Eno* – Another Green World

Classic album that finds Eno close to his peak. Almost as good as Before & After Science

Maybe the best album ever made. My VG UK first sounds amazing. I need to upgrade soon. It's the soundtrack to a place that does not exist. It's an album full of such feeling and emotion. "The Big Ship" makes me cry every time. It's such a hopeful soft thing. I love all the wonky pop albums. But this is the crown jewel. This is the one that sits above all else.

...i was laying in bed with influenza when this album came out, heard it
every day, getting up after a week, stronger than before. when everbody was
complaining about boring mid 70's, only a few already recognized the
creative potential in the 4 popsong-albums by brian eno, recorded with
friends like robert wyatt, phil manzanera, john cale, robert fripp & fred
frith. 14 short little pieces, full of charming colours & tricky time
signatures...

No collection is complete without this masterpiece. A must own album that was ahead of its time and never gets old.

Can anybody comment on the quality of this pressing? Any info would be greatly appreciated!

A beautiful work of art. One of those albums you never get tired of. Everything Merges With The Night is utterly gorgeous. Gets me every time.

THE LEGEND:

I can still taste the late summer of 1975 on the tip of my tongue, I the smell of my Sansui 7070 Receiver as its wood housing warmed, and the smooth hum of my Tanburg reel to reel player gently doling out those melodic tunes from Another Green World ... and I being in love. I truly felt that all I needed was to find a place somewhere in the corner, and waste the rest of my days on comfortably worn sheets, exhaling endless plums of blue smoke, with Brian Eno as the soundtrack to my life.

While Here Come The Warm Jets was wonderful, and Taking Tiger Mountain was a brilliant step, Another Green World was one of the most wonderful, hypnotic, spiritual, and hedonistic bodies of work I had yet to encounter ... and I loved every moment of it. Seven of the songs answered every question I felt I could ever ask, and to those I still return time and time again, never loosing the sensation or pleasure.

The music seems so simple and so unpretentious. Another Green World had a grace, and style that spoke directly to my soul. And for the first time in my life I felt that I could write this ... is there any reason I couldn’t play this [?] ... after all these tunes are all about mathematics, form and balance, aren’t they? But Brian Eno had turned my brain to sand, and I never really got ed my degree of uncertainty. What I can tell you, is that this music is pure magic, conjured from warm springs, crystal waterfalls, and steaming jungles. Each of these songs should go on forever, constantly moving toward a horizon that is forever out of reach.

These songs are not ambient music, theses songs are the sound of my breath and my heart, riding on a cool breeze in the late afternoon.

THE FACTS:

If one were to make the assumption that ambient sound is music that floats almost unnoticed in the background, I could hardly classify Another Green World by Brian Eno as ambient music.

But first we must consider the times and the events of the day ... to say that Brian Eno came out of Roxy Music would be true, but it would not take into consideration the amount of work he had done previous to that outing, or his visual arts perspective. It has been put forth, that Brian’s movement into ambient sound, and I use that term loosely, marked a shift in his musical consideration and expression ... though if one has the patients to listen to the early Roxy Music collection, it is very easy to hear Brian’s workings in the background, tying movements together and floating one song into another. To me, this does not sound iconoclastic or off beat ... it sounds very structured, calculated and quite brilliant.

What was bizarre, was that Brian took these background techniques and developed them into a construct of consistent songs, if not a body of work ... though some of the songs are so short that they sound experimental, while others feel incomplete, almost as works in progress. It would be my contention that the work found on this release [and most of his other work] is more melodic in nature then ambient, because it does demand and hold the listener’s attention. Just listen to “Sky Saw” with Robert Fripp, or “St. Elmo’s Fire,” both of which float the listener away, but in a constructive manner that would not allow the listen to float if they were not paying abject attention to the music. All of this music, including Brian’s musical theories stand in juxtaposition to where rock n' roll was at during the early 1970’s ... rock had become so complex, with so many walls of sound that it only stupefied the listener, it was a natural step to return to a more simple less complex sound.

Therein lies the misconception of this so called ambient music. While the sound may have seemed simple and pleasing, creating this sound with early 1970’s technology was anything but simple. Brian was developing the rules as he went along, making use of tape loops, over dubbing, multi tracking, spacial separation, and multi position microphoning, processing [using one of the earliest VCS3 Synthesizers] ... all designed to capture and displace sound and then tie it together through the use of tape loops, and occasional mystical lyrics. Much of this technology had been used before, but now with sixteen and thirty two track tape recording, the effects could be achieved more easily and with more effect then The Beatles had achieved on Sgt. Pepper.

This brings me to the song “Third Uncle” [from taking Tiger Mountain], or “Blank Frank” [from Here Come The Warm Jets] which are anything but ambient ... these songs are pure punk, yet with consideration and an intelligence, perhaps the foreshadowing of what was just around the corner, recognized by the consummate mind of Brian Eno ... if not outrightly suggested and designed by him, it's worthy, to consider the fact for a few moments that Brian Eno was responsible for Punk, and while this may not be true, his work makes it worth consideration.

In any event, I purchasing his albums, I wore the fact that I got what Brian was saying like a badge of honor ... THIS WAS NOT AMBIENT MUSIC, THIS WAS SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING TO BE RECKONED WITH ... this was source material.

Review by Jenell Kesler

There's a much more common blue label variant of this. Needs a separate entry as it was probably a '77 repress.

My copy has the catalogue number of ILPS 19351 which does not seem to be listed here - the number is almost identical to the UK and US 1975 pressings. There is some text in Italian on the record and sleeve but it doesn't match the Italian pressing above either. It may be an original Italian pressing rather than a repress. Does anybody else's copy have the same catalogue number?

Absolute Classic!!! Run, don't walk, to buy it.