Textures
Rarities | Diary CD | HeadCandy | Land of Clear Colours | Shutov Assembly | Textures | Installation CDs | New CDs

Does ESL003CD mean anything to you? If you are a die hard fan of Eno you will know that that is the catalogue number of 'Textures', the 1983 CD sent out to film and television studios. Because it was never commercially released, it is a pretty rare CD.

An original copy came up on eBay and it produced a fair amount of interest. In fact it was so interesting that someone paid £377 for it in July 2001! Strangely enough though, a further copy was sold on eBay in November 2001 that only made £63 - you might expect to see this again soon as it seems to have been bought by a dealer. More recently a US dealer was offering a Copy of Textures, Music for Prague, Music for White Cube and a number of the other installation CDs. The Textures and the White cube were both snapped up by the same fan for $401 and $108.49 respectively in January 2003.

How do you get your hands on an item like this? Well apparently the copy auctioned in July 2001 was discarded from the library of a major London TV company and was rescued by one of the staff. It was passed on to a friend who put it up on eBay thinking it would make a couple of quid.

For the rest of us, getting hold of something as rare as this is reliant on who you know with a CD recorder. There is some consolation in the fact that a number of the Textures tracks appear in similar versions on other Eno albums (Neroli, Shutov Assembly, Music for Films III). The gentleman who paid $167.50 in 1998 for the previous eBay Textures auction posted a message on the alt.music.brian-eno newsgroup with information about the tracks. You can still find the original message (and information about a lot of other Eno rarities) on the google groups cache.