Brian Eno‘s 90’s solo albums tend to get overlooked in the light of his 70’s and 80’s output even though his star was truly back on the map by the early 90’s due to the resurgence in Ambient music he helped pioneer. Typically whilst everyone else was looking back Eno had moved on and was looking forward, releasing (or not) a mixed bag alongside producing the likes of U2, James, curating interactive apps and installations and remixing Massive Attack.

He reissues ‘Nerve Net’, ‘The Shutov Assembly’, ‘Neroli‘ and ‘The Drop’ on December 1st – all expanded into 2 disc editions. Each comes in deluxe casebound packaging and contains the original album on the first disc alongside a second disc of unheard or rare music from his archives.

Arguably the strongest release is ‘Nerve Net’, a mixed bag that anticipated Trip Hop on certain tracks and contains some of his finest rhythmic works since ‘My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’. Most interesting of all though is that the 2nd CD contains the first release of the ‘lost’ album, ‘My Squelchy Life’, an earlier version that was aborted at the time.

‘The Shutov Assembly’ features a whole album of unreleased recordings from the same period and ‘Neroli’ – a concept album based around perfume – includes an entire unreleased hour-long ambient work, ‘New Space Music’.

Perhaps the weakest of the bunch is 1997’s ‘The Drop’ which is an odd release with a terrible cover that’s saved by the final track, ‘Iced World’ which is a beautiful 30 minute ambient piece worth the price of admission alone. This is expanded to include 9 tracks previously only available as a limited edition of 1,000 sold at an exhibition of Eno’s ’77 Million Paintings’ at La Floret in Japan.

Each album contains a 16 page booklet compiling photos, images and writing by Eno relevant to each release. Three of the albums are also being made available as gatefold double vinyl releases containing the original audio only, but accompanied by a download card and printed inner sleeves with the content from the CD booklets.

Pre-order each of the albums over at Enoshop.co.uk where you can also buy all sorts of editons of his work, oblique strategies sets, T-shirts and other obscurities like the ‘Curiosities’ compilations which are well recommended.