Reviewing ambient music presents a mild conundrum: there's actually very little to write about. Might as well wax lyrical about Lou's Metal Machine Music for all the twangy writerly metaphors one can draw from it. But in the case of Thursday Afternoon one can actually formulate interesting things to say, one can talk about Eno and His Strategies and the collaboration with Lanois and the new CD format for which it was mixed, and the video project for which it was the soundtrack. For more technical reviewy details I'd suggest looking up the Wikipedia entry.

I'd start by saying that Thursday Afternoon is the peak expression of Eno's ambient aesthetic. It is his best ambient album: a sonic idea of detailed, layered background music given the full stretch of the canvas. It runs just over 60 minutes. It is calm, sonically uneventful, and 'an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly' according to Eno's notes. It is, according to his dictum, eminently ignorable.

There's a piano riff that's been slowed down and repeated, there's a calm sea of synth washes that shimmer and roll like light curtains. There's a warm modal sense to the music that never clamours for attention; and it is sincerely calm and gentle.

Technically, that's all there is to be said. As a work of art it has a subtle, low-key and delicate beauty. As music it is dangerously close to the fairy end of New Age dreck. As conceptual gambit it begs to be laughed at and ridiculed (one man's pure subjectivity is another's pure surface). But it is still his best ambient disc, and one of the great pinnacles of the genre. Actually, strike that — there are no peaks or pinnacles in ambient music, only wide open spaces.

And, it is an album I want everyone to have.

It does something to me. It might have something in common with the abovementioned dreck because it seems to replicate the brain's alpha-wave frequencies — surely by accident. But in a broader sense it is music on a frequency that I can tune into very easily. It also has something of Miles' In a Silent Way in that these musical frequencies seem utterly congruent with the act of thinking. It gives a cerebral buzz that's entirely in keeping with the texture-driven attentiveness of the music, in the sense that you can listen and give Thursday Afternoon as much or as little attention as you want and the music never becomes a boring, endlessly repeated blah of space and sound. It has enough detail and randomized change to keep it interesting and still be eminently ignorable; it is a comfortable place for the mind to inhabit. Cue the meditation master with his ponytail.

It works best when played at low volume — it becomes a part of the room. It sits at the periphery of attention and yet you're aware of it, or rather become aware of your thoughts thinking about it. And so it is like meditation in a way. This master is (famously) bald.

So then, treat it like a joke or an arty wank, but I think it's one of the great explorations of what's conceptually possible in music. It's pure texture and yet it is strangely engaging. Anything with such a positive affect can't be all crap and vanity.

And the last 7 minutes to the fade-out represent the most uncanny analogue of a setting sun ever committed to tape.