Another Green World (1975)

Another Green World is the third solo studio album by the English musician Brian Eno (credited as "Eno"), released by Island Records on 14 November 1975. It was produced by Eno and Rhett Davies. It 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 albums.

Another Green World features contributions from musicians including Robert Fripp (electric guitar), Phil Collins (drums), Percy Jones (fretless bass), Rod Melvin (piano) and John Cale (viola). Employing tactics derived from his Oblique Strategies cards for guidance, Eno and the musicians variety of unconventional recording techniques and instrumental approaches, reflected in unusual instrumental credits such as "snake guitar" and "uncertain piano". The cover art is a detail from British artist Tom Phillips' After Raphael.

Although Another Green World received acclaim, its only contemporary chart success was in New Zealand, where it reached number 24. 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. Eno played all the instruments on seven songs, including keyboards, guitars and percussion. Among the guest musicians was Phil Collins, who had played drums on the Tiger Mountain track "Mother Whale Eyeless" 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.

The King Crimson 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 career. While his previous albums had contained rock songs, only five of the fourteen tracks on Another Green World have lyrics. Critic Ian Wade of The Quietus noted that it is "much calmer" than Eno's previous work, "smoothed into a new pastoral ambient pop". Music critic Jim DeRogatis called it an ambient and art-pop album. According to eMusic's Richard Gehr, the 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 Eno's 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.