Brian Eno's Another Green World (2 page)

I did learn some very fascinating things about the way that
Another Green World
was put together in the studio. But I was also very interested in
Discreet Music
, which came out the same year (1975); I was interested in
Evening Star
, Obscure Records, Harmonia and Cluster, analog machinery, gardening, painting, cybernetics, and televisions turned sideways. But instead of my base of information getting too unwieldy—like my overgrown garden yard, which is bursting with so much entropy right now that it’s practically impossible to see the stone paths that wind through it—I actually felt calmer and more focused.

One of the great gifts of writing a book on Brian Eno is interviewing some of the very interesting people that he has worked with over the past 30-odd years. Practically every week I heard from an Eno collaborator or friend who had useful advice or a unique perspective to offer. I wasn’t just interested in talking with his collaborators on
Another Green World
; I wanted to learn more, in a general sense, about how Eno worked with other people.

For inspiration, I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects—from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno’s methods, past and present, are not really about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander’s
A Pattern Language
, Stafford Beer’s
The Brain of the Firm
, and John Cage’s
Silence
. What these books have in common, besides being books that Eno rates highly, are that they connect a variety of seemingly disparate things, and they lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking—such as the Oblique Strategies cards.

Of course, there is the music. In the chapters that follow, I delve into the many unique sounds on these records. This is not any kind of formal musicological
analysis. What it is, instead, is an exploration of the sonics—the timbres and layers of shifting textures. There is not much literary analysis here; Eno has stated many times that lyrics, especially at this time period of his life, did not interest him very much. But that does not mean that the words do not serve an important function. I look at two different properties of
Another Green World
. The first, as Eno himself has pointed out, is that only five out of the 14 tracks on the album have words, but that listeners tend to perceive the album as a “song record,” not an ambient record. Each song with lyrics “bleeds” into the surrounding ambient tracks. How does this effect work in our heads? The second phenomenon has to do with another type of sleight of hand—how chains of words, even nonsense words that do not make any sense in sequence, can nonetheless profoundly affect our emotions, trigger memories, and generate very powerful images. For this reason, I spend considerable time exploring Eno’s often elaborate, suggestive song titles.

One of the most instructive things I did was to listen to
Another Green World
at a number of different speeds. Each time I heard something new that I had not heard before—a new sound that was buried in the mix, for example, or an effect, a heavily layered backing vocal, an abstruse lyric. Speeding up and slowing down
Discreet Music
taught me a lot, too; the title
track of
Discreet Music
, or “Side One’’ if you happen to own the vinyl copy, is recorded at half-speed. So I listened to it at double-speed, to gain some insight into what the original material might have sounded like before Eno slowed it down. I also listened to it at quarter-speed, which I liked even more than Eno’s half-speed version.

I still haven’t gotten tired of these albums, though it’s possible that I may have listened to
Another Green World
more times than Eno has. I become more drawn to these records the more I listen. Recently, I put the album on after not listening to it for a while. I was really moved by it, playing it over and over and hearing something new in its flow each time. It was like I could see the pathways of all of the electronic music that came before it and after it, traveling through that record like so many streams.

I often think that
Another Green World
’s longevity comes from its innate ambiguity. The more you listen, the more beguiling and open-ended the album becomes. In contrast to many other albums from the mid-1970s, the record doesn’t sound dated at all.
Another Green World
isn’t stuck in the past or fixated on the future—it continues to live its life in the fabric of the present.

Many casual listeners who have heard of Brian Eno know him best as a legendary rock producer—a pivotal force behind classics like David Bowie’s
Low
, U2’s
The Joshua Tree
, and Talking Heads’
Fear of Music
. Others, especially in Britain, know him as a key member of the trendsetting art-rock band Roxy Music in the early 1970s. As a solo artist, he’s best known for being a pioneer of ambient music; his bestselling solo record is still his 1978 ambient album
Music for Airports
. But that’s barely scratching the surface; unraveling the myriad twists and turns of Eno’s life could be a fulltime occupation. His sprawling discography, with its intricate network of genres, collaborators, and endless projects and side-projects, reads a bit like the history of rock and experimental music of the last four decades collapsed into one giant list.

At the time of this writing, Brian Peter George St Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is 61 years old. Many musicians of Eno’s generation are now traveling museum pieces, dusting off their greatest hits catalog for yet another reunion tour. Eno famously hates to tour, and chances are good that you will never see him perform. Despite nearly 40 years of convincing work as a musician and producer, Eno still likes to refer to himself as a “non-musician’’; he once even lobbied to get “non-musician’’ listed as his job on his passport. For him, the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history; he has long since moved on, and is not terribly interested, for better or for worse, in resuscitating his storied past. These days, you are more likely to find him arguing about politics, mulling a grand unified theory of culture, testing a chime for a clock designed to ring once every 10,000 years, or coaxing his iPhone into producing generative music.

Writers use various metaphors to describe Eno’s working method; a popular one is that Eno is a musician who “paints with sound.” It’s true that Eno looks at sound the way a visual artist might; he has a painterly sensibility with his ambient music, and he studied painting at art school. But the painting analogy tends to conjure up the mental image of a lone genius cloistered in a garret. Eno didn’t create
Another
Green World
in isolation, daubing his sonic canvas in solitude. The album was recorded in a London studio with a hodgepodge of performers and instruments and ideas, with Eno at the helm of the ship.

