Brian Eno's Another Green World Read online

  Though “Discreet Music’’ was a relatively simple concept, it was very much a product of its time. Replicating the exact conditions of the system that put “Discreet Music” in motion is not easy. In one particularly touching display, the Canadian ensemble Contact performed the entirety of “Discreet Music” onstage with painstaking accuracy, using a panoply of acoustic instruments.

  Eno himself attempted to remake “Discreet Music” 20 years later with modern means, over the course of some generative music experiments he was doing in software, and found out that he couldn’t do it. “This is actually very hard,” he wrote in his diary in 1995, “trying to duplicate the complicated analogue conditions of the original: a synth that never stayed properly in tune, variable waveform mixes and pulse-widths, variable filter frequency and Q, plus probably something like 309 audible generations of long-delay repeat, with all the interesting sonic degradation that introduced. Digital is too deterministic. At the purely electronic level, there are very few molecules involved, and their behavior is amplified. The closer you get to ‘real’ instruments including physical devices such as tapeheads, tape, loudspeaker cones, old echo units, analogue synths—the more molecules are involved, and the closer you get to a ‘probabilistic’ condition. This is an argument for strapping a lot of old junk on to the end of your digital signal path—valves, amplifiers, weird speakers, distortion units, old compressors, EQs, etc—in the hope that you reintroduce some of the sonic complexity of ‘real’ instruments. There’s nothing wrong with the pristine formica surfaces of digital: it’s just that one would like to be able to use other textures as well … my attempts to replicate Discreet Music result in interesting failure after interesting failure.”

  11

  “Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.”

  Another Green World, like Discreet Music, was an album for quiet contemplation, for home listening. There was no live experience; there was no tour. Eno avoided tours, with the exception of some brief touring with Fripp and a few other scattered live appearances. The Sony Walkman wouldn’t be introduced until 1979; most likely, your experience of listening to Another Green World in the mid-1970s was on a home stereo system at your house or a friend’s house. “In the 1970s people started having fairly decent hi-fis, instead of the old record players, and this changed the way we listen,” said Eno in an interview with Artpress in 2001. “People started noticing the aural surface, the richness of the textures. I realized that this was what the recording studio was for: to change the texture of sound, to make it more malleable. That, more than the melody, rhythm, or lyrics, was what I wanted to concentrate on.”

  The music seemed to luxuriate in a vague feeling of melancholia without sounding particularly downcast. It didn’t convey any sense of deep depression, but of thoughtful introspection—a slight distance and dislocation from the world at large, the contemplative state of staring out the window of a moving train and watching trees and highways scroll by. Another Green World’s back cover—a tinted photo of Eno sitting up in bed in a sort of meditative reverie, taken by his Finnish girlfriend of the time, Ritva Saarikko— seems to underline the album’s general vibe of quietude and reflection, of stillness, solitude, and immobility. In its own way, Another Green World was a very tender, emotional record, but nothing about it was impetuous or irrational or excitable; there was no direct punch to the gut. There was no mention of the word “love.”

  “‘I was very interested at that time to see if there was a way of making music that still connected with one emotionally—of course it’s easy to make music that doesn’t connect emotionally, to fulfill any brief you want—but I wanted to make music that still had an emotional connection that didn’t depend on a narrative or on a person,” Eno said in an interview with Paul Schütze in The Wire in 1995. ‘‘A lot of the stuff I was doing, I think, was to do with the erosion of a single personality being at the center of the music. I did that in lots of different ways, by sinking the voice in, or by singing nonsense … All these were ways of giving the message: ‘that isn’t the important bit, necessarily.’ That’s only one part of the landscape.”

  If Another Green World had a filmic equivalent, it might be in some of the early scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate movie Barry Lyndon, also released in 1975. The movie, a period film based on a William Makepeace Thackeray novel, stretches for almost three hours, moving at a stately pace. The soundtrack is all baroque and classical music—Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Handel. The most striking feature of the film is not the soundtrack, but the cinematography. Barry Lyndon doesn’t look like many other films out there; every scene is shot in what appears to be natural light, and several scenes appear to be lit with the aid of candles alone. Kubrick did employ artificial light, and the most cutting-edge studio techniques, throughout the making of the movie. But by shooting with special lenses capable of a huge aperture, Kubrick was able to shoot the film under extremely low-light conditions—like a candle’s dim flicker—giving the whole movie a naturalistic feel.

  In one particularly painterly early scene from the film, which happens to be one of Eno’s favorite scenes, Barry Lyndon, the protagonist, leaves home to seek his fortune. As he leaves, all you see is a sweeping landscape of misty green Irish countryside, with the foggy sky and craggy mountains soaring behind him. Barry, in contrast, looks so very small on his horse in the foreground; you almost don’t notice that he’s there. He seems to melt right into the cinematic grandeur of the backdrop. The background becomes the foreground, and vice versa.

  “When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground,” said Eno in an interview with Artpress in 2001. “It was the background that interested me. As in a painting, I wanted to get rid of the element that up to then had been considered as essential in pop music: the voice.”

  Most of the tracks on Another Green World, nine out of the 14, don’t have lyrics at all; they are purely instrumental pieces. “Most people don’t realize that that’s the proportion—that was quite a bit of sleight of hand,” Eno told The Wire in 1995. ‘‘People tend to think of that as a song record. But it isn’t—it’s an instrumental record with the odd bit of vocal.”

  Part of the reason why Another Green World is perceived as a “song record” is because the five tracks with words, besides being distinctive and memorable, are evenly spaced through the album; about one in every three tracks has lyrics. There’s “Sky Saw,” the first track, “St Elmo’s Fire,” the third, “I’ll Come Running,” the sixth, “Golden Hours,” the tenth, and “Everything Merges with the Night’’—the thirteenth. The songs could have just as easily been organized like David Bowie’s Low, released in 1977 (an album in which Eno played a legendary role)—with all of the tracks with lyrics on one side, and all the ambient instrumentals on the other. Instead of having a clear separation, on Another Green World there is no divide; the ambient tracks are integrated smoothly and evenly into the whole record.

  Another reason why Another Green World’s instrumental tracks blend so well into the so-called “song album’’ is because the songs are, on average, much longer than the instrumental tracks. The songs are also slower and more meditative, blending in well with the ambient pieces—there aren’t any nervy and spastic rockers, like “Baby’s on Fire” on Here Come the Warm Jets, or “King’s Lead Hat” on Before and After Science.

  Most of the ambient pieces on Another Green World are only about two minutes long; some are even shorter. They’re more like segues. The songs, in contrast, are all three minutes or longer. Low is the opposite—the songs on Side One are sharp, jagged little fragments; the song “Breaking Glass’’ is under two minutes long. Meanwhile, the flip side is adrift with sprawling ambient pieces—“Warszawa’’ and “Subterraneans’’ are both around six minutes long.

  Even though most of the tracks on Another Green World had no lyrics, the album features some of Eno’s most poetic, evocative song titles. The tit
les served an important function; they were mental triggers that could set the imagination of the listener reeling in a certain direction. Each title—“In Dark Trees,” “The Big Ship,” “St Elmo’s Fire’’—offers an impressionistic image for the person listening. When you listen to an instrumental like “In Dark Trees,” it’s hard not to envisage dense forests, shadows, and fog. “Spirits Drifting’’ seems to suggest ghostly, eerie specters seeping out of the air.

  Harold Budd, a kindred spirit to Eno who would soon collaborate with him on several albums, offered some insights on the importance of song titles. “The only thing I ever go into the studio with is a list of titles,” Budd said. “And if I really like the titles, I know it’s going to happen. And it does happen. That’s the way it goes. What a wonderful way to live, honestly. The titles, of course, are my version of poetry, I guess, or something like that. They don’t have a rhyme scheme or anything like that, but they’re mostly images, and kind of little things that tend to paint or tint the tenor or the atmosphere of a room.” Budd remembered how he carefully deliberated over the titles for compositions like “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.” “It was wonderful, that image of a rose angel,” Budd said. “Whatever a ‘rose angel’ is, I haven’t a clue, and it certainly isn’t a madrigal, but it’s a combination of words that, to me, is still magic. Absolute magic.

  “I think a bad title can ruin an otherwise good piece,” Budd continued. “I like the idea of marrying the sound to a really interesting title. The titles don’t mean anything; you’d be slightly mad if you thought they alluded to something real. They’re just evocations of something, God knows what.”

  In many ways, Another Green World was a transitional album for Eno, a halfway point to his purely ambient works. “The biggest problem is that I also want to use my voice,” said Eno in a lecture at Trent Polytechnic in 1976. “If you sing—in particular if you use lyrics—you create a fixed central position to music. You can’t help that happening somehow … [as] soon as you put a voice on, you create a central image; the instruments are then arranged around it because one is naturally attracted to the voice, just as if one where in a forest you would naturally look towards a human being entering into that forest …

  “On my last album Another Green World I had two kinds of music. There was one that solved this problem by not using any voice at all. There was another one that maintained the conventional song format, and so the album, which had 14 tracks on it, was a sequence of different approaches. What I’m interested in now is not having a sequence of different approaches. Somehow compacting that sequence so they’re one on top of each other, so they interact with each other.”

  Before and After Science , Eno’s next solo record, was also a sequence of varied approaches—a dazzling crash-collision of ideas from rock, pop, ambient music, and all points in between. It was more outwardly rock’n’roll than Another Green World, and in some ways, it was a step back in time; it seemed to have more in common with 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy] than anything after it. But by the time of Music for Airports, released in 1978, Eno’s compositional approach was more continuous and refined. Music for Airports was Another Green World’s exploration of textures and Discreet Music’s exploration of tape-loop processes taken one radical step further, into full-on ambient immersion.

  “I figure that the listener requires about half of what you think you require when you’re the creator,” said Eno in a Sound on Sound interview in 2005. “I’ve come to realize that I can trust listeners—they don’t need to be constantly woken up. They’re quite happy to drift for a while and come back in when the music comes back in. In general, the listener wants much less than the creator. When you’re creating something, it’s very easy to get into a nervous state and think ‘Oh God, here’s a whole bar where nothing happens,’ and try to get more stuff in. But as a listener you’re quite happy with these open spaces. I noticed that years ago when I was experimenting with Revoxes, and often found that I preferred the pieces played back at half speed. This was just not because of the softer, more sombre tonality, but simply because less happened.”

  Every bar of Another Green World’s busy, intricate instrumental tracks seemed crammed with sonic information. Music for Airports, meanwhile, was more uniform and fluid, moving at an almost tidal pace. The song titles, too, changed shape. Eno’s ornate song titles were now clean, minimalist numbers: “1/1,” “2/1,” “1/2,” and “2/2.”

  Another Green World’s 14 jewel-like tracks were buried treasures, littered with clues to Eno’s myriad forthcoming directions. The album was the link to Eno’s future. It was a bridge between Old Eno and New Eno, between Rock and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer, between the old world and electronic music as we know it. It was a subtle shift in thinking that would soon yield seismic results—for Eno, and for music.

  12

  “Is it finished?”

  Special thanks to my good friend Michaelangelo Matos for looking over early drafts of the manuscript. Thanks to Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, J. Peter Schwalm, Judy Nylon, David Toop, Stewart Brand, Percy Jones, Barry Sage, Christine Alicino, Leo Abrahams, and anyone I may have forgotten who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Thanks for the inspiration, moral support, and/or donations of rare articles, books, vintage Oblique Strategies cards, and other ephemera: Matt Lockhart, Blake Brasher, Matt Malchano, Mark Feldmeier, Simon Reynolds, Paul Kennedy, Stuart Argabright, David Whittaker, Tony Fisher, Martyn Mitchell, John Emr, Henry Jenkins, Senior Haus, Andrew Brooks, Amanda Palmer, Noah Blumenson-Cook, Stephen Martin, Lee Barron and The Cloud Club. Lastly, thanks to my editor David Barker for his saintly patience and support.

  Geeta Dayal

  San Francisco, CA

  February 2009

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