Brian Eno's Another Green World (10 page)

Eno’s former band, Roxy Music, seemed to be heading in a different aesthetic direction. The front cover of the band’s latest LP,
Siren
, again sported a pulchritudinous Amazon woman—this time the model Jerry Hall, who was now dating Bryan Ferry. Eno was putting arcane block diagrams on the back cover of his LPs; Ferry was giving his hairdresser an album credit on the back of his LP.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Lou Reed had released his own (in)discreet music:
Metal Machine Music
. Both albums were released the same week in the UK, and the albums couldn’t be more different on the surface. While
Discreet Music
seemed almost deliberately understated—the gentle melodies, the spare cover art, the absence of any images of its creator—
Metal Machine Music
screamed excess. It was a doublealbum of screeching guitar feedback, featuring Lou Reed on the front cover, front and center, sporting a fuck-you look and his trademark black leather jacket. It was hard not to look at the album as a total farce— the liner notes made goofy references to “amine beta rings”; Side 4 featured a lock-groove that made the track continue looping forever. The album was a kick in the face to Lou Reed’s record label, RCA, a grudging attempt by Reed to fulfill his contractual obligations to the company. Reed seemed to be having a lot of fun with it as well; in one infamous interview with
Lester Bangs, Reed claimed that the crashing waves of guitar feedback were painstakingly embedded with coded references to Beethoven’s
Eroica
and other classical symphonies.

Some critics argued that
Discreet Music
’s gentle quiescence made it more revolutionary than Reed’s deliberate attempt to inflame. “This almost translucent serenity makes
Discreet Music
more radical than
MMM
,” wrote James Wolcott in
Creem
in 1976, “because Reed’s knife-scraping-the-edge-of-theuniverse soundtrack has a psychotic willfulness, yet the underlying purpose was old-fashioned—to outrage the straights. (You know: épater la bourgeoisie.) Eno’s album, however, has a Kubrick cool, a tacit faith in the benevolence of the machine, and his refusal to irritate the listener is more avant-garde a stance than the traditional A/G artiste approach of ‘Kill them with dissonance.’”
Metal Machine Music
was like injecting black-as-dirt espresso straight into your veins;
Discreet Music
was more like sipping Earl Grey tea—pale, warm, mildly stimulating, a bit flowery.

On another level,
Discreet Music
and
Metal Machine Music
had more in common than one might think. In a sense, they were both ambient music. “
Discreet Music
soft, calm, melodic and reassuringly repetitive, without a single sound other than tape hiss above about 1,500 Hz,” observed Eno in his diary
in 1995, “whereas
MMM
is as abrasive and unmelodic as possible, with almost nothing below—and yet they occupy two ends of what was at the time a pretty new axis—music as immersion, as a sonic experience in which you float. The roots of Ambient.” (Personally, I’d always felt that
Metal Machine Music
’s unnatural ululations—once memorably described in a
Rolling Stone
review as “the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator”—were actually very pretty, and I never understood what the fuss was about. For a long time when I lived in New York City, I would fall asleep at night with
Metal Machine Music
spinning on my record player. I didn’t find it harsh and abrasive at all; at a low volume, it had a comforting, shimmering effect, and did a fine job of drowning out street noise.)

The two albums also had something even more elemental in common—systems. Both records were the result of setting up a system, putting it in motion, and essentially leaving the room. On
Metal Machine Music
, Reed took a couple of his guitars, which he had tuned using his own bizarre logic, and put them next to big amplifiers. The amps had been turned up all the way, of course, and the resulting amp feedback was so powerful that it sent intense vibrations through the guitars (provoking intense sounds), which then fed back into the amps. In effect, Reed’s guitars were playing by themselves, in a sort of snowballing volley
with the amplifiers. On “Discreet Music,” this “feedback loop” played out as a big tape loop—two reelto-reel tape machines that generated new sounds by feeding into each other, and building upon each other in the process.