Many years ago, Eno coined a term he called “scenius” to describe how large groups of people, not simply lone misunderstood geniuses, generate creativity. “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene,” Eno has said. “It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” While there wasn’t exactly a burgeoning “cultural scene” in London surrounding
Another Green World—
it was a singularly peculiar record for the year 1975, by any metric—the album shared connective tissue with some of the people and ideas bubbling under the surface of popular culture.

Painting is an appealing analogy for Eno’s ambient explorations, but filmmaking is a better model for how Eno works with other people in practice. He has a knack for identifying and assembling the right mix of people to serve a larger vision, and the ability to coax unexpected performances out of these collaborators. He approaches music the way a director might approach a soundtrack—as a means of establishing a mood, a sense of time and place. (Eno himself has a long history of making music for films, both real and
imagined.) And, like any great director of the cinema, everything Eno touches bears his subtle but unmistakable fingerprints, regardless of who the stars in the foreground happen to be.

A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things—these little details—to create that sense of place. It has a lot to do with light and sound. The sounds that come into a room can help paint a world there and make it so much fuller
.

—
David Lynch, in
Catching the Big Fish

Fabulous geography is his business—territories explored, Fourthworld maps made: “On Some Faraway Beach’’ …
Another Green World
; “Over Fire Island’’; “By This River’’; “Through Hollow Lands’’; “Inland Sea’’; “Lizard Point’’; “Warszawa’’; “Neuköln’’; “Moss Garden’’,
On Land; The Plateaux of Mirror; Dream Theory In Malaya
…

—Mark Sinker
, The Wire,
1992

Another Green World
, recorded in 1975, is a thriving, self-contained ecosystem. The music sounds slightly alien and synthetic, but the song titles are rich with references to nature—lizards, fish, reptiles, islands, fire.

A tracklisting:

Side One

  Sky Saw

  Over Fire Island

  St. Elmo’s Fire

  In Dark Trees

  The Big Ship

  I’ll Come Running

  Another Green World

Side Two

  Sombre Reptiles

  Little Fishes

  Golden Hours

  Becalmed

  Zawinul/Lava

  Everything Merges with the Night

Spirits Drifting

Eno’s wide-ranging references—big ships, dark trees—sound exotic, but they all have some footing on
Earth. Over the years, Eno has generally preferred to make records that exist
On Land
, not in space. Instead of propelling us into far-flung galaxies, his music coaxes us to reconsider our everyday surroundings. It may be head-music, but it’s not scrambled psychedelia; it’s a gentle drift into a blurred photograph. Hazy childhood memories melt into our discovery of these spaces, as we pin Eno’s points of interest onto our own psychogeographic maps.

Eno grew up in the sleepy burg of Woodbridge, Suffolk, in eastern England—not the most happening town, by any stretch—and so perhaps it makes sense that his interest in imaginary landscapes began at a young age. He was a pale, flaxen-haired boy with delicate pixie-like features, who seemed hyper-attuned to odd and otherworldly things. In one apocryphal story, documented in
On Some Faraway Beach
, Eno and his half-sister Rita claimed that they spotted a UFO in the middle of the night. He had a restless mind and craved solitude, and spent a lot of his time as a child hanging out by himself, hunting for fossils in the woods near his house.

On the surface, Eno’s small-town childhood seemed almost aggressively normal, but there was a subtly eccentric undercurrent to his early family life. His dad was a mailman who had a secret talent for playing drums and repairing clocks. Eno’s grandfather,
who was also a mailman, rebuilt hurdy-gurdies and massive pipe organs on the side. One of Eno’s prime inspirations was his uncle, who regaled him with stories about faraway lands. “He had spent some years in India,” Eno recalled in an interview with Kurt Loder in
Synapse
in 1979. “So he had these kind of strange Indian ideas about things. He’s quite eccentric, very strange, always trying out weird experiments at home, building ways of distilling liquor and stuff like that, and taming the strangest animals, like rooks. He was very important to me, because he represented the other half, the sort of strange side of life, and he was to me like all that music was as well. And I would think, ‘Where’s he coming from?’ as they would say now. I used to go and visit him regularly, once or twice a week, and he used to talk and introduce me to ideas.”

Eno entertained himself by making drawings, and playing strange games; at the age of seven, he began designing his own houses. His make-believe blueprints were fantastical and ambitious, rife with byzantine pathways and bizarre configurations—a dreamy departure from the drab 1950s backdrop of his English childhood. ‘‘These places always had strange corners and labyrinths and secret rooms,” he remembered in an interview in
Reality Hackers
in 1988. ‘‘They had streams running through them, or trees growing up
through the middle of them, or they would be suspended across chasms …”

By the time Eno started making his own solo records, in the early 1970s, he began designing songs that seemed to have streams running through them, or trees growing up through the middle of them, or were suspended across chasms. References to an alternate geography would crop up with increasing frequency in his song titles: Take 1973’s dreamy “On Some Faraway Beach,” from his album
Here Come the Warm Jets
, for instance. Or “China My China’’ from 1974’s
Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]
. There was the entirety of
Another Green World
, of course. Later on, there were ambient records like
On Land
, replete with suggestive track titles like “Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960,” and forays into the Fourth World in an album with Jon Hassell. After a while, the constant and abundant references to points of cartographic interest became a bit of an Eno trademark. In the early 1990s, when Eno abandoned his evocative natural imagery for cold cyber-futurism, releasing a single called “Fractal Zoom,” the response was fierce. “Seemingly dud title,” admonished Mark Sinker in
The Wire
. “The chief colonizer of the Imaginary Landscape, the armchair Columbus of the aural Virtual World, doesn’t need credibility leg-ups from overexposed videogame jargon.”