Thursday Afternoon
Encyclopedia
Thursday Afternoon is a 1985 album by the British
ambient
musician Brian Eno
consisting of one 60 min eponymous composition. It is the rearranged soundtrack to a video production of the same title made in 1984.
in 1975, Eno had shown a strong interest in creating music that can influence the atmosphere of the space in which it is played, rather than be focused on directly. The Thursday Afternoon video was conceived as a series of seven “video paintings” which can be looked at in passing without demanding full attention from the viewer. Each of the segments depicts simple imagery that has been treated with visual effects, much in the same way as Eno's music is often made up of simple instrumental performances that have been treated with audio effects.
The music on this album consists of multiple tracks of processed piano and electronic textures. The layers of the composition are phased so that their relationships to each other are constantly changing in a way similar to his previous Discreet Music
piece. The album was also one of the first to take advantage of the (then new) extended running time of the compact disc
format, containing only one 60-min track.
, was filmed in San Francisco in April 1984, and treated and assembled at Sony in Tokyo
. Produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois
, it features seven "video paintings" of actress and photographer Christine Alicino, a friend of Eno's, and has a running time of 82 minutes. It was filmed in "vertical format" which necessitated the viewer to turn the television on its side which, in many cases, affected the picture tube's color purity adjustments. The DVD reissue presents it in both portrait and landscape formats so that this is no longer necessary.
The content is a series of images that stay static for some time and then slowly move forward, often to pause again. Various video techniques were implemented, such as image feedback, to create a very different interpretation of video and the nude.
Eno himself was aware of the newness of what he was doing. "I was delighted to find this other way of using video because at last here's video which draws from another source, which is painting .... I call them 'video paintings' because if you say to people 'I make videos', they think of Sting's new rock video or some really boring, grimy 'Video Art'. It's just a way of saying, 'I make videos that don't move very fast" 1.
The soundtrack was recorded at Dan Lanois' studio in Canada 2 and is a longer, different mix. Three time-lapse GIFs give an impression of the subject matter and its treatment, although not the slow-moving speed of the video .... 97K, 99K, 249K.
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" 6.
, 2005 & 2006, (HNDVD 1508) 1, 2 (Region 1 NTSC & Region 2 PAL).
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
ambient
Ambient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
musician Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
consisting of one 60 min eponymous composition. It is the rearranged soundtrack to a video production of the same title made in 1984.
Overview
Since recording Discreet MusicDiscreet Music
Discreet Music is an album by the British ambient musician Brian Eno. While No Pussyfooting may be his first ambient album and Another Green World features many ambient pieces, this is Brian Eno’s first purely ambient solo album...
in 1975, Eno had shown a strong interest in creating music that can influence the atmosphere of the space in which it is played, rather than be focused on directly. The Thursday Afternoon video was conceived as a series of seven “video paintings” which can be looked at in passing without demanding full attention from the viewer. Each of the segments depicts simple imagery that has been treated with visual effects, much in the same way as Eno's music is often made up of simple instrumental performances that have been treated with audio effects.
The music on this album consists of multiple tracks of processed piano and electronic textures. The layers of the composition are phased so that their relationships to each other are constantly changing in a way similar to his previous Discreet Music
Discreet Music
Discreet Music is an album by the British ambient musician Brian Eno. While No Pussyfooting may be his first ambient album and Another Green World features many ambient pieces, this is Brian Eno’s first purely ambient solo album...
piece. The album was also one of the first to take advantage of the (then new) extended running time of the compact disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
format, containing only one 60-min track.
The video
The original video, made at the request of, and released by the Sony Corporation of AmericaSony Corporation of America
Sony Corporation of America , based in New York, is the United States subsidiary of Japan's Sony Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo. It is the umbrella company under which all Sony companies operate in the United States....
, was filmed in San Francisco in April 1984, and treated and assembled at Sony in Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
. Produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois
Daniel Lanois
Daniel Lanois born September 19, 1951 in Hull, Quebec) is a Canadian record producer, guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. He has released a number of albums of his own work and has produced albums for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie...
, it features seven "video paintings" of actress and photographer Christine Alicino, a friend of Eno's, and has a running time of 82 minutes. It was filmed in "vertical format" which necessitated the viewer to turn the television on its side which, in many cases, affected the picture tube's color purity adjustments. The DVD reissue presents it in both portrait and landscape formats so that this is no longer necessary.
The content is a series of images that stay static for some time and then slowly move forward, often to pause again. Various video techniques were implemented, such as image feedback, to create a very different interpretation of video and the nude.