An extract from “Discreet Music’’ was recycled into the track “Wind on Wind,” on the Fripp/Eno album
Evening Star
, which was released the same year.
Evening Star
was the second Fripp/Eno album, after
No Pussyfooting
in 1973, and it was created using a similar tape-delay setup.
Evening Star
further crystallized the Fripp/Eno model of making music; Side Two’s swirling, expansive 28-minute-long track, “An Index of Metals,” still ranks as one of the duo’s greatest, most fully-realized works.
Evening Star
’s cover art was a striking abstract painting by Eno’s friend and Oblique Strategies collaborator, Peter Schmidt. There were other oblique references to the Strategies; the track titles “Wind on Wind’’ and “Wind on Water’’ were references to hexagrams in the I Ching.

Though “Discreet Music’’ was a relatively simple concept, it was very much a product of its time. Replicating the exact conditions of the system that put “Discreet Music” in motion is not easy. In one particularly touching display, the Canadian ensemble
Contact performed the entirety of “Discreet Music” onstage with painstaking accuracy, using a panoply of acoustic instruments.

Eno himself attempted to remake “Discreet Music” 20 years later with modern means, over the course of some generative music experiments he was doing in software, and found out that he couldn’t do it. “This is actually very hard,” he wrote in his diary in 1995, “trying to duplicate the complicated analogue conditions of the original: a synth that never stayed properly in tune, variable waveform mixes and pulse-widths, variable filter frequency and Q, plus probably something like 309 audible generations of long-delay repeat, with all the interesting sonic degradation that introduced. Digital is too deterministic. At the purely electronic level, there are very few molecules involved, and their behavior is amplified. The closer you get to ‘real’ instruments including physical devices such as tapeheads, tape, loudspeaker cones, old echo units, analogue synths—the more molecules are involved, and the closer you get to a ‘probabilistic’ condition. This is an argument for strapping a lot of old junk on to the end of your digital signal path—valves, amplifiers, weird speakers, distortion units, old compressors, EQs, etc—in the hope that you reintroduce some of the sonic complexity of ‘real’ instruments. There’s
nothing wrong with the pristine formica surfaces of digital: it’s just that one would like to be able to use other textures as well … my attempts to replicate
Discreet Music
result in interesting failure after interesting failure.”

Another Green World,
like
Discreet Music
, was an album for quiet contemplation, for home listening. There was no live experience; there was no tour. Eno avoided tours, with the exception of some brief touring with Fripp and a few other scattered live appearances. The Sony Walkman wouldn’t be introduced until 1979; most likely, your experience of listening to
Another Green World
in the mid-1970s was on a home stereo system at your house or a friend’s house. “In the 1970s people started having fairly decent hi-fis, instead of the old record players, and this changed the way we listen,” said Eno in an interview with
Artpress
in 2001. “People started noticing the aural surface, the richness of the textures.
I realized that this was what the recording studio was for: to change the texture of sound, to make it more malleable. That, more than the melody, rhythm, or lyrics, was what I wanted to concentrate on.”

The music seemed to luxuriate in a vague feeling of melancholia without sounding particularly downcast. It didn’t convey any sense of deep depression, but of thoughtful introspection—a slight distance and dislocation from the world at large, the contemplative state of staring out the window of a moving train and watching trees and highways scroll by.
Another Green World
’s back cover—a tinted photo of Eno sitting up in bed in a sort of meditative reverie, taken by his Finnish girlfriend of the time, Ritva Saarikko— seems to underline the album’s general vibe of quietude and reflection, of stillness, solitude, and immobility. In its own way,
Another Green World
was a very tender, emotional record, but nothing about it was impetuous or irrational or excitable; there was no direct punch to the gut. There was no mention of the word “love.”

“‘I was very interested at that time to see if there was a way of making music that still connected with one emotionally—of course it’s easy to make music that doesn’t connect emotionally, to fulfill any brief you want—but I wanted to make music that still had an emotional connection that didn’t depend on a
narrative or on a person,” Eno said in an interview with Paul Schütze in
The Wire
in 1995. ‘‘A lot of the stuff I was doing, I think, was to do with the erosion of a single personality being at the center of the music. I did that in lots of different ways, by sinking the voice in, or by singing nonsense … All these were ways of giving the message: ‘that isn’t the important bit, necessarily.’ That’s only one part of the landscape.”

