Brian Eno – LUX

After two patchy outings on Warp, LUX finds Eno returning to purely ambient pastures with a suite based on a recent gallery installation. A cursory listen reveals striking similarities to his sublime 1985 work, Thursday Afternoon: both are built around reverberant, minimal piano figures, subtle electronic textures and distant drones, and both effortlessly nail Eno's ambient mission statement of "rewarding attention but not being so strict as to demand it."

LUX, however, is not holographic in the way Thursday Afternoon is – this music swells and peters in deliberate waves; its facets may catch the light in a similar way but there is a more tactile and deliberate agency behind their movement. True, Eno may not be breaking any new ground here but LUX's patient susurrations remind us that whilst so called 'ambient music' has mutated in countless ways during the last quarter of a century, Eno's singular ability to elicit its most nourishing qualities remains undiminished.