Inventor of the “infinite guitar” and Grammy-nominated film composer (with credits including Heat, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Into the Wild), Canadian musician Michael Brook announces the first vinyl reissue of his 1992 4AD record Cobalt Blue and the vinyl debut of Live at the Aquarium, both out July 10 — a long-overdue celebration of underrated gems in the 4AD catalogue, newly remastered by Rashad Becker and presented on Crystal Clear 2×LP and 2CD with artwork by Alison Fielding based on the original v23 designs.
Cobalt Blue is a timeless and quietly stunning collection of instrumental pieces and shimmering dreamscapes, featuring contributions from ambient music pioneer Brian Eno, composer & multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno, and Grammy-winning producer Daniel Lanois. Recorded later that year, Live at the Aquarium captures Brook’s rare solo performance in London, highlighting the hypnotic sustain and atmosphere that define his work.
Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue & Live at the Aquarium is out July 10. Pre-order and find more information HERE.
MICHAEL BROOK – COBALT BLUE & LIVE AT THE AQUARIUM
4AD0853LPE | July 10, 2026
Formats: Digital | Crystal Clear 2xLP | 2CD
TRACKLISTING
A1. Shona Bridge
A2. Breakdown
A3. Red Shift
A4. Skip Wave
A5. Slipstream
A6. Andean
B1. Slow Breakdown
B2. Ultramarine
B3. Urbana
B4. Lakbossa
B5. Ten
B6. Hawaii
C1. Shona Bridge (Live)
C2. After Image / Urbana (Medley Live)
C3 Andean (Live)
D1. Ultramarine (Live)
D2. Lakbossa (Live)
D3. Cascade (Live)
D4. Red Shift (Live)
MICHAEL BROOK BIOGRAPHY
In 1992, it had been seven years since the release of guitarist/composer Michael Brook’s debut album, Hybrid. In that time, he had signed to Brian Eno’s label and management company, Opal, and moved to England from his native Toronto. He produced a soundtrack composed by The Edge. The U2 guitarist and their producer Daniel Lanois had both acquired versions of Brook’s invention known as the “infinite guitar,” an instrument modified to produce endless sustain. Brook also toured extensively during this period, collaborated with world music giants such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N’Dour, and was co-artist and producer on the ambient classic Sleeps with Fishes, with Pieter Nooten, released by the prominent indie label 4AD.
When Brook eventually returned to the studio to work on his second album, he had absorbed a tremendous amount of new input and experience. The result was Cobalt Blue — a record that was under-appreciated at the time but has grown in esteem and influence over the decades and proved to be a crucial moment in a remarkable career.
Brook is known as a pioneer in the ambient music movement and a highly sought-after producer, especially in the arena of world music, for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. He has worked with a vast range of noted artists — including Cheb Khaled, U. Srinivas, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and the The Pogues — and toured with David Sylvian and Robert Fripp and with John Cale. He also became an acclaimed composer for film, working on the scores of more than 50 movies, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower, An Inconvenient Truth, Brooklyn, and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. Brook was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1996 for his album with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Night Song, and for a Golden Globe in 2008 for the Into the Wild soundtrack. El Infierno won the 2011 Havana Film Festival award for best music. In 2024, Khan’s album Chain of Light, produced by Brook, was The Guardian’s World Music album of the year.
Of course, all of these accomplishments were far ahead of him when he started work on Cobalt Blue with no clear sense of the direction his music was going to take. The resulting sound was “not exactly ambient,” Brook says, but more rhythmic and melodic; he describes the Cobalt Blue material as “Wordless Songs.” This sense of drive and variation represented a shift in priority, even a bit of rebellion.
“I actually had no burning desire to be specifically a composer,” says Brook. “I was excited about exploring and discovering areas of interest across various disciplines. When I was at York University, there was a real anti-tonal, anti-rhythmic music thing going on,” he adds. “I was embarrassed that I played guitar. But on Cobalt Blue, I was over that. I was more comfortable going into stuff that felt more like songs.”
Listening back to the album, Brook notes the critical contributions that Eno made to the arrangements. “I just hadn’t composed much before, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he says. “Then, it felt like, ‘Why is Brian so opinionated?’ But he was right, and really did make a big difference!”
Whatever he was still learning about writing, though, he certainly made up for in sonic innovation. Touring with Jon Hassell, collaborating with Eno and Lanois, and playing as part of the “Opal Evenings” package with Roger Eno, Harold Budd, and Laraaji, Brook was charting new territory by looping his music live onstage and working with sequencers and sound processing, experiments that helped define Cobalt Blue.
“4AD offered to put the album out after the original record label lost their distribution deal in the US. But for years after the release, I got very little feedback, partly because the music press didn’t really cover music that was hard to put in a genre. So initially, I really didn’t know what the perception was—it felt like a guitar crying in the wilderness.”
One track, though, managed to gain some attention. “Ultramarine” featured Brook’s guitar being played in a new way — with a percussive, almost slap bass style, giving the instrument a rhythmic but ethereal quality. “’Ultramarine’ was both a groundbreaker and kind of a unicorn,” he says. “The composition is locked into the way the guitar is tuned because it’s all harmonics. In that sense, it’s unique and somehow it seemed to resonate with people.”
Influential DJ Chris Douridas played the song on KCRW, and director Michael Mann heard it and took notice. He used “Ultramarine” in his landmark 1995 film Heat, and asked Brook to contribute to the score. “That brought the film community’s awareness to the work I was doing,” says Brook; he soon moved to Los Angeles, and worked on dozens of films over the next two decades, including Brooklyn, The Fighter, and The Vow.
When Cobalt Blue was reissued in 1999, the package included a second disc, Live at the Aquarium, from a promotional concert at the London Zoo. The very existence of this recording is “a fluke,” says Brook — when the person doing sound for the show offered to record it, no one had even brought a tape to the event, and someone was quickly dispatched to Brook’s apartment to grab a DAT.
“It was a big challenge to figure out how to do Cobalt Blue live,” he says. “Technically, it was really complicated. I had to rehearse for a long time so that I was using muscle memory with the technology, which allowed my attention to focus on the emotional side of the music.” Listening now, he hears different strengths in the two versions. “The live one maybe has a little more passion to it,” he says, “but Cobalt Blue is more architectural, compositional.”
Cobalt Blue represents a moment of transition for Michael Brook, a key to some of the trailblazing paths that he would pursue. “It was the beginning of having a process for composing and trying to use the guitar in different ways,” he says. “It’s where I learned how to use the studio as part of the creative process, for sure — it was the first time I had my own studio where I could really work on stuff, and I’m a recording studio composer, not a ‘hum a tune into a phone’ or pencil-and-paper guy.”
But, Brook adds, none of this was necessarily intentional nor obvious at the time, which is the way his work has always unfolded. “I relate to and enjoy what John Lennon described as ‘the charisma of uncertainty’ in the creative process,” he says. “For me, it’s like panning for gold, where you don’t know if you will find anything. The gold is when something creates an emotional response in me, and I hope that it will do so for others.”
MICHAEL BROOK ONLINE
