Brian Eno announces plans to reissue ‘The Ship’
Brian Eno has announced his plans to reissue his 2016 album, The Ship, on October 20th. The record will be available in coke bottle green vinyl.
The Ship marked Eno’s twenty-seventh full-length solo studio release. The album featured the 21-minute long title track, alongside a series of three songs with the name ‘Fickle Sun’. The third in this series, ‘Fickle Sun (iii) I’m Set Free’, reimagines The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Set Free’.
Trailing just behind his debut, Here Come The Warm Jets, The Ship took the title for Eno’s second highest-charting solo record. Now, The record has been newly remastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road for the reissue.
Eno will embark upon a series of celebratory live performances following the release date. Beginning on Saturday, October 21st, Eno will take to stages in Venice, Berlin, Paris, Utrecht, and London, accompanied by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic and their conductor Kritjan Järvi. The Venice and Utrecht dates are already sold out.
The performances will feature Eno’s long-time collaborators Leo Abrahams on guitar, Peter Chilvers on keyboard and programming, and Melanie Pappenheim producing additional vocals. It will also include a live cameo from Peter Serafinowicz.
At the time of The Ship‘s first release, Eno stated, “Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia, the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we’re increasingly under threat.”
Now, he shares, “The album The Ship is an unusual piece in that it uses voice but doesn’t particularly rely on the song form. It’s an atmosphere with occasional characters drifting through it, characters lost in the vague space made by the music. There’s a sense of wartime in the background, and a sense of inevitability. There is also a sense of scale which suits an orchestra, and a sense of many people working together.”
The ambient musician continued, “I wanted an orchestra which played music the way I would like to play music: from the heart rather than just from the score. I wanted the players to be young and fresh and enthusiastic. When I first saw the Baltic Sea Philharmonic I found all that… and then noticed they were named after a sea. That sealed it!”
Revisit ‘The Ship’, the album’s title track, below.
