necessitated the viewer to turn the television on its side. The DVD reissue presents it in both portrait and landscape formats so that this is no longer necessary.

The content is a series of images that stay static for some time and then slowly move forward, often to pause again. Various video techniques were implemented, such as image feedback, to create a very different interpretation of video and the nude.

Eno himself was aware of the newness of what he was doing. "I was delighted to find this other way of using video because at last here's video which draws from another source, which is painting .... I call them 'video paintings' because if you say to people 'I make videos', they think of Sting's new rock video or some really boring, grimy 'Video Art'. It's just a way of saying, 'I make videos that don't move very fast" 1.

The soundtrack was recorded at Dan Lanois' studio in Canada 2 and is a longer, different mix. Three time-lapse GIFs give an impression of the subject matter and its treatment, although not the slow-moving speed of the video .... 97K, 99K, 249K.

[edit] The CD album

At just one track of 61 minutes in length, the music is ambient in the true, Eno sense of the word - beatless, flowing and ethereal - "... the purest expressions of what I thought ambient music should be: endless, relatively unchanging moods" 3.

Remixing and rearranging from the soundtrack to suit the CD media, Eno explains "the music wasn't recorded digitally. It was recorded on a 24-track analogue machine, and then digitally mastered" 4.

An acoustic piano plays a series of notes and simple chords against a background of synths, which eventually dominate the entire soundscape. Though the composition sounds "static", in the sense that its length makes it seem like a solid "lump" of sound, it features many unstable elements that change in both timbre and volume over its entirety - "an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters .... changes in the music are slow, and many of the changes will never be consciously registered. You might not notice it changing, but you will notice it not being boring" 5.

Eno further explains his views in this area, particularly on the applications and use of the sequencer ... "When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn't recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is 'unlocked'. And all that stuff like Thursday Afternoon, is very deliberately that: music where the elements float separately from one another" 6.

[edit] Credits

  • Brian Eno : performance, mixing, assembly, production,
  • Daniel Lanois : mixing, engineering, production
  • Roger Eno : performance, production
  • Michael Brook : mixing, assembly
  • Tim Hunt : engineering
  • Nigel Gayler : engineering
  • Carlos Olms : digital consultant
  • Simon Heyworth : mastering
  • Andrew Day : redesign
  • Alex Roggero : photography
  • Tom Phillips : cover art
  • Russell Mills : artwork, art Direction, design

[edit] Versions

[edit] Video

  • Released on : VHS, Beta (NTSC, cat# 2929), Laser disc, Videodisc (probably a bootleg)
  • Japan : Sony, OOZM 70 (VHS) / OOQM 70 (Beta)
  • UK : Hendring, Hen 2 133 (VHS)
  • Germany : Video Edition Markgraph, VEM 101 (VHS)


[edit] DVD

The video has been repackaged with his "Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan" (a 1981, 47-minute ambient video created by Eno) as "14 Video Paintings", RykoDisc, 2005 & 2006, (HNDVD 1508) 1, 2 (Region 1 NTSC & Region 2 PAL)


[edit] Music

Country Label Cat. No. Media Release Date
UK EG Records EGCD 64 CD 1985
Germany EG Records 827 494 2 CD 1985
UK Virgin ENOCD11 CD 2005
Japan EMI 68746 CD 2005
UK Polydor 827 494-2 ? ?
US Caroline 1518-2 ? ?

[edit] Miscellenea

  • The album's liner notes are written by C. S. J. Bofop. Substituting the letters with those immediately preceding them in the alphabet spell out B. R. I. Aneno.
  • An Installation held at the undercroft of the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, NW1, between September 9 and October 6, 1999 featured elements from the album, amongst others.
  • Early versions of the UK/Europe version of 14 Video Paintings had a mastering error which put the Thursday Afternoon soundtrack on one of the orientations of Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan.

[edit] External links


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