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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent short guide to a landmark recording and its environment., November 4, 2009
This review is from: Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3 series) (Paperback)
Geeta Dayal's contribution to Continuum's 33 1/3 series was delayed several times; finally in print, it was definitely worth the wait. Geeta Dayal has successfully walked the tightrope between giving us an extended review of a record that (incredibly!) will be 35 years old next year and a biography of its creator, Brian Eno. What we get are touches of both--in the context of a nice, accessible guide to the total environment that went into the making of that amazing record, Another Green World. We are reminded that Eno's way of working drew on such devices as the Oblique Strategies cards, what he'd learned from other adventurous composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and the gold mine of ideas available in books he'd read ranging from Stafford Beer's ventures into cybernetics and management to Morse Peckham's exploration of the relationship between art and biology. Eno's way of working, which treated musical composition as one species of system creation and used the recording studio as a de facto instrument, lifted Eno out of the boxes that confined, e.g., the majority of "prog rockers." Among the results was removing vocals/lyrics from the center of the picture resulting in "flatter" productions where no single instrument dominates. This mindset would lead to the development of ambient music in the late 1970s/early 1980s and, later, to generative music in the 1990s. It's amazing that any one person could pull all this off--but Eno is undoubtedly a genius, having gone from visually-stunning (and cross-dressing) Roxy Music glam rocker to one of the world's most in-demand producers and most respected visual artists.
While drawing on the numerous interviews Brian Eno has given for the music press, Dayal's treatment also makes use of observations by other musicians who have worked with Eno and agreed to be interviewed for her book: Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, Percy Jones, David Toop, Leo Abrahams, and others. Dayal also draws on past statements by David Bowie, John Cale, and others. All these insights reveal the strange combination of playfulness and occasionally frustration that came with working in the studio with Captain Eno, who had been educated at an art school (Ipswich) whose instructors deliberately set about to upset all their students preconceptions about their subject matter. From those who have worked with him we get a near-unanimous vote of confidence. He knew what he was doing; his aim was to unlock hidden potential: undertaking the musical equivalent of planting seeds and then just observing what they grew into (one of the Oblique Strategies does read "Gardening, not architecture").
Another Green World itself is, to my mind, an immortal album, almost like magic set in sound. Many of its fourteen tracks are unlike anything recorded either before or since. Five are songs, with lyrics and fairly standard structure. Sample titles: "St. Elmo's Fire," "I'll Come Running," "Everything Merges With the Night." The other nine are instrumental sound paintings evoking various moods and images. Sample titles: "Becalmed," "In Dark Trees," "Little Fishes," "Spirits Drifting." The opener, "Sky Saw," begins as an instrumental but then brings in vocals, forming a kind of bridge between the two. One of Geeta Dayal's later chapters (interestingly titled using the Oblique Strategy "Ask people to work against their better judgment") walks us one-by-one through the various tracks on Another Green World, integrating commentary from the musicians that worked on these tracks often with no idea what other musicians were doing or what the results would be like.
Geeta Dayal is to be congratulated for pulling together a lot of information and insight into this one slim volume. For some reason I was expecting a book with physically larger dimensions, but that's neither here nor there. This is a useful contribution to a slowly growing literature on Brian Eno and belongs in every serious Eno collector's library.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, January 13, 2011
This review is from: Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3 series) (Paperback)
This was the second 33 1/3 book I read (the first was Hugo Wilcken's excellent Low) and I can't overstate my disappointment. Unlike Wicken's book which always kept the album in focus, Dayal's work hardly even keeps the album in sight. Despite asserting in the preface that the book would not be a biography, an excessive amount of time is spent repeating old stories about Eno's history (pre- and post- Another Green World) that have little or no bearing on the album in question. In over 100 pages, less than a dozen actually focus on the album's tracks. In short: this book is not a source for anyone interested in learning something specific about Another Green World.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspirational, July 28, 2010
This review is from: Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3 series) (Paperback)
Geeta Dayal's "Another Green World" contribution to the 33 1/3 collection is invaluable. It's a knock out, really. The book is like a tiny manifesto for struggling creative individuals who find themselves perplexed and frustrated in any number of fields as diverse as music, business management, visual arts and on and on. Business management may seem a stretch, but when you consider "cybernetics" which has had a major impact on Brian Eno's organizational skills, the connection doesn't seem so tenuous.
Dayal's book reads like a philosophical treatise in the way "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" informs its readers of philosophy without coming off as the least bit didactic. You know, the college professor lectures, and you pretend to dutifully listen and take notes as you doodle. The reader is kind of thrown into Dayal's elaborations, expansions, and amplifications on "Another Green World," and you learn a few things about Dayal in the process.
For example, Dayal is every bit the experimentalist as Eno. The author suggests playing selections of "Another Green World" and "Discrete Music" at half and quarter speeds on either turn tables or on tape machines. Dayal also suggests playing Eno's music in combos: tracks from Discrete Music played at the same time as "Music For Airports." I thoroughly enjoyed this inventiveness bordering on the playful that Eno and by extension, Dayal, engage in. I suppose, if you can't have fun in your work, then you're missing out on something. Eno and Dayal have made me more familiar with this idea of loving what you do, and doing what you love, although, it's not the first time I've encountered what, at surface seems like a New Age cliche' for folks struggling with a loss of meaning in their work. Interesting that Brian Eno mentions suffering a midlife crisis starting at age 19, and continuing unabated, for the last forty years of his life! He often asks himself, "Is any of this art that I'm doing really worth the time and effort?" If anything, Eno is honest with himself. He possesses that deep philosophical strain found in most civilizations.
There isn't an exact chronological order to this book. It kind of ping pongs from interviews with Eno in the 1980's and 1990's to extended interviews with session players and colleagues of Eno who give the book a flavor of current happenings. By this I mean, there is an immediacy to some of the interviews, that makes one feel as though the recording sessions were taking place earlier in the day. There's a real vibrancy on offer in Dayal's critique.
As mentioned in several reviews for the 33 1/3 series, these books are intended for people who are passionate about their albums/cds. The general sense I get is that as people mature and sharpen their intellectual skills in their 30's/40's/50's, they desire a more sophisticated approach or at least a defense as to why these albums matter to them. They need a structural approach to the material that inspired so much passion,and infused their existence with meaning. Gayeet Dayal lends the vocabulary necessary to articulate what it is that this music does for the listener. It's a very commendable book on that score.
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