Another Green World is the third solo studio album by English musician Brian Eno (mononymously credited as "Eno"), released by Island Records on 14 November 1975. The album marked a transition from the rock-based music of Eno's previous releases towards his late 1970s ambient work. Only five of its fourteen tracks feature vocals, a contrast with his previous vocal albums.
Produced by Eno and Rhett Davies, it features contributions from a small core of musicians, including Robert Fripp (electric guitar), Phil Collins (drums), Percy Jones (fretless bass), and Rod Melvin (piano). John Cale plays viola on two tracks. Employing tactics derived from his Oblique Strategies cards for guidance, Eno and the backing lineup utilised a variety of unconventional recording techniques and instrumental approaches, reflected in unusual instrumental credits such as "snake guitar" and "uncertain piano". The album's cover art is a detail from British artist Tom Phillips' "After Raphael".
Although the album received widespread critical acclaim, its only contemporary chart success was in New Zealand, where it reached #24. Contemporary reception has been similarly positive; several publications, including "Rolling Stone", "NME" and "Pitchfork", have named the album among the greatest of the 1970s and of all time.
Production.
"Another Green World" was recorded at Island Studios in Notting Hill, London, in July and August 1975. Brian Eno originally viewed his new album as an experiment and entered the recording studio with nothing written or prepared. For the first four days in the studio, Eno failed to be productive. To look for new ideas, Eno turned to his Oblique Strategies cards and began coming up with new ideas, as he had done on his previous album "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)".
Some of the album credits for the instruments have fanciful names that describe the sound they make. The "Castanet Guitars" are electric guitars played with mallets, electronically treated to sound something like castanets. The "Leslie piano" is an acoustic piano fed through a Leslie speaker. Eno described the "snake guitar" and "digital guitar" thus: "the kind of lines I was playing reminded me of the way a snake moves through the brush, a sort of speedy, forceful, liquid quality. Digital guitar is a guitar threaded through a digital delay but fed back on itself a lot so it makes this cardboard tube type of sound."
As on his previous two solo efforts, Eno had several guest musicians contributing to "Another Green World", but also worked on more solo material. Seven songs on the album have Eno playing all the instruments himself, including keyboards, guitars and percussion. Among the guest musicians was Phil Collins, who had played drums on "Tiger Mountain" and got along with Eno, which led to calling him and his Brand X bandmate Percy Jones to play on "Another Green World". On recording the album, Collins recalled:
[Eno] gave us all a bit of paper and we made lists from one to 15. Eno said "No. 2, we all play a G; No. 7 we all play a C sharp"; an so on. So it was like painting by numbers... [Eno] used to love me and Percy; we'd go in and run through our dictionary licks and he'd record them and make a loop of them.
Guitarist Robert Fripp, who had worked with Eno on "(No Pussyfooting)" and "Here Come the Warm Jets", performed the solo on "St. Elmo's Fire". Eno asked Fripp to improvise a fast guitar solo that would imitate an electrical charge in a Wimshurst high-voltage generator; this was credited as "Wimshurst Guitar".
Music and lyrics.
"Another Green World" represents a turning point in Eno's musical career. While his previous albums had contained quirky rock songs, only five of the fourteen tracks on "Another Green World" have lyrics. Critic Ian Wade of "The Quietus" noted that the album is "much calmer" than Eno's previous work, "smoothed into a new pastoral ambient pop". Music critic Jim DeRogatis called it an "ambient/art-pop classic". According to eMusic's Richard Gehr, the album's music veers from the guitar-oriented experimental rock of "Here Come the Warm Jets" and "Taking Tiger Mountain" to the synthesiser-oriented ambient minimalism of his subsequent work. Its minimalist instrumentals are scattered among more structured art-rock songs. According to AllMusic's Steve Huey, most of the album consists of "paced instrumentals that, while often closer to ambient music than pop, are both melodic and rhythmic". The instrumental tracks mark a transition between Eno's earlier rock songs and his later instrumental works in which texture and timbre are the most important musical elements. Dave Simpson described the album as creating a "largely song-based electronic pop", while AllMusic's Jason Ankeny described it as an art rock album.
