Post Description

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"


1. "Thursday Afternoon" – 61:00