Brian Eno has announced that he will be relaunching his Opal Records label and reissuing his albums ‘Another Day On Earth’ and ‘Drawn From Life’.
Opal was founded by the artist back in 1988 and released albums by Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Harold Budd, Laraaji, Djivan Gasparyan, Hugo Largo, Zvuki Mu, Daniel Lanois, Jon Hassell and John Cale.
Eno put the label on hiatus in 1991 to concentrate on his own work, and the catalogue moved across to All Saints Records. In the time since, it has never signed a new artist, but has occasionally put out Record Store Day exclusives.
Now, he is bringing the label back in 2026, and reissuing two of his albums on it – 2005’s ‘Another Day On Earth’ and his 2001 collaboration with J. Peter Schwalm, ‘Drawn From Life’.
The 2005 record was originally released on Hannibal Records and marked Eno’s long-awaited return to song after over a decade of ambient and production work. Both of the two albums have been unavailable outside of Japan for close to 20 years now, but will now be available with the reissue.
To celebrate the release, Eno has released two previously unreleased live performance videos, one track from each album.
From ‘Another Day On Earth’, there is ‘Caught Between’ which was filmed live at Coliseu do Porto, Porto Festival on June 16, 2001. For ‘Drawn From Life’, there is ‘Persis’ which was filmed live at Naeba Ski Resort, Fuji Rock Festival on July 29, 2001.
Both videos see him perform alongside J. Peter Schwalm, Nell Catchpole (violin), Leo Abrahams (guitar), Christoph Buhse (drums), Tim Harries (bass) and Heiko Himmighoffen (percussion).
Each re-release arrives on October 16 – pre-order here – and one per cent of the proceeds from sales of Opal records will be donated to Earth Percent.
Describing Opal in 1988, Eno shared: “If someone asks me what the Opal artists have in common I’m hard pressed to find a simple answer. I suppose I could say that each is distinctive, not only from each other, but also from the various mainstreams of modern music: it is a label for outsiders.
“Such a description might appear to condemn to permanent obscurity the artists to whom it is applied. But popular music has always drawn its strength and richness both from the centre – from the Beatles, for example – and from the edges – like the Velvet Underground. And sometimes the tables suddenly turn and what was on the outside shows up very close to the centre.”
In other Brian Eno news, earlier this year the musician was among a number of millionaires based in the UK – also including Gary Lineker and Richard Curtis – to ask Prime Minister Andy Burnham to tax them more.
Before then, he joined Massive Attack, Caribou and hundreds of other musicians in calling for Live Nation to drop operations in Israel, and also took part in Together For Palestine’s charity single ‘Lullaby’.
