How the ‘one singular vision’ of Brian Eno’s Another Green World changed music
- Written by: Dean Biron, Teaches in School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology
Now a suite of bespoke apartments, the 17th century chapel at 8 Basing Street, Notting Hill in London once housed a recording studio.
Following in the clomping footsteps of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, in the northern summer of 1975, ex-Roxy Music member Brian Eno booked the premises at a daily rate of several hundred pounds to record his third solo album.
Eno came to Basing Street with a very sketchy plan. Essentially, the plan was to not have a plan. At first this approach became an ordeal of crooked paths, blind alleys and generalised straw-grasping.
Three months later he emerged with Another Green World, one of the most sublime and influential records ever made.
A transmission from another galaxy
Eno’s first two post-Roxy Music solo albums – 1973’s Here Come the Warm Jets and 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) – hinted that he was primed to cut ties with conventional rock methods and sounds.
Even more telling was his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp (at the time cast adrift from his own monolithic prog rock outfit, King Crimson). Their album No Pussyfooting featured extraordinary “mirrