Another green World
Ambient Music For Airports 1
Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy)
or other…
what is his greatest work?
FML
I lean toward the trilogy of “Here Come The Warm Jets,” “Another Green World” and “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”.
I really love “China My China” from the latter album. There are a million ideas in it, comedy, awesomely strange playing, and a multiple-person typewriter solo, which is introduced by the words, “…they know what God gave them their fingers for - to make percussion over solos.”
I have to confess to not understanding ambient music, so I am unqualified to comment on the majority of the rest of his canon. Regardless, he would have been immortal anyway if these three were the only albums he ever made.
Who else would write a song around the phrase, “I’ll come running to tie your shoe”?
change gears and baby’s on fire. what was the name of that group with roxy music guitarist, brian eno & others?
another green world
I’m real big on “My life in the Bush of Ghosts”, done w/ David Byrne, and now in a new release with extra tracks etc.
If you allow for non-solo works, my vote is for **No Pussyfooting ** with Robert Fripp- repetitive and droning, but very trippy, if you’re in the right state of mind.
From those not mentioned above, **Music for Airports ** is really good as background music, and would be good to listen to at an airport- imagine that.
That group was called 801.
And they have a very good live album you should find, called (predictably enough) 801 Live.
Just get it, you’re welcome.
If you like Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy) give this a listen. Completely re-mastered and re-recorded by one musician and it is amazing.
Interestingly, Eno heard it and said “I am deeply moved by your versions of my songs”. “I like it very, very much!”… you can hear a recording of the phone message from Eno on the linked site.
I lurrrve Eno. Another Green World is pretty much my favorite. While it belongs to the early, song-oriented period, the wonderful instrumental miniatures point the way to the ambient stuff to come.
No Pussyfooting is a mind-blower, but I think of Fripp & Eno as a whole separate entity. When I first bought it, I had no idea what to expect from a collaboration between Roxy Music’s synthesizer wizard and King Crimson’s mathematical guitar genius. I put it on and listened to what sounded like a long, droning intro, and waited for the big musical freakout to come crashing in…and waited…and waited…and finally realized that this was the main event.
What an awesome line-up that was! I love their version of “TNK”.
The Windows 95 startup sound. Yep, that was Eno.
…and now Vista’s is Fripp.
thanks. It was bugging me I couldn’t remember
For me, Another Green World has always been held a special place in my heart–its music touched me more than anything else Eno ever did, or for that matter anything recorded in the Seventies, which is saying a lot. Robert Fripp’s guitar solo on “St. Elmo’s Fire” gave me chills up my spine every single time. He played it as a musical impression of the flickering arcs of static electricity dancing around a Wimshurst generator. “…spitting ions in the æther.”
I loved all of Eno’s stuff including his collaborations No Pussyfooting with Fripp and Low with Bowie. My second favorite Eno album of all has got to be My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, made with David Byrne. Good news for fans of the original 1981 version: the track “Qur’an” is on YouTube. Ignore the imbecilic video that some youtube-jockey stuck onto it and just listen to the music.
The track “Qur’an” was removed from the CD rerelease no doubt because of Muslims’ religious sensibilities. Even though the majority of the world’s Muslim populace has no problem with music, they are often very musically inclined peoples, especially the Sufis. It’s mostly the mullas and Wahhabis who would object to worldly music profaning the sanctity of Allah’s word. I also revere the sacredness of the Qur’an, but differ with them about the music, because I feel that Eno & Byrne’s music is divinely inspired and just as spiritual an experience for me as any sacred music (that goes for their other brilliant collaboration Remain in Light as well). I thought they paid due homage to the cultural significance of the Qur’an by crafting stately, flowing rhythms around it. In fact, I have been in Sufi gatherings that in a centuries-old North African tradition sang verses of the Qur’an to the accompaniment of drums and chanting. So Byrne & Eno applying electronica percussion to Qur’an cantillation is defensible in terms of Muslims’ own sacred tradition.
The abstract video for “Mea Culpa” from the same album is artistically mindblowing.
My favorite song from the bush of ghosts is “Regiment” – in it, the heartrending Arabic vocals, the sensuous throbs of the percussion, and the lucid arrangement all came together perfectly to make one of the most stellar compositions I’ve ever heard. How many of us found our first exposure to Arab music from this album?
I loved Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (“Third Uncle”) and Before and After Science (“Julie With…”) Even though everyone else’s favorite Eno album was usually Here Come the Warm Jets, somehow that album’s sound never clicked with me the way his other Seventies music did. I mainly remember from it his trademark crappy guitar sound. Don’t get me wrong, I loved his crappy guitar playing when it was mixed well, like on “Third Uncle,” but a whole album needs more sonic interest than that. Phil Manzanera’s lead guitar on that track provided the complement it needed.
So even though Another Green World is my favorite album of the entire Seventies, in general I think Eno’s genius was best developed in collaboration with others. My favorite example is how he planned Low with Bowie. Each one drew a card from the Oblique Strategies deck to guide his half of the album creation and they kept the cards secret from each other. Eno drew “Make everything the same” and Bowie drew “Make everything different.” The tension between these made for one helluva album.
I’ve always wanted an Oblique Strategies deck, but they’re too damned expensive and hard to get. I do have one card, though. It came as an insert in the Working Backwards vinyl box set. Mine says “Use an inappropriate colour.”