BRIAN ENO REVIVES OPAL RECORDS WITH TWO LONG-UNAVAILABLE ALBUMS
Brian Eno is bringing back Opal Records, the label he founded in 1988, with new editions of two albums that have been largely unavailable for nearly two decades: Another Day on Earth and Drawn from Life, his collaboration with German electronic musician J. Peter Schwalm. These are both among my favorite and most overlooked Eno recordings.
Opal Records had a short but significant original run from 1988 to 1991. Its roster included Roger Eno, Harold Budd, Laraaji, Jon Hassell, Daniel Lanois, Armenian duduk musician Djivan Gasparyan, Hugo Largo, Russian band Zvuki Mu and John Cale, along with Brian Eno himself. We interviewed many of those artists at the time, including Eno, who famously walked out of our interview. Eno put the label on hiatus in 1991, with its catalog subsequently moving to All Saints Records.
The revived Opal launches with two albums representing different sides of Eno’s music.
Another Day on Earth, originally released in 2005, marked Eno’s return to a song-based solo album after Nerve Net in 1992. The recording included Jon Hopkins, Nell Catchpole, J. Peter Schwalm and guitarist Leo Abrahams, with lyrics co-written by novelist Michel Faber and computer scientist Danny Hillis. The album has been unavailable outside Japan since 2008. The new edition restores it across formats and includes “The Demon of the Mines,” previously available only on the Japanese release.
Another Day on Earth features one of his most poignant songs, “And Then So Clear.” Longtime Echoes fans will remember that we debuted this song in a longer version on the show. It features Eno’s voice through autotune and a few other processes long before that became ubiquitous and trite.
“I’ve never wanted to be me songs,” Eno told me at the time. “I can’t bear me actually, I’m so uninterested in my personality, so it sounded like an ethereal floating being, a being with no body actually.”
Drawn From Life was originally released in 2001 and grew out of Eno’s collaboration with J. Peter Schwalm. The album includes appearances by Can founder Holger Czukay, Laurie Anderson, Nell Catchpole and Leo Abrahams. Although originally issued under Eno’s name, the new edition will be jointly credited to Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm for the first time.
“Time and time again, we found that we drifted into these rather dark, still landscapes and we liked being there,” he told us at the time. “I think it’s trying to imagine a music that comes out of 21st century cities, but cities that are as complex as real cities, that are not simple images of cities, not ‘Blade Runner,’ not Le Corbusier’s machines for living, not concrete jungle, but all of those things and people living their lives and being emotional and having children, and all the other things that people do.”
The partnership between Eno and Schwalm extended beyond the album. They performed together in Porto, Lanzarote and at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival and later created the score for Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Fear X. They also made Music for Onmyo-ji, originally released only in Japan. That is one that has escaped me and I’m going to have to track down.
The relaunch also reaches back to Opal’s original philosophy. When Eno described the label in 1988, he called it “a label for outsiders,” bringing together musicians who existed outside the mainstream but often helped reshape it.
To announce Opal’s return, Eno has released two previously unseen live performance videos from 2001: “Caught Between,” recorded at Coliseu do Porto in Portugal, and “Persis,” recorded at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. The performances feature Eno and Schwalm with Nell Catchpole, Leo Abrahams, Christoph Buhse, Tim Harries and Heiko Himmighoffen.
There doesn’t appear to be any notice that the label will be making new recordings or signing new artists, which could just make this a glorified reissue campaign. Curiously, neither Another Day on Earth or Drawn from Life were originally released on Opal, instead arriving a decade and more later on Hannibal and Astralwerks respectively. These newly christened releases will drop on October 16 on digital and physical formats, including limited translucent vinyl editions. Everyone is just mining the catalogs these days. One percent of proceeds from Opal Records sales will be donated to EarthPercent.