Ed O'Brien has stopped hiding

One afternoon in 2020, as the world had shrunk to the edge of a flat, Ed O'Brien did an Instagram feed and found himself talking for nearly an hour with a stranger from Houston who had lost an uncle and a brother to complications from Covid the week before. When he had begun those impromptu connections, direct with the likes of Paul McCartney and Jim Jarmusch, O'Brien had not imagined such a conversation. At the age of fifty-one, thirty of which he had spent as a guitarist in one of the most famous bands in contemporary rock, he had allowed himself to be caressed by the pain of an outsider. The experience touched Edward John, Oxford-born and a student at that Abingdon School in Oxfordshire where he had met future Radiohead bandmates, deeply. His debut had come in 2020 with the solo album 'Earth', on which he signed with only the initials EOB to keep his name at a safe distance. The successor, 'Blue Morpho', is an attempt to reconnect with himself, starting with his generalities.

'Blue Morpho' was born out of a deep depression that struck O'Brien soon after the release of 'Earth'. For four years he spent hours playing guitar in his London studio, with no set direction or purpose, but cataloguing everything that emerged, following a method that Thom Yorke had suggested to him years earlier as a writing secret. The foundations of the album took shape in Wales, in sessions with talented producer Paul Epworth - whom he met through his children's school - and sound engineer Riley MacIntyre. The puzzle was completed by a series of chance encounters: at Glastonbury, O'Brien crossed paths with saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, talking about frequency and natural resonance; Hutchings would later record the flutes. In Estonia, pursuing the music of Arvo Pärt, he met composer Tõnu Kõrvits, who would be responsible for the arrangements of the strings performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. The final form of the record took shape at London's Church studio, a two-hundred-year-old sacred space. The sequencing was entrusted to Flood, the mixing to Ben Baptie.

The album's title refers to an iridescent South American butterfly, and its beginning is entrusted to suspended acoustic guitars. "Incantations" is a folk that allows itself to be hypnotised by dissonances and tribalisms, touching ecstatic peaks in its almost eight-minute duration. In the track that gives the album its name, some of the atmospheres of 'A Moon Shaped Pool' are revived, complete with arabesque strings and a moment in which 'Subterranean Homesick Alien' is revived. Indeed, O'Brien has to fight with ears accustomed to the Radiohead sounds he himself helped build, such as the restless arpeggio of 'Sweet Spot'. But when the Madchester-soaked trip hop of "Teachers" or the experimental interlude "Solfeggio" arrives, the guitarist's authorial ability is evident. Back in 1999, he composed an ambient soundtrack for the BBC miniseries "Eureka Street". Moving in this direction is the ethereal "Thin Places", which gives way to "Obrigado", a final suite capable of moving from Brazil to Pink Floyd driven by O'Brien's brilliant voice.