Before and After Studio Science
Few artists have so rewired music as Brian Eno. Even before he set about inventing ambient music in the late='70s, Eno —the one-time keyboardist of proto-glam outfit Roxy Music— was fashioning a radical palette of sounds, rewiring rock'n'roll in both its approach and its output. The departure point was his third solo LP, 1975's Another Green World.
Made after a two-month hospital stint in which a bedridden Eno, recovering from being struck by a taxi, could hear a record of harp music played at barely-audible levels, pieces on the album drew from such an experience: creating atmospheres in which melodies were obtuse, obscured, or buried, and the textures and timbres of audio were paramount.
Another Green World was still a pop record —the pleasures of "I'll Come Running" and "St. Elmo's Fire" have everything to do with their melodic hooks, charmed structure, and half-mumbled choruses— but it, in no way, resembled any pop record that had come before it. Using the studio itself as an interpretive instrument, Eno radically treated every input: exploring the limits of the era's rudimentary synthesizers, running guitars through a battery of effects, cutting up tape-loops of percussion, hammering everything in sight with mallets, using an array of speakers and devices for purposes which they were never intended.
Another Green World is the product of all that tinkering; the fall-out from Eno exploding rock'n'roll's painfully familiar form. The record's form befits such descriptions: its largely-instrumental selections assembled in scattershot form.
When Is An Album An Album?
Often, the works I discuss in this 'definitive' series are notable —are, sometimes, renowned— for how they work as albums; how the songs sit effortlessly together, flowing from one to the next. Another Green World is no such album. Instead, its 14 sketches are each distinct; there no album-long development, no forward momentum, no sense of any kind of narrative.
Instead, the pieces feel fragmented; sitting in their own isolated worlds, the black grooves of silence separating the tracks on the vinyl seeming like the borders on a map. Cuts like "In Dark Trees" —in which Eno dapples click-clacks of synthetic percussion over eerie drum-programming and howls of reverb'd slide guitar— and "The Big Ship" —in which swelling, church-organ-ish synths build up in a stirring, almost cinematic crest— are faded in at the beginning, then faded out at the end. This gives the effect that we're getting but a glimpse at them; as if they're truncated sections of a larger composition.
Each of those two tunes —the album's highlights, in many ways— is notable for its lack of change. Like a proto-post-rocker (which he, in many ways, was), Eno doesn't shift tempo or key, but builds intensity as the volume rises incrementally; the emotional build-up feeling all the more intense for the fact that the song, compositionally speaking, barely moves.
In all this, Another Green World exists as a series of contradictions: the intensely emotional work of an egghead; the work of studio science that eschews complexity; and, most paradoxically, the not-an-album album that's, somehow, a perfect album.
Record Label: Island
Release Date: September 1975
