Customer Reviews

Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3 series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I very much looked forward to this book and when it arrived I noticed it was quite a thin volume. Quality over quantity? Alas, it was neither quality nor quantity.

To begin, the entire introduction has the author lamenting the difficulty of writing the book and that difficulty shows in the wandering, ADD approach she brings to the subject. It lacks focus and while some details of Another Green World are described, she brings nothing new to the table.

Every analogy is without merit, especially the cinematic analogies. The David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti analogy is telling in that it tells the reader that Geeta Dayal lacks the necessary skill as a writer to describe the working relationship between Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.

At one point the author writes that Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti wasn't their greatest record. This book is filled with useless bits such as that one. While such bits try to place AGW in context, they succeed only in padding this lifeless volume out to just barely over 100 pages.

In the end, the bibliography was more interesting than the book. A failed effort for a subject which deserves so much more.

The book basically delivers what most serious Eno fans will be looking for; Eno's ideas, concepts and recording/composing mentality. It touches on Discreet Music, and Roxy Music, as it applies to Another Green World. It also talks about Eno's use of musicians, giving them mysteriously vague instructions without sheet music. If you are looking for very specific technical technique, this book has very little of that, which makes sense, being that Eno seems to focus much more on exploration of artistic concepts than specific mic placement (though, I do remember little story about a microphone swinging from the ceiling or something, but I also read the 33 1/3 book about Low by David Bowie, so it could have been in that one )

Although all the books in the 33-1/3 series, including this one, are advertised as 6.6x4.8 inches, some copies of Another Green World seem to be manufactured on a print-on-demand book machine incapable of trimming books down to this small size, so the book arrived (three times ) as a 6x9 paperback, the small text block awkwardly centered on the page with huge margins. Not only does it look ridiculous, it doesn't match the others in the series, and amazon customer service proved incapable of sending one at the proper trim (shouldn't amazon warn us that the book will arrive as a print-on-demand edition that may not match the format advertised on their site)? I wasted a lot of time sending the book back and forth, and finally bought it at my local indie bookstore. And thankfully, because it's a great little book. Dayal is an astute listener, but focuses by and large on Eno's process for making this album, which relied heavily on his Oblique Strategies card deck. The story is a fascinating one, and it's hard to believe that such great music came out of a studio session where almost nothing was planned, nothing scored, and songs were built out of next-to-nothing; random sounds, loops, words, rhythms, and so on. The book (and album) proves Eno's theory that "everything comes from nothing," that even Beethoven didn't carry the Ninth Symphony around in his head just waiting to write it down. I found the book inspiring in this way, and it deepened my appreciation of Another Green World; I recommend it highly to any Eno fan as well as any musician or other individual interested in the creative process.

I am fairly big Brian Eno fan. I've followed his career and read some of the books. I love his music and the music that he has produced for others. I enjoyed this book because it doesn't focus on his career or his life, it zeroes in on a specific time in his career (Another Green World) and examines it. I think one has to understand that this album was made 35 years ago, so, unfortunately, to get the contributing artists to talk about it now, may be somewhat less informative or clear as memories fade. Knowing that, it is an excellent little study of the working process that Eno used for this album. I recommend it highly and hope that they do a few more Eno albums.

This volume serves as a decent introduction to '70s Eno and it stretches well beyond the scope of this album to discuss his first ambient records (Airports, Discreet Music), Oblique Strategies, and his collaborations with Robert Fripp as well. However if you've read Eric Tamm's book or even many of the interviews on Enoweb, you won't find much that's new here. The author misses the opportunity to dig deeper into the album in question, while doing things like wasting an entire chapter merely running off an extended list of what sort of records were being released in 1975, and an extended preface that isn't really necessary. So not much for fanatics, but a good primer for newbies.

This book was a dense and sweet delight--like a chocolate truffle that you savor slowly, hoping to make it last.