Brian Eno – Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics

My copy has the same runouts (PVC 7919 - A) as the test pressing with the STERLING and HuB included. No EGS 107 at all but everything else Is a match to this version.

Sounds like the soundtrack to a Super Nintendo jungle platformer/fantasy RPG.

World music term has been applied in so many contexts that it has no meaning. This record is speaks on lots of levels. It is a fabric of multiple patterns and textures. It is warm, haunting, and searching at the same time. Electronically processes instruments still have human feeling associated with them. Eno's ambient stuff can be more for a particular moment than something that can be played regularly. If you let this music into your world you will not regret it.

This is supposedly the album Eno worked on just before jumping into the "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" sessions, and while the two albums are very different, you can definitely see the fingerprints of Early 80s Eno all over this one. Hassell's heavily-effected trumpet is the lead instrument here, but the mood mostly belongs to the minimal rhythms underneath, which successfully walk the line between meditative and groovy. The idea of possible fourth world musics is all about a place beyond pop and folk, beyond primitive and synthetic, where all known sounds collapse into a new aesthetic, and the A side of this record strikes that balance perfectly. The illusion falters on the B side, where Hassell's trumpet sounds just a bit too much like a trumpet, and its jazzy noodling stops sounding like a celestial force and starts to resemble... well, a jazz guy noodling on a trumpet. Still a great release overall.