I wouldn’t, if I were you, try to experience Lux as music. Brian Eno, the ‘composer’ (I’m not certain if this is the right label for him) of this 76-minute electronic soundscape, is more interested in intelligent design than intuitive composition, in motion than emotion. And yet other reviews I’ve read insist on assessing Lux as though Eno’s trying to further the aesthetic purview of Bruckner, or Derek Bailey, and falling short. Here’s the truth: Lux to its core fulfils the remit of ‘ambient’ music, the term Eno coined for now-classic mid-’70s albums such as ‘Music for Airports’ and ‘Discreet Music’, which fused the principles of Satie’s furniture music with Kraftwerk’s approach to synthesiser technology, via Cage and minimalism.

These sounds are designed to surround you in a warm embrace; if you fell asleep for 20 minutes then drifted back in, Eno wouldn’t mind. Shimmying and bobbing around space like oil dispersing through water, little groups of chiming piano notes do a slow dance, held in position by feathery electronic drones. But even if the land of nod does temporarily claim you, you wouldn’t lose your place because there’s no narrative thread to lose. Lux circles the continuous present; and even when there is a discernable shift in texture, such as at 19'24", when guitar sounds diplomatically nudge keyboards to one side, the prevailing mood music is sustained.

As befits sonic design, the production values are immaculate. The inconvenience of needing to deal with ‘music’ is for Eno, one senses, merely a way of having material to work up in a studio. The detail lavished on each emerging motif – its glacial journey through the sound environment and internal harmonic spectra – is as meticulous an approach to soundscaping as you’ll hear. His detractors say fair do’s, but Eno is all production and no content, event or soul. But pointing out that Andy Warhol’s soup tins are useless as a depiction of water lilies never got anyone very far. Eno makes us think again about the nature of sound as music, or not – and that’s fine.