Free Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
Authors: Geeta Dayal
to which Eno stacked his own voice on top of itself, building up airy harmonies with his own voice—a trademark Eno technique. Eno’s voice is paper-thin, like a piece of phyllo dough; it stacks well on itself, giving way to a layered, golden richness.
The next two instrumentals—“Becalmed’’ and “Zawinul/Lava’’—are beautifully spare piano-driven pieces, and foreshadow the elegant, minimal piano work on
Music for Airports
. “Zawinul/Lava,” in particular, sounds a lot like “1/1’’ from
Music for Airports
—they’re even in the same key—and the two pieces actually sound quite good played simultaneously. The title, of course, was likely inspired by Joe Zawinul, the late jazz keyboardist with the Weather Report (the “lava” in the title is anyone’s guess.) “Zawinul/Lava” also features the somewhat creepy sounds of children squealing in the background; the melancholy keyboard melody is overlaid with a treated recording of a playground. (If there was a beat to go with the melodies and children’s voices, it would sound a lot like a Boards of Canada tune.)
“Everything Merges with the Night,” the next song on the album, is possibly the sappiest song ever writtenthat grapples with either a romance with a woman named Rosalie (“Rosalie/I’ve been waiting all evening/Possibly years, I don’t know’’) or, more tantalizingly, Chilean socialism and cybernetics experiments. The clue to the latter theory, here, is the verse “Santiago/Under the volcano/Floats like a cushion on the sea/But I can never sleep here/Everything ponders in the night.” It is conflicting imagery like this that keeps Internet fans awake at night; Eno lyrics for songs like “Everything Merges with the Night” have been picked over and debated on various websites to a mind-bending degree.
“Spirits Drifting,” the final piece on
Another Green World
, is an ethereal instrumental with an extremely long fade-out. The long fade-out, another signature Eno touch, gently transitions the listener back to reality after having been immersed, for the past hour or so, in another sonic world. Artful uses of fade-ins and fade-outs can make you feel as if you’re stepping into a scene that’s still happening when you leave it; Eno would use this technique to great effect on albums like David Bowie’s
Low
and U2’s
The Joshua Tree
. The fade-out also makes a conceptual statement, as Eno wrote in his essay “Ambient Music,” that “the music is a section from a hypothetical continuum and that it is not especially directional: it does not exhibit strong ‘progress’ from one point (position, theme, statement, argument) to a resolution.”
‘‘Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor.” / ‘‘Don’t be frightened of clichés’’
The year 1975 was an eerily prescient year for popular music. Rock narratives tend to skip neatly from the psychedelic 1960s to the 1977 punk rock explosion and the post-punk that followed it. Outside of Led Zeppelin and a few other juggernauts, the mid-1970s often get short shrift by biographers, while punk gets lionized for cutting through the bloated prog-rock dreck that preceded it.
In a recent biography of Brian Eno,
On Some Faraway Beach
, David Sheppard paints a dim picture of popular music in the UK at the time: “In 1975, chart pop seemed to grow blander by the month, withonly pockets of resistance … the UK singles chart continued to be the preserve of Philadelphia soul crooners The Stylistics and Caledonian heart-throb popsters The Bay City Rollers. Meanwhile, Rod Stewart’s career-defining
Atlantic Crossing LP
and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett-saluting
Wish You Were Here
would soon book in for protracted album chart residencies. Prog mastodons such as Yes and Genesis still roamed the earth …”
Plenty of people hated the mainstream music of 1975 while they were living through it. In retrospect, though, 1975 was a year packed with subtle accidents and shifts
The next two instrumentals—“Becalmed’’ and “Zawinul/Lava’’—are beautifully spare piano-driven pieces, and foreshadow the elegant, minimal piano work on
Music for Airports
. “Zawinul/Lava,” in particular, sounds a lot like “1/1’’ from
Music for Airports
—they’re even in the same key—and the two pieces actually sound quite good played simultaneously. The title, of course, was likely inspired by Joe Zawinul, the late jazz keyboardist with the Weather Report (the “lava” in the title is anyone’s guess.) “Zawinul/Lava” also features the somewhat creepy sounds of children squealing in the background; the melancholy keyboard melody is overlaid with a treated recording of a playground. (If there was a beat to go with the melodies and children’s voices, it would sound a lot like a Boards of Canada tune.)
“Everything Merges with the Night,” the next song on the album, is possibly the sappiest song ever writtenthat grapples with either a romance with a woman named Rosalie (“Rosalie/I’ve been waiting all evening/Possibly years, I don’t know’’) or, more tantalizingly, Chilean socialism and cybernetics experiments. The clue to the latter theory, here, is the verse “Santiago/Under the volcano/Floats like a cushion on the sea/But I can never sleep here/Everything ponders in the night.” It is conflicting imagery like this that keeps Internet fans awake at night; Eno lyrics for songs like “Everything Merges with the Night” have been picked over and debated on various websites to a mind-bending degree.
“Spirits Drifting,” the final piece on
Another Green World
, is an ethereal instrumental with an extremely long fade-out. The long fade-out, another signature Eno touch, gently transitions the listener back to reality after having been immersed, for the past hour or so, in another sonic world. Artful uses of fade-ins and fade-outs can make you feel as if you’re stepping into a scene that’s still happening when you leave it; Eno would use this technique to great effect on albums like David Bowie’s
Low
and U2’s
The Joshua Tree
. The fade-out also makes a conceptual statement, as Eno wrote in his essay “Ambient Music,” that “the music is a section from a hypothetical continuum and that it is not especially directional: it does not exhibit strong ‘progress’ from one point (position, theme, statement, argument) to a resolution.”
‘‘Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor.” / ‘‘Don’t be frightened of clichés’’
The year 1975 was an eerily prescient year for popular music. Rock narratives tend to skip neatly from the psychedelic 1960s to the 1977 punk rock explosion and the post-punk that followed it. Outside of Led Zeppelin and a few other juggernauts, the mid-1970s often get short shrift by biographers, while punk gets lionized for cutting through the bloated prog-rock dreck that preceded it.
In a recent biography of Brian Eno,
On Some Faraway Beach
, David Sheppard paints a dim picture of popular music in the UK at the time: “In 1975, chart pop seemed to grow blander by the month, withonly pockets of resistance … the UK singles chart continued to be the preserve of Philadelphia soul crooners The Stylistics and Caledonian heart-throb popsters The Bay City Rollers. Meanwhile, Rod Stewart’s career-defining
Atlantic Crossing LP
and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett-saluting
Wish You Were Here
would soon book in for protracted album chart residencies. Prog mastodons such as Yes and Genesis still roamed the earth …”
Plenty of people hated the mainstream music of 1975 while they were living through it. In retrospect, though, 1975 was a year packed with subtle accidents and shifts