Thursday Afternoon

Uncut (p.117) - 4 stars out of 5 - "Magnificently evocative..."

Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon is included in his Original Masters "Soundtracks Works" edition as it is, after all, a soundtrack to a video that Eno himself made in 1984. It consists of seven practically immobile shots of a nude or semi-nude model filtered through a variety of video effects, shown "vertically" with the TV set turned on its right side. Thursday Afternoon debuted at a high profile art gallery in New York, and at that time Eno's cadre of boosters proclaimed that he was going to do for visual art what he'd already done for music. Unfortunately, the video was long, static, and to most viewers rather boring; several New York's film and art critics advised Eno to stick to music, and so far, he has largely done so, despite a handful of low-key gallery installations held in Europe since that time. Recent years have witnessed Eno redirecting his visual work away from video into the field of computer animation. Nonetheless, Thursday Afternoon has managed to carve out a unique niche of its own as a piece of music, as it is the longest of his ambient audio works, running 61 minutes on this new CD edition, as compared to the 59 minutes of the first CD version and the 82 minutes of the laserdisc and VHS versions. The music was recorded by the same three-way combination that produced Apollo, Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois. As compared to the totally fluid stasis heard in Music for Airports segments such as 2/2, there is a lot more going on in Thursday Afternoon. However, it is applied to a much longer time frame; Thursday Afternoon is more than twice as long as Discreet Music. A fair amount of the additional detail is only audible barely above the threshold of human hearing, so the droning keyboard parts in the foreground mostly dominate the texture. Thursday Afternoon seems like one of the best stand-alone works among Eno's cycle of ambient music projects, and yet one can appreciate that this has an appeal a great deal more limited than that of Music for Airports. For those willing to take the plunge Thursday Afternoon has never appeared in better sound than here and with any luck the return of the long-unavailable video is impending. Such a re-release will find an openhearted welcome from Eno's fans, save those with flat-screen TVs.

The soundtrack to a VHS cassette of Christine Alicino's "video paintings" (which can be viewed properly only when the monitor is stood on its side), Thursday Afternoon is an hour-long, uninterrupted ambient piece created in Eno's "holographic" compositional style, in which even the most brief snippet of music is representative of the performance as a whole. ~ Jason Ankeny