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4/8/2025

individual musings on most of brian eno's solo and collaborative body of work released between 1973 and 1979

i've been on a little bit of a brian eno kick for a bit now, his stuff has pretty much been the only music i've been listening to for a few weeks or so at this point, too. needless to say, big fan.

a big reason i was so drawn to brian eno was just how universally beloved his work seemed to be, i don't think i've ever seen an "eno hater"; and y'know, with influential acts like these you usually have some pretentious snob disparaging it with how it "isn't/wasn't new", you bring up the beatles and they're like: "people jerk the beatles off way too much, they didn't actually contribute that much to popular music! these guys that neither you nor the contemporary public of the time have ever heard of in their lives were actually doing what they were a year before!". /mu/ is a rotten place.

besides, i'd always liked ambience (though i didn't really ever actively seek it before), the FEZ soundtrack is one of my favorite game OSTs, and generally the more minimal tracks on it are the ones i like more. so, i started with Ambient 1: Music For Airports, and bumbled my way from there.

here're my thoughts on what i've listened to of his work, chronologically:

[1973] Fripp & Eno - (No Pussyfooting)

brian eno of (formerly) roxy music, and robert fripp of king crimson come together to make a weird thing.

it's cool. it's made up of two long tracks "Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls""The track's title refers to an image of nude women performing a Nazi salute that was ripped from a discarded pornographic
film magazine found by Eno at AIR Studios, which he stuck on the recording console while recording the track."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that both essentially boil down to an oscillating drone noise with beep boops and some delayed guitar over it, achieved through the unique tape looping system pioneered by eno while creating the album (frippertronics).
it's nice drone music, it's not insanely approachable as you may imagine, some may call it... EXPERIMENTAL, but as someone who's been listening to analogues of music like this for a bit now, i like it.

it's the first instance of eno making anything ambient-esque, so it's pretty important in that sense, as that would of course become the main focus of his work later on.

[1974] Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets

eno's first solo album.

so, as i said, the first thing i heard from brian eno was Ambient 1: Music for Airports, so when i listened to this... on top of him coining the term "ambient music" and pioneering that genre, i did not expect him to be such an outstanding rock musician... at the beginning of his solo career, no less. holy fuck. it's brilliant, and so, so ahead of its time. no wonder people revere this guy so much... "ahead of its time" is a pretty good phrase to describe a lot of eno's work actually, i suppose it makes sense considering how influential he ended up being.

the whole is fantastic, "Needles in the Camel's Eye", "Cindy Tells Me", "On Some Faraway Beach", such a diverse selection of tracks and all so good, but the last few are my favorite, especially the triumphant tone of "Some of Them Are Old", right before the eponymous closer... ah... it's magic. it's an amazing experience.

[1974] Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

eno's second solo album.

it doesn't really make me shit my pants from awe anywhere near as much as Here Come The Warm Jets, but it did surprise me considering this seems to be the least discussed of his first few (largely) non-ambient albums. Taking Tiger Mountain was a bit more unconventionally made compared to Warm Jets, thanks to a neat little set of instruction cards called Oblique Strategies that Eno and his friend Peter Schmidt developed for this album; these cards dictated what they'd do in the recording process.

i almost wanna call this my favorite of his non-ambient works, i really like a lot of the stuff on here. more than Here Come The Warm Jets? it's less impressive, i'd say, but i think i just innately prefer this sound, it's more whimsical. china gets mentioned a lot in the lyrics for some reason. apparently, it's supposed to be a "loose concept album"; about what exactly? yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...

a definite highlight on the album is "Third Uncle", one of eno's most well-known pieces according to something i read somewhere sometime. i don't know how many times i'll be able to say "holy fuck" throughout this whole thing and have it be able to mean something, but while i still can... holy canoli.

