BRIAN ENO – Thursday Afternoon [fvll albvm] (1985)

Thursday Afternoon is the tenth solo studio album by British ambient musician Brian Eno consisting of one 60-minute eponymous composition. It is the rearranged soundtrack to an 80-minute video production of the same title made in 1984.

Since recording Discreet Music in 1975, Eno had 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 Thursday Afternoon video was conceived as a series of seven “video paintings” which can be looked at in passing without demanding full attention from the viewer. Each of the segments depicts 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 that have been treated with audio effects. The work was filmed on a Thursday afternoon and named as such.

Thursday Afternoon 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 his previous Discreet Music piece. The album was also one of the first to take advantage of the (then new) extended running time of the compact disc format, containing only one 60-min track.

At just one track lasting 60 minutes, the music is ambient: beatless, flowing and ethereal. Remixing and rearranging from the soundtrack to suit the CD medium, Eno stated: “… the music wasn’t recorded digitally. It was recorded on a 24-track analogue machine, and then digitally mastered.”

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