Essential Albums
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1984 - Though Brian Eno’s <i>Ambient</i> series grew out of a simple purpose—to improve upon the canned music that Eno had endured while travelling through airports—its innovative approach would go on to affect film scoring, electronic music and pop music in general. For all their evocative power, these four long tracks are remarkably simple in construction. Each is centred on samples of wordless singing and acoustic piano, with rumbling assistance from a synthesiser. Eno wasn't the first to work with tape loops and abstract compositions; avant-garde composers had been doing it for decades. But his <i>Ambient</i> works felt remarkably different. This doesn’t sound like music conceived by fringe musicians; it sounds like a transmission from an unknown future. In many ways, it was—the techniques Eno introduced on this album would be so thoroughly adopted by DJs and film composers that by the '90s, these peculiar sounds were relatively familiar to even casual music listeners. But despite its expansive influence, <i>Ambient 1</i> retains its unique ability to seduce and frighten new listeners.
- Brian Eno’s first two solo albums, 1974’s <i>Here Come the Warm Jets</i> and <i>Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy</i>, weren’t too far from what he had been playing in Roxy Music just a couple years prior: catchy, glam-infused art rock from which unexpected details (a nonsense phrase, an eerie swatch of backmasking) sprouted as colourfully as the feathers in Eno’s boa. But by the next year’s <i>Another Green World</i>, the properties of his universe had gotten stranger. Straight lines turned soft and bendy; a coppery tarnish crept across his music’s once-bright hues. The shift is right there in the opening “Sky Saw”, whose murky swirl suggests a kind of aquatic dub funk, and “Over Fire Island”, in which Percy Jones’ fretless bass bubbles like magma beneath Eno’s dolefully drizzling synth lead. <br /> Eno had toyed with improvisation and stream-of-consciousness lyrics previously, but <i>Another Green World</i> marked a step further into the unknown: It was written and recorded on the spot, and he used his <i>Oblique Strategies</i> cards—an aleatory, free-form brainstorming aid—to point him toward new sounds, methods and tone colours. His invention of ambient music was still a few years away, but you can hear him edging toward it in the contemplative rhythms of “In Dark Trees”—which anticipates the globe-trotting explorations of 1981’s <i>My Life in the Bush of Ghosts</i>, with David Byrne—and “Sombre Reptiles”, featuring a slinky sound Eno termed “snake guitar”. But for all his experimenting, he didn’t ignore his pop instincts: “St. Elmo’s Fire” is as immediate and indelible a tune as he’s ever written, right down to its vividly surrealistic lyrics.
- Brian Eno’s love for manipulating sound and creating "accidents" between musicians worked marvelously to his advantage on his solo debut. He gathered 16 seemingly incompatible artists (from bands like Roxy Music, Hawkwind and King Crimson) and directed them with dancing moves and nonsensical lyrics to subliminally guide their playing. Songs like “Baby’s on Fire” and “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”—where brilliant ‘60s pop harmonies, surf guitars and futuristic sounds blend—are glam-pop gold, sounding hugely catchy despite their improvisational, free-associative beginnings.