Track Listing

1. Lizard Point
2. The Lost Day
3. Tal Coat
4. Shadow
5. Lantern Marsh
6. Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills)
7. A Clearing
8. Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157106 in Music
• Released on: 1990-08-31
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Limited Edition Japanese "Mini Vinyl" CD, faithfully reproduced using original LP artwork including the inner sleeve. Features most recently mastered audio including bonus tracks where applicable.

Amazon.com essential recording
Released in 1982, On Land is Eno's most mature, perfect ambient work. Combining low, rumbling synths with eerie banging and clanking and the occasional wild-animal chirp or grumble, this recording places the listener alone, in the midst of a massive piece of sonic landscaping. And Eno has left no detail to chance. In fact, the work is so complete that when Eno suggests a windswept plain, the listener gets a chill. When trumpeter Jon Hassell bays with a softly disturbing imitation of a wounded beast, the first instinct is to scan the horizon for its glinting eyes. So subtle, intuitive, and well paced is this recording that as it slips quietly from the speakers and into every corner of the listening room, it transforms the space into a gently pulsing sound environment that seems strangely out of time and away from everything. It's a place you'll be drawn to time and time again. An ageless masterwork. --S. Duda

Customer Reviews

Archetypal Ambient
Ambient 4: On Land is definitely a dark piece of work. But it isn't dark in an evil or foreboding way. Rather, Brian Eno has created a very organic album, full of captivating sounds. The music here is dense and imaginative, each track laying the groundwork for a long ago twilight in rural England. Just as Kind of Blue can function either as a compelling listen or as background music, Ambient 4 presents a quiet, subdued audio image, but there is also a lot to hear.

The tracks themselves don't tell the whole story. You create the details yourself. It's almost like the sounds you'd hear whilst camping -- and the soundscapes are teeming with life. Outdoor wallpaper almost. And the track titles do a fine job of evoking such visualizations: "Lizard Point" opens the album, and we move through "The Lost Day" -- and -- a "Shadow." Finally we arrive at the spooky "Lantern Marsh" and the wistful "Unfamiliar Wind" -- and then -- "a Clearing." What lies beyond the Clearing? "Dunwich Beach" I suppose.

Perhaps one of this recording's finer points is that it's completely unpretentious. It is not an hour of synthesizer drones masquerading as some major achievement, like a lot of the ambient electronic music of the 1990s. Yet this album is an achievement not simply for its sheer simplicity and innovation, but also because it still sounds fresh and interesting 25 years later.

Addictive
Brian Eno created a minor masterpiece with this CD. As a longtime heavy metal fan, I'm surprised at how often I listen to this. The music is deceptively simple, based on isolated keyboard notes and a background of natural sounds. It doesn't sound like a field recording --- you can tell it was created in a studio --- but it has a wonderfully organic feel to it.

The biggest surprise is that the tracks have so much variation. Like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, each song maps out a different piece of sonic territory. These songs are full of beautiful ideas and restraint. Buy this and you'll listen to it every day for years.

An infinite universe of an album
One of my favorite recordings of all time, and one that holds so many special memories. It's amazing the way a recording can change your mood and help you to think clearly, and with a different perspective. This album literally alters your mood. If you've ever played this album at low-ish volume on a lazy, cloudy day and taken a nap with it on - talk about Freudian dreams! This recording is a total masterpiece.

I had a friend that I bought this for years ago... telling him that it was one of my favorite recordings and it was genius and that I hoped he got as much out of it as I had. He called me back the next day after playing it at home and told me he thought it was really "scary" sounding... and it freaked him out and he didn't like it at all. Years pass... one day in conversation he unexpectedly tells me that "...that weird Brian Eno CD I got him... the one with all the grumbles and hums and distant animal sounds..." has ever so slowly been pulled out of hiding and has now turned into one of his favorite CDs. He says it initially scared him... but there was something about it that made him keep thinking of it and going back to it again and again. He now listens to it almost every day while working because it clears his mind and inspires him. He says "...it sounds like something God would record."

I would love to see this CD re-released by Eno one day, perhaps with extra recordings that never made it onto the final album... or longer versions of each track (they all fade out at the end). THAT would be a revelation!!!