[1975] Eno - Another Green World

eno's third solo album, and one of his most celebrated.

it's really good, but in the context of eno's work, it means it's just okay. kidding! Another Green World sees eno dip his toes into minimalist music, a clear push towards the more ambient stuff he'd be doing after this release. most of the tracks on this album are without lyrics, rather unintrusive, and nowhere near as saturated with crazy sounds as eno's previous two albums.

establishing atmospheres is the focus here, most prevalently melancholic ones. "Golden Hours", my favorite track, captures this essence perfectly; a song with lyrics about your body getting older, with simple, somber instrumentation that makes you feel like you're slowly turning to stone, and wasting away... dust particle by dust particle.

side one swings between pop-eno and ambient-eno too much for me to really be able to fully enjoy the album one way or the other; i just find it a little weird when pop tracks like "I'll Come Running" are sandwiched between these wonderful aural soundscapes of bliss, so unlike many others i don't consider it his greatest work, but that's just a me problem! not gonna sit here and try to argue that it isn't a masterpiece, it's universally considered one.

[1975] Fripp & Eno - Evening Star

second collaboration album between robert fripp and brian eno, no swastika girls on this one.

fripp's guitar over eno's increasingly prevalent ambience, definitely much more ACTUALLY ambient in comparison to (No Pussyfooting). the album is aurally split into two sides: side one with very jovial and serene soundscapes, meanwhile the increasingly dreadful, ominous, perpetually distorting "An Index Of Metals" covers side B, which is much more reminiscent of (No Pussyfooting) with its droning; it feels like you're going mad listening to it, and i mean that in a "good atmosphere" way.

great stuff. when contrasting it against (No Pussyfooting), it's amazing to hear how much their sound evolved over the span of two measly years.

[1975] Brian Eno - Discreet Music

eno's fourth solo album, and first full foray into ambient music as he came to make it (mind you, the collaboration with fripp and this were being made around the same time; "Wind On Wind" from Evening Star is a remix of an excerpt from Discreet Music), also first to be released under his first and last name.

as of writing, it's my favorite brian eno album out of all of them, and all because of its eponymous first track spanning side one. "Discreet Music" (song) is 31 minutes of perfect, dreamy, calming ambience. i put this on all the time, it's perfect for nearly any scenario. this shit helps me focus, helps me sleep, helps me speak, whatever! ambient music is in general unintrusive, right, but few tracks are able to stay this stealthy and yet interesting at the same time. helps with focus, but you can also focus on it.

i believe it is the gold standard for ambient music.

side two's tracks are three variations on Pachelbel's Canon in D Major. it's cool, i guess... not very ambient though. it actually startles me more often than not when side one quietly finishes and loud string instruments start playing; kind of a reverse "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" situation with converting from vinyl here. for that reason, i tend to just put track one on repeat the whole time, that's what i'm here for.

[1977] Cluster & Eno - Cluster & Eno

collaboration album between brian eno and german musical duo Cluster, ambience with a heavier emphasis on synth.

it's half electronic ambience; songs like "Steinsame" (which feels almost like a somber song coming off a C64's sound chip) "Wehrmut" and "Schöne Hände" give a real sense of dreamy, mechanical melancholy. then the other half is very piano-oriented. first ambient release by brain eno that doesn't have a 30 minute song on it, too, so it feels less homogenous than they have so far (not necessarily a bad or good thing, just a trait). "One" is the odd one out, has a real spiritual, ritualistic, maddening feel to it. it's weird! but cool.

some ambience with variety. electrical variety. pushing the definition of "ambience" with some of the more active tracks, too. i like it.

[1977] Brian Eno - Before And After Science

eno's fifth solo album, and last non-ambient solo release (for a while, at least).

Before And After Science is brian eno's rock songwriting at its most mature. apparently, over the two years this album was being worked on, over a hundred songs were written for it, but in the end, only 10 were picked for inclusion. that's a lot of songs.

holy shit holy shit holy shit holy shit ad nauseaum. yea it's really good, the album is sort of a send-off for eno's rock-based compositions, but it certainly isn't half-assed. i must point out the highlight "King's Lead Hat" from among them all, brian eno's go at "new wave", which is surely a genre name that has meaning. i'm also a big fan of the vocals on "Kurt's Rejoinder", the lyrics are senseless, but they're sung in such a fun way, with eno drolly hopping from word to word.

burger bender bargain blender shine, shine, shine
and gunner burn the leader on the fuse
bundle up the numbers counting 3, 6, 9
here's anna building webs across our shoes
celebrate the loss of one and all, all, all
and separate the torso from the spine
burger bender bouncing like a ball, ball, ball
so burger bender bargain blender shine

this "sound-over-sense" approach (and the track's name) is a homage(?) to Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate", which is some interwar-period avant-garde art movement poem made of gibberish, that is also sampled halfway into the song. ...can't say i know much about that, though.

