Another Green World

Having recused himself from Roxy Music, Brian Peter George Eno set upon a solo career. His first two albums, 1974's Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), were planted firmly in the glam and art rock of his former band; however, Eno's forte was experimentation, with a revisionist outlook towards rock ‘n' roll. Eno's third vocal record, Another Green World, is generally regarded as his finest. The album hosts a veritable cast of musicians from the timeline, including Robert Fripp, Percy Jones, Phil Collins and Paul Rudolph. Alternating between so-called pop songs and instrumental vignettes, the album is pure Eno. Using he and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards, he uses chance to guide compositions and literal descriptions to find sounds: "Wimshurst guitar," "anchor bass," "choppy organs," and so forth. The deadpan "I'll Come Running to tie Your Shoe" is classic, as well as the plaintive "St. Elmo's Fire." The treatments Eno applies to the songs are more interesting as the songs themselves—sound for sound's sake—which speaks to Eno's compositional modus operandi: it's really not about the destination the song brings, but rather the journey while it's playing. To wit, witness "In Dark Trees," "Becalmed" or the title track. From here, Eno's career would follow two paths, one continuing his pop muse into production (and a final vocal album), and the other exploring process or "non-music," beginning with Discreet Music for his Obscure Records in late 1975. In 1976, Eno would then venture off to Germany to work with Cluster's like-minded Roedelius and Moebius and collaborate on the first of a legendary trio of albums with David Bowie, as well as participate in the 801 supergroup with Phil Manzanera, Bill MacCormick, Francis Monkman and others.