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: #9730 in Music
• Released on: 2009-08-03
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From Amazon.com
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

Appreciation
Like the man (top 10 reviewer) says, this is something special. This is Eno's finest example of ambient, which he invented. Rebelling against the music everywhere, the "used to sell strategy" enlisted by those wanting to sell us things we don't even know if we want. These sounds are not designed to wrap you in cotton wool but to enable you to take yourself somewhere. It's a trip without the side effects, put it on headphones or fill a room and just sit there. Each listen will be different, you will drift off and you will find yourself along some pathway that makes the sounds irrelevant. It is an aid to thinking.

A dark, organic, romantic and nostalgic masterpiece
If you have just stumbled across the now classic Eno Ambient series and were wondering which one to try, look no further. I own 10 Eno discs and to me this is the most evocative and engaging. The album created a feeling of growth and emergence right from the opening track, 'Lizard Point'.

Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 is my favourite painting a picture of romantic, nostalgic euphoric recall from an event real or imaginary.

This disc is as engaging or as 'background' as you want it to be and to achieve that took real genius from Eno. Buy it.

Heavenly & remote classic from 1982...
The on-going series of Eno-reissues in 2004/5 is an absolute treat possibly only rivalled by a similar set of reissues/remasters from Krautrock-legends Can. Ambient 4: On Land could easily be my favourite Eno-record, though considering he's involved with several all-time favourite records (Another Green World, For Your Pleasure, Here Come the Warm Jets, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Remain in Light, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, Music for Airports, Low...)it's not empirical data! This is music for those nights, or when the world has ended and you are the sole occupant- which is perhaps why 'The Lost Day' was used in recent Romero-rip-off '28 Days Later'?

'On Land' returns to the ambient climes established by Music for Airports/Music for Films/Plateaux of Mirrors - though the roots a suggested by Eno's revised sleevenotes from 1986 were always in 1975's classic 'Another Green World' : "On that record I became aware of setting each piece within its own particular landscape and allowing the mood of that landscape to determine the kinds of activity that could occur..." The chief-influences, apart from the all-encompassing sound-drift of songs like 'In Dark Trees' & 'St Elmo's Fire', were Fellini's 'Amarcord' (which has been recently reissued on DVD & is translated as 'I Remember'- memory is significant here, look at the definite title of the final track!) and the Duke Ellington-elegy 'He Loved Him Madly' from Miles Davis' 'Get Up With It.'

These instrumentals just flow, and more gorgeously with the remastering process which the back catalogue most definitely benefits from (now sounds as good as the original vinyl listened to on drugs, reclined on a psychiatrist's couch: don't ask!). Words that suggest worlds like 'opaque', 'otherworldly', 'swellmapped' & other compounded-post-Joycean words could be used (we'll leave cliches like sonic-cathedrals behind...). 'On Land' fits alongside key records like 'Rock Bottom,' 'Curved Air' & 'The Room', composers like Reich and Glass, and precedes later ambient joys such as 'Music Has the Right to Children' (Boards of Canada), 'Plight & Premonition' (Sylvian & Czukay) & 'Selected Ambient Works II' (The Aphex Twin). It's that night-time music, file next to 'The Marble Index,' 'In a Silent Way', 'Spirit of Eden', 'Star Sailor', 'Floating in the Night', 'The Serpent's Egg' et al...

It's all a highlight, made more so by the contributions of guests such as Jon Hassell (on 'Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960'- very much the missing link between 'Power Spot' & 'Brilliant Trees') and Bill Laswell (on 'Shadow'). There was also 'encouragement and suggestions' from Harold Budd, Daniel Lanois and the late Robert Quine. 'On Land' is a key ambient album and more wonderful than it ever was: load onto thy i-pod and sink into soundscape-marshes via those oblique strategies...