It goes without saying that Brian Eno‘s rangy, restlessly inventive career is impossible to boil down to ten releases, but that’s my present task, and try I must.

To make the task more manageable, however, I’ve restricted myself to albums where Eno’s name features on the cover – that means none of the albums by Talking Heads or Bowie (Fear of Music, Remain In Light, Low, “Heroes”), not to mention Laraaji and U2, that Eno produced and so strongly influenced. There’s no space either for his first two solo albums, Here Come The Warm Jets and Taker Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), or his collaborations with Cluster and Harmonia. ‘The Essential Brian Eno’ begins with the below ten records, then, but by no means does it finish with them.

01: BRIAN ENO
ANOTHER GREEN WORLD
(ISLAND, 1975)

Our necessarily abridged story begins with 1975′s Another Green World - which, like every album in this list, is available to listen to in full on Spotify. When it comes to ‘best of the 20th century’ lists, Another Green World is the one Eno album that always crops up, and rightly so: it’s a tremendous record, a vision of alien-Albion that’s full of feeling and formal artistry both. Even its sleeve art is perfect, combining the bucolic with the starkly geometric and so setting the tone for the technologically-enhanced pastoralism of the musicwithin.

Recorded over the summer of 1975 at Island studios, this album is perhaps the most famous product of Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, a deck of deadpan commands intended to stimulate and, if necessary, redirect creativity (e.g. ‘Try faking it!, ‘What would your closest friend do?’ or most famously ‘Honour the error as a hidden intention’). Increasingly smitten with systematic approaches to music-making, Eno took additional conceptual cues from business management guru Stafford Beer, and Another Green World finds him delighting in the role of “managing” a crack team of guest musicians numbering violist John Cale (yes, that John Cale), drummer Phil Collins (yep, him) and guitarist Robert Fripp.

The first side of the album consists of oneiric, unusually structured pop miniatures. The skronky art-funk opener ‘Sky Saw’ is something of a red herring; ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ and the thinking chap’s stoner anthem ‘Golden Hours’ show just how confidently Eno has mastered “traditional” song-writing by this stage in career; the melodies are comparable with the best of Bowie, and the lyrics and arrangements, not to mention the vocal delivery, avoid the hammy (if compelling) excesses of 1977′s Before And After Science. Things get really interesting with the instrumentals: the pulsating ‘In Dark Trees’ is proto-techno, but sounds swampy and water-logged rather than Kraftwerk-shiny, while ‘The Big Ship’ is the closest I believe any artist working in the pop idiom has ever come to rendering a feeling of total redemption. Synth fantasia ‘Becalmed’ and the cryptic ‘Zawinul/Lava’ shows that quiet music can can also be highly dramatic. Another Green World isn’t Eno’s most radical album, but for me it’s his most ambitious and exquisitely realised.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.