Brian Eno's Another Green World (11 page)

Harold Budd, a kindred spirit to Eno who would soon collaborate with him on several albums, offered some insights on the importance of song titles. “The only thing I ever go into the studio with is a list of titles,” Budd said. “And if I really like the titles, I know it’s going to happen. And it does happen. That’s the way it goes. What a wonderful way to live, honestly. The titles, of course, are my version of poetry, I guess, or something like that. They don’t have a rhyme scheme or anything like that, but they’re
mostly images, and kind of little things that tend to paint or tint the tenor or the atmosphere of a room.” Budd remembered how he carefully deliberated over the titles for compositions like “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.” “It was wonderful, that image of a rose angel,” Budd said. “Whatever a ‘rose angel’ is, I haven’t a clue, and it certainly isn’t a madrigal, but it’s a combination of words that, to me, is still magic. Absolute magic.

“I think a bad title can ruin an otherwise good piece,” Budd continued. “I like the idea of marrying the sound to a really interesting title. The titles don’t mean anything; you’d be slightly mad if you thought they alluded to something real. They’re just evocations of something, God knows what.”

In many ways,
Another Green World
was a transitional album for Eno, a halfway point to his purely ambient works. “The biggest problem is that I also want to use my voice,” said Eno in a lecture at Trent Polytechnic in 1976. “If you sing—in particular if you use lyrics—you create a fixed central position to music. You can’t help that happening somehow … [as] soon as you put a voice on, you create a central image; the instruments are then arranged around it because one is naturally attracted to the voice, just as if one where in a forest you would naturally look towards a human being entering into that forest …

“On my last album
Another Green World
I had two kinds of music. There was one that solved this problem by not using any voice at all. There was another one that maintained the conventional song format, and so the album, which had 14 tracks on it, was a sequence of different approaches. What I’m interested in now is not having a sequence of different approaches. Somehow compacting that sequence so they’re one on top of each other, so they interact with each other.”

Before and After Science
, Eno’s next solo record, was also a sequence of varied approaches—a dazzling crash-collision of ideas from rock, pop, ambient music, and all points in between. It was more outwardly rock’n’roll than
Another Green World
, and in some ways, it was a step back in time; it seemed to have more in common with 1974’s
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
than anything after it. But by the time of
Music for Airports
, released in 1978, Eno’s compositional approach was more continuous and refined.
Music for Airports
was
Another Green World
’s exploration of textures and
Discreet Music
’s exploration of tape-loop processes taken one radical step further, into full-on ambient immersion.

“I figure that the listener requires about half of what you think you require when you’re the creator,” said Eno in a
Sound on Sound
interview in 2005. “I’ve come to realize that I can trust listeners—they don’t
need to be constantly woken up. They’re quite happy to drift for a while and come back in when the music comes back in. In general, the listener wants much less than the creator. When you’re creating something, it’s very easy to get into a nervous state and think ‘Oh God, here’s a whole bar where nothing happens,’ and try to get more stuff in. But as a listener you’re quite happy with these open spaces. I noticed that years ago when I was experimenting with Revoxes, and often found that I preferred the pieces played back at half speed. This was just not because of the softer, more sombre tonality, but simply because less happened.”

Every bar of
Another Green World
’s busy, intricate instrumental tracks seemed crammed with sonic information.
Music for Airports
, meanwhile, was more uniform and fluid, moving at an almost tidal pace. The song titles, too, changed shape. Eno’s ornate song titles were now clean, minimalist numbers: “1/1,” “2/1,” “1/2,” and “2/2.”

Another Green World
’s 14 jewel-like tracks were buried treasures, littered with clues to Eno’s myriad forthcoming directions. The album was the link to Eno’s future. It was a bridge between Old Eno and New Eno, between Rock and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer, between the old world and electronic music as we know it. It was a subtle shift in thinking that would soon yield seismic results—for Eno, and for music.

Special thanks to my good friend Michaelangelo Matos for looking over early drafts of the manuscript. Thanks to Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, J. Peter Schwalm, Judy Nylon, David Toop, Stewart Brand, Percy Jones, Barry Sage, Christine Alicino, Leo Abrahams, and anyone I may have forgotten who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Thanks for the inspiration, moral support, and/or donations of rare articles, books, vintage Oblique Strategies cards, and other ephemera: Matt Lockhart, Blake Brasher, Matt Malchano, Mark Feldmeier, Simon Reynolds, Paul Kennedy, Stuart Argabright, David Whittaker, Tony Fisher, Martyn Mitchell, John Emr, Henry Jenkins, Senior Haus, Andrew Brooks, Amanda Palmer, Noah
Blumenson-Cook, Stephen Martin, Lee Barron and The Cloud Club. Lastly, thanks to my editor David Barker for his saintly patience and support.

Geeta Dayal
San Francisco, CA
February 2009

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