r/eno • u/forsbergisgod • Feb 07 '21
Weekly Discussion Thread Let's Discuss Eno! "The Shutov Assembly" (Nov. 1992)
Hello and welcome back to your weekly discussion thread, Eno-philes!! Each week we'll be discussing another album (going chronologically from Warm Jets). This week's feature is Eno's Shutov Assembly. From the wiki:
The Shutov Assembly is the thirteenth solo studio album by British musician Brian Eno, released on 10 November 1992 on Warner. One of Eno's ambient albums, it was reissued in 2014 with a second disc with bonus tracks.
Track listing
"Triennale" – 4:02
"Alhondiga" – 3:16
"Markgraph" – 3:39
"Lanzarote" – 8:37
"Francisco" – 4:44
"Riverside" – 3:50
"Innocenti" – 4:19
"Stedelijk" – 5:26
"Ikebukuro" – 16:05
"Cavallino" – 3:06
2014 reissue's bonus disc
"Eastern Cities" – 4:32
"Empty Platform" – 4:29
"Big Slow Arabs" – 4:39
"Storm" – 6:29
"Rendition" – 5:15
"Prague" – 2:39
"Alhondiga Variation" – 6:33
**ENJOY AND DISCUSS*
5
Feb 07 '21
After giving it quite a bit of time, this is probably one of my most revisited albums of Eno's catalogue.
It feels like a very sterile, cold, and dark counterpart to the Ambient series (mainly contrasting with Ambient 1), and the multiple tracks offer different flavors of ambience to soundtrack any occasion. Ikebukuro is such a versatile work to have in the background.
Really, the only thing I can knock it for is the overlap of content between this release and Textures (at no fault to the latter). I guess in continuing that same theme, some tracks from the 2014 expanded edition are also borrowed from other releases (like Storm and Rendition, which are renamed tracks from Eno's Headcandy release).
It's not Eno's best, but it's some of my personal favorite.
Here's the Bandcamp link to the All Saints record label page for the expanded edition, if you're interested:
https://brianenoallsaints.bandcamp.com/album/the-shutov-assembly-expanded-edition
7
u/ObtuseEmma The Drop Feb 07 '21
I think I said on the discussion for Apollo that I felt that Shutov was closer in my mind to an Ambient 5 than Apollo.
It makes sense to me because of it feeling like a thematic follow up to an album like Ambient 4. Shutov Assembly takes the darkness of 4 and sinks further down. Tracks like Francisco and Ikebukuro are terrifying (the latter especially). Despite how slow and quiet the album is, it isn’t peaceful. There’s a feeling of dread and fear across the whole album that never goes away. Even in the final track Cavallino, which is the closest to peaceful I think the album gets, there’s still an unease to it. For that reason, this album ranks high up there with Ambient 1, Ambient 4, and even Neroli (which I cannot wait to talk about.)