If
Another Green World
had a filmic equivalent, it might be in some of the early scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate movie
Barry Lyndon
, also released in 1975. The movie, a period film based on a William Makepeace Thackeray novel, stretches for almost three hours, moving at a stately pace. The soundtrack is all baroque and classical music—Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Handel. The most striking feature of the film is not the soundtrack, but the cinematography.
Barry Lyndon
doesn’t look like many other films out there; every scene is shot in what appears to be natural light, and several scenes appear to be lit with the aid of candles alone. Kubrick did employ artificial light, and the most cutting-edge studio techniques, throughout the making of the movie. But by shooting with special lenses capable of a huge aperture, Kubrick was able to shoot the film under extremely low-light conditions—like a candle’s dim flicker—giving the whole movie a naturalistic feel.

In one particularly painterly early scene from the film, which happens to be one of Eno’s favorite scenes, Barry Lyndon, the protagonist, leaves home to seek his fortune. As he leaves, all you see is a sweeping landscape of misty green Irish countryside, with the foggy sky and craggy mountains soaring behind him. Barry, in contrast, looks so very small on his horse in the foreground; you almost don’t notice that he’s there. He seems to melt right into the cinematic grandeur of the backdrop. The background becomes the foreground, and vice versa.

“When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground,” said Eno in an interview with
Artpress
in 2001. “It was the background that interested me. As in a painting, I wanted to get rid of the element that up to then had been considered as essential in pop music: the voice.”

Most of the tracks on
Another Green World
, nine out of the 14, don’t have lyrics at all; they are purely instrumental pieces. “Most people don’t realize that that’s the proportion—that was quite a bit of sleight of hand,” Eno told
The Wire
in 1995. ‘‘People tend to think of that as a song record. But it isn’t—it’s an instrumental record with the odd bit of vocal.”

Part of the reason why
Another Green World
is perceived as a “song record” is because the five tracks
with words, besides being distinctive and memorable, are evenly spaced through the album; about one in every three tracks has lyrics. There’s “Sky Saw,” the first track, “St Elmo’s Fire,” the third, “I’ll Come Running,” the sixth, “Golden Hours,” the tenth, and “Everything Merges with the Night’’—the thirteenth. The songs could have just as easily been organized like David Bowie’s
Low
, released in 1977 (an album in which Eno played a legendary role)—with all of the tracks with lyrics on one side, and all the ambient instrumentals on the other. Instead of having a clear separation, on
Another Green World
there is no divide; the ambient tracks are integrated smoothly and evenly into the whole record.

Another reason why
Another Green World
’s instrumental tracks blend so well into the so-called “song album’’ is because the songs are, on average, much longer than the instrumental tracks. The songs are also slower and more meditative, blending in well with the ambient pieces—there aren’t any nervy and spastic rockers, like “Baby’s on Fire” on
Here Come the Warm Jets
, or “King’s Lead Hat” on
Before and After Science
.

Most of the ambient pieces on
Another Green World
are only about two minutes long; some are even shorter. They’re more like segues. The songs, in contrast, are all three minutes or longer.
Low
is the opposite—the
songs on Side One are sharp, jagged little fragments; the song “Breaking Glass’’ is under two minutes long. Meanwhile, the flip side is adrift with sprawling ambient pieces—“Warszawa’’ and “Subterraneans’’ are both around six minutes long.

Even though most of the tracks on
Another Green World
had no lyrics, the album features some of Eno’s most poetic, evocative song titles. The titles served an important function; they were mental triggers that could set the imagination of the listener reeling in a certain direction. Each title—“In Dark Trees,” “The Big Ship,” “St Elmo’s Fire’’—offers an impressionistic image for the person listening. When you listen to an instrumental like “In Dark Trees,” it’s hard not to envisage dense forests, shadows, and fog. “Spirits Drifting’’ seems to suggest ghostly, eerie specters seeping out of the air.