The Bloom app developed by Peter Chilvers and Brian Eno hasn’t been updated since 2024 but there’s a new half-hour-long video of it playing on YouTube. Maybe something new is coming? (Update: per David Mead below and Deb Chachra on Mastodon, it’s related to the Eno documentary, and on Facebook I benefited from the indefatigable Bruce Levenstein drew my attention to an even longer version of this audio that is available through music streaming services, more on which below.) The video is titled “Brian Eno x Bloom – Bloom: Living World (Video Edit),” and it is one of several such recordings than Eno has posted over the past year or so. The Bloom app is available for iOS and Android, and it also runs on macOS. I often have Bloom going in the background as I work, set in “Listen” mode rather than “Create,” so it can do its chill thing automatically. The app is a generative marvel, the circles appearing and disappearing in sync with the soft beads of sound that slowly come and go in relative prominence.
Here is descriptive text about Bloom: Living World from Eno’s Instagram:
Brian Eno has reimagined Bloom as a studio work, applying treatments to an hour long recording and adding subtle sonic touches. It is accompanied by Bloom: Small World, which encapsulates the whole experience into a concise 5 minutes and thirty four seconds. Accompanying the music is an original video edit, also generated from the app.
In Eno, the new film about his creative life, Brian explains that his approach to making each piece of music is to think of it as creating a new world. In Bloom: Living World this is illustrated with elegance and simplicity.
