By: Daniela Patrizi
ENO | website | facebook | bandcamp | soundcloud |
Released on May 22, 2015 via Ikarus Records
World off, music on.
I’ve been waiting for the right moment to give a proper listen and to write about the latest album from ENO. There are moments when all we need is to shut off the lights and turn up the volume to completely forget the world around us. Those moments require a special music and ENO are definitely a good choice. Sit back in your chair and listen to From the Lower Earth and Ocean and pay attention to the details and to the perfect combination of ambient and post rock of this beautiful and seductive record. You are gonna experience a great musical journey.
For those of you that still don’t know who they are, ENO are a post rock/ambient duo formed in 2004 by Ivo Mu?nger and Christian Mikolasek in St.Gallen, Swizterland, and From the Lower Earth and Ocean, apart from being their third full length album, is also their greatest achievement. A curious thing is that ENO is a Finnish word and it means uncle. The influence of Finland, with its mythology and folklore, is also in the new album because the song titles and the spoken text you’ll find throughout the songs have been taken from the finnish national epic Kalevala, compiled by Elias Lo?nnrot in the early 19th century – more precisely from the dramatic song cycle Rune XLVII where Louhi, the powerful witch-queen of Pohjola, steals the sun, the moon and the fire.
from the lower earth and ocean by ENO
Each one of the seven tracks on From the Lower Earth and Ocean delivers a decisively different feeling, and that is its greatest strength.
‘night was king and reigned unbroken’ opens the album and sets the mood. Going through the track it’s evident that the overall sound comes from a perfect blend of ambient and post rock with electronic hints, with sober and deep emotional moments through which the duo express a desire to break down barriers in the listener’s mind.
Ivo and Christian are capable of transforming the listener’s place into a concert hall surrounded by instruments where the notes resonate from everywhere. Behind every track lies a story enveloped in some deeper emotion that can come from the band or from the listener. This is the effect of ‘northlands old and toothless wizard’ where the vocals tell the story of Louhi that steals the sun, the moon and fire leaving Kalevala in the darkness. The listener is completely involved in the story and the band manage to give space to the listener to imagine the story till the point that he can be the performer.
The suspense created by ‘northlands old and toothless wizard’ dissolves in the gentle melody of ‘where a hundred islands cluster’ whose last two minutes are one of the peaks of the album and ,together, the two songs are an immersive and artistically gravitating experience.
The following, ‘a dark cloud from the northwest’, is simple and delicate but beautiful and nuanced.
‘how to still the angry waters’ represents another pick of the album and it’s the proof that the duo can give birth to so much magic through keyboards that it’s impossible not to fall in love with this song. The sense of loss and the melancholy is in each note and this is not a bad thing at all. It’s like floating from a dark sky to a light blue ocean and, even when the music ends, the listener somehow intuits that the music is still continuing somewhere, as constant as the tide. The melodies are unique and when a band manages to create something innovative through the manipulation of boundaries even with the limitations of a duo, it’s a great achievement.
‘and the clouds of northland thunder’ concludes the magical journey of From the Lower Earth and Ocean and it is as calming as still waters. The sound has the power to raise you and you’ll feel weightless. It conjures up an atmosphere of intimacy that offers an undeniable source of comfort and refuge if you’re looking for such things.
From the Lower Earth and Ocean is a great record and taking the opportunity to listen to it will tell you more than I ever could.