"Sky Saw" opens the album with the instruments constantly changing structure, except for one of the two bass parts which plays the same pattern throughout. Eno later re-used portions of "Sky Saw" for a track on "Music for Films" in 1978 and a song on Ultravox's 1977 debut album. "Songs like 'The Big Ship'", writes Mike Powell, "start on A and linger, accumulating countermelodies, magnifying themes, staying the same and yet revealing new sides with every turn." "In Dark Trees" and "The Big Ship" are two songs on which Eno plays all the instruments, namely the synthesizer, synthetic percussion and drum machine. These instrumental pieces and others like "Little Fishes" have been described as "highly imagistic, like paintings done in sound that actually resemble their titles".
To create the lyrics, Eno would later play the backing tracks singing nonsense syllables to himself, which he would then form them into actual words and phrases. This lyric-writing method was used for all his vocal-based recordings of the 1970s. The tracks that do feature lyrics are in the same free-associative style as Eno's previous albums, with a "gently whimsical and addled" sense of humour.
Release and reception.
Released on Island Records 14 November 1975, "Another Green World" did not chart in either the United Kingdom or the United States. However, the album's contemporary critical reception was mostly very positive. Henry Edwards of "High Fidelity" wrote positively of the album, claiming it to be Eno's "most accessible to date". Tom Hull of "The Village Voice" felt that, although it "wouldn't be fair to say that "Another Green World" is Eno's best album", the album is definitely "his easiest to love". Charley Walters of "Rolling Stone" found it a "major triumph" that Eno's creative risks "so consistently pan out", and said that it is "indeed an important record—and also a brilliant one". Negative reviews of the album focused on the lack of the rock songs from Eno's previous albums. Jon Pareles, writing in "Crawdaddy!", found its electronic excursions less challenging than Eno's previous progressive rock songs and remarked: "This ain't no Eno record. I don't care what the credits say. It doesn't even get on my nerves." Lester Bangs of "The Village Voice" was lulled by much of the music and said that "those little pools of sound on the outskirts of silence seemed to me the logical consequence of letting the processes and technology share your conceptual burden". Robert Christgau, who originally gave the album an "A−" in his review for "The Village Voice", admitted that he resisted the album at first, but ultimately grew to "love every minute of this arty little collection of static (i.e., non-swinging) synthesizer pieces (with vocals, percussion, and guitar)". In "" (1981), he said that the record's 14 pieces can be appreciated both individually and as a whole, calling the whole "the aural equivalent of a park on the moon – oneness with nature under conditions of artificial gravity". In 1977, "Another Green World" was voted the 11th best album of 1976 in "The Village Voice"'s Pazz &amp; Jop critics' poll. Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it second on his own list.
In 2004, Virgin Records began issuing remasters of Eno's albums in digipaks. Modern reception of "Another Green World" has been more unanimously positive. Steve Huey of AllMusic called it "a universally acknowledged masterpiece" and "the perfect introduction to [Eno's] achievements even for those who find ambient music difficult to enjoy". Mike Powell of "Pitchfork" hailed it as Eno's definitive album, and "Q" magazine wrote that it was "breathtakingly ahead of its time". J. D. Considine, writing in "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" (2004), said that Eno used the recording studio for the album "as an instrument, molding directed improvisations, electronic effects, and old-fashioned songcraft into perfectly balanced aural ecosystems". In his review for "Blender", Douglas Wolk said that the audio clarity of the remastered edition "makes it easier to pay attention to every [song's] subtle complexities".
Legacy.
The album has made several top albums lists. Pitchfork placed the album at number ten on its list of greatest albums of the 1970s. In 2012, "Rolling Stone" ranked the album number 429 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and then at number 338 in the updated 2020 list. In 2003, "Blender" placed the album on its list of "500 CDs You Must Own: Alternative Rock", calling it "experimental yet accessible" and "exactly the kind of album that Eno devotees long for from him today".
An extract from the title track was used as the theme music for the BBC Two series "Arena".
Personnel.
Credits adapted from "Another Green World" back cover.
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References.
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Works cited