Brian Eno — Thursday Afternoon. Story behind the album with one 60-minutes track

One day in the first half of the 1980s, Brian Eno, who had moved to New York, wanted to shoot the charming sky of Manhattan. He took out his film video camera and for about four days filmed the movement of clouds outside the window. Since there was no tripod at hand, Brian simply put the camera on its side.

Brian Eno

Because of this, the picture on the TV was vertical and, without thinking twice, Eno turned the TV on its side. The slowly floating clouds reminded him of the slowly floating music, and the vertically placed TV immediately stopped being a TV—now it looked like a canvas that slowly came alive. In addition, the sun burned out the colour filter of the camera, which made the colours on the video look slightly different. This delighted Eno: “It was a beautiful camera. It responded to light and colour in a way that no other camera I’ve ever seen can do. So I had a unique paintbrush really and I worked with that for a long time. I could set it at a level of light sensitivity where very slight changes in the amount of light, the brightness of the light, translated into very powerful colour changes.”

Cityscape videos were constantly played in the background in Eno’s apartment. Soon he noticed that his friends had started sitting in front of the vertically placed TV with a slowly changing cityscape for a long time. In 1987, the author collected fragments of these films for the exhibition Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan).

Watching the guests who were looking at the screen where nothing was happening, Eno suddenly realised: “I might have discovered a new kind of painting.” He persuaded his photographer friend Christine Alicino to pose nude for seven scenes, which later were slowed down to a state of almost complete immobility. Eno sold the idea of video portraits to the Japanese media giant Sony and the films shot in April 1984 with a petite brunette were mercilessly processed: colours were twisted and exotic effects were applied. Since the shooting took place on Thursday afternoon, the whole project was called Thursday Afternoon.

The release was done in a pompous manner: a videotape with an hour and a half of unhurried nudity was sold in a large box, which contained not only a booklet with a list of scenes, but also Eno’s manifesto, where he offers his slow art as an alternative to video clips, just to contemplate and reflect. The music was published on a new audio medium, a CD, which, unlike a vinyl, doesn’t need to be turned over after 20 minutes of listening and therefore provides an incredible opportunity to just turn on the music and relax. Another advantage is the purity of the sound. “My music is very quiet; silence is very important in my music,” Eno explained.

The shimmering combination of a quiet piano and barely noticeable electronics on Thursday Afternoon became one of the reference sounds for ambient music. It also became the musical accompaniment to the video of the same name, which was often exhibited in galleries around the world.

“I’d resisted doing anything with video for a long time because I really didn’t like video art at all, and I’ve never been much of a television watcher. And anyway just the nature of the material was kind of ugly to me: it looked coarse. But I discovered that it looked coarse because people were always trying to make it do something that it didn’t want to do, it doesn’t want to be like film. As soon as you accept that… and accept that it has a texture, and it has a grain, that’s fine, it’s like saying that a canvas is not the same as a glossy photograph, so you then work with that texture. I wanted to connect video with pictures and with picture-making, and began by making pieces that were very long, slow, slowly changing examinations of, for instance, a landscape—or in my case the skyscape of Manhattan, where I was living at the time.”