eno's transition into mainly creating ambient works is symbolized with the division of the album's tracks; side one of the album contains the more lively tracks mentioned earlier, meanwhile the latter side two's are calm and languid, kind of like the songs on Another Green World; unlike on that album, however, it's all nicely segregated, so there's no sudden discord between these two opposing moods.

i know i said this earlier with Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain... but maybe THIS is my favorite non-ambient eno album? it's a breathtaking work, it really is. all i need to do is think about the beautiful closer "Spider And I" and i start crying internally a little bit, not much a little bit just a little internally just a bit.

come to think of it, i think it just depends on which one of them i'm listening to at any given time.

[1978] Eno—Moebius—Roedelius - After The Heat

in truth, eno's second collaboration with Cluster. why they decided to credit themselves like this, i don't know.

again predominantly electronic; the album's sound, aside from the few piano-oriented pieces that are reminiscent of their preceding collaboration's spirit, imposes an overtly dark synth-dominated atmosphere, though its ambience manifests itself more often in composition, rather than passive soundscapes.

it's skewed more towards active listening than what i'd traditionally consider ambient (especially the last 3 tracks! they have vocals!), not that that's an issue or anything, but i feel it's a little... mmm... unrepresentative of the work to just call it "electronic ambience". i hate using genre labels, but i live in a world full of them, and i know not much more in describing music. phooey.

a favorite of mine is the particularly threatening and gloomy "Broken Head", one of the tracks with vocals.

i was just a broken head
i stole the world that others plundered
now i stumble through the garbage
slide and tumble, slide and stumble

slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

[1978] Brian Eno - Music For Films

brian eno's sixth solo album, one of soundtracks for imaginary movies.

a collection of tracks spanning anywhere from barely over a minute, to over 4 minutes; Music For Films is a varied album of both overt and subdued instrumentals, a kaleidoscope of ambience. quite uncharacteristic for eno.

though as a whole piece i find it quite boring at times (RELATIVE TO HIS OTHER AMBIENT WORKS), there are great selections on it; really good for picking and choosing from for what fits you at the moment. i guess this would be a nice starting-off point for anyone wanting to get into brian eno? idk.

i gotta say though: fuck track 2 and that overly loud acoustic guitar that periodically comes in. why must you startle me so, eno. why.

[1979] Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports

the one and only, the very album that coined the term "ambient music" itself. seventh solo album and first in the "Ambient" series.

i love 1/1 and 2/2, the former greatly reminds me of the very same calm and harmony that "Discreet Music" makes me feel, the piano soft as a feather. with the album's title in mind, it also evokes the image of an empty airport lobby, meanwhile you're the only one sitting there, waiting... 2/2, on the other hand, brings an atmosphere of peaceful finality; not triumph, mind you. finality.

i do not care about 1/2 and 2/1 nearly as much. both are very similar tracks that are mainly characterized by an angelic female choir. in comparison to the others, they are very cold and empty, "absent" in how they sound. ultimately, however, i find them better as "ignorable" ambience, though that's likely more because of the fact i don't find choirs by themselves that interesting to listen to.

despite that, love it to bits. i frequent Discreet Music more for ambience to put in the background, but this is equally as great for that as well. this was my starting-off point for eno as well, so it's special to me in that sense.

that's pretty much it for everything i've listened to. i'm not done exploring brian eno's works, still wanna hear everything up to Thursday Afternoon at least, but i'm taking it slow; i don't wanna just blow past everything and then end up not remembering any of it. i want to simmer in it for a while, splash around in it.

useless to be saying this, but brian eno's stuff is preeeetty cool if you haven't heard it! you shooould! he's kind of a big deaaaaal! ...maybe even the greatest deaaaaal!

oh, and with some of these collaborations: sorry if it comes off like i'm just ignoring the other composers, i'm mostly focusing on eno here... though i must say, i am interested in hearing some more Cluster; cold war west german music has always conceptually piqued my interest in some capacity.

— 7+

P.S. "ambient" counter: 22. "ambience" counter: 12.