Eno himself was aware of the newness of what he was doing. "I was delighted to find this other way of using video because at last here's video which draws from another source, which is painting .... I call them 'video paintings' because if you say to people 'I make videos', they think of Sting's new rock video or some really boring, grimy 'Video Art'. It's just a way of saying, 'I make videos that don't move very fast" 1.
The soundtrack was recorded at Dan Lanois' studio in Canada 2 and is a longer, different mix. Three time-lapse GIFs give an impression of the subject matter and its treatment, although not the slow-moving speed of the video .... 97K, 99K, 249K.
The CD album
At just one track of 60 mins in length, the music is ambientAmbient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
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
Music sequencer
The music sequencer is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically :...
... "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" 6.
Credits
- Brian EnoBrian EnoBrian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
– performance, mixing, assembly, production, - Daniel LanoisDaniel LanoisDaniel Lanois born September 19, 1951 in Hull, Quebec) is a Canadian record producer, guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. He has released a number of albums of his own work and has produced albums for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie...
– mixing, engineering, production - Roger EnoRoger EnoRoger Eugene Eno was born in Woodbridge, England in 1959. He is known primarily as an ambient composer.He began euphonium lessons at twelve and at sixteen entered Colchester College to study music...
– performance, production - Michael BrookMichael BrookMichael Brook is a Canadian guitarist, inventor, producer, and film music composer. He plays in many genres, including rock, electronica, world music, minimalism and film scores....
– mixing, assembly - Tim Hunt – engineering
- Nigel Gayler – engineering
- Carlos Olms – digital consultant
- Simon Heyworth – mastering
- Andrew Day – redesign
- Alex Roggero – photography
- Tom PhillipsTom Phillips (artist)Tom Phillips CBE R.A. is an English artist. He was born in London, where he continues to work. He is a painter, printmaker and collagist.-Life:...
– cover art - Russell MillsRussell Mills (artist)Russell Mills is a British artist who was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, UK in 1952. He paints, creates multimedia installations, designs stage sets and lighting and has produced record covers and book covers for Brian Eno, the Cocteau Twins,Michael Nyman, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Nine Inch...
– artwork, art direction, design
Video
- Released on – VHS, Beta (NTSC, cat# 2929), Laser disc, Videodisc (probably a bootleg)
- Japan – Sony, OOZM 70 (VHS) / OOQM 70 (Beta)
- UK – Hendring, Hen 2 133 (VHS)
- Germany – Video Edition Markgraph, VEM 101 (VHS)
DVD
The video has been repackaged with his Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan (a 1981, 47-minute ambient video created by Eno) as 14 Video Paintings, All Saints RecordsAll Saints Records
All Saints Records is a British independent record label. It was established in 1991 by Dominic Norman-Taylor. They have published Ambient music from the likes of Brian Eno or Biosphere.-History:...
, 2005 & 2006, (HNDVD 1508) 1, 2 (Region 1 NTSC & Region 2 PAL).
Music
| Country | Label | Cat. No. | Media | Release Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK | EG Records | EGCD 64 | CD | 1985 |
| Germany | EG Records | 827 494 2 | CD | 1985 |
| UK | Virgin | ENOCD11 | CD | 2005 |
| Japan | EMI | 68746 | CD | 2005 |
| UK | Polydor | 827 494-2 | ? | ? |
| US | Caroline | 1518-2 | ? | ? |
Miscellenea
- The album's liner notes are written by C. S. J. Bofop. Substituting the letters with those immediately preceding them in the alphabet spell out B. R. I. Aneno.
- An Installation held at the undercroft of the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, NW1, between September 9 and October 6, 1999 featured elements from the album, amongst others.
- Early versions of the UK/Europe version of 14 Video Paintings had a mastering error which put the Thursday Afternoon soundtrack on one of the orientations of Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan.
External links
- Liner notes from Thursday Afternoon
- Inlay notes from Thursday Afternoon
- Hyperreal article on Eno's video artworks
- 2 of Eno's sketchbooks. On the left is a 1982 "repetition schema" for T.A., and on the right is a sketch of the mix for U2's Unforgettable Fire
- Interview; Electronics & Music Maker, December 1985
- Observer article; Feb.23 1986
- Disquiet transcript of an online discussion, 2005
- ProgArchives CD review
- IMDB video entry
- PopMatters review of 14 Video Paintings
- Prefix mag review of 14 Video Paintings
- Creem mag review of 14 Video Paintings
- Christine Alicino's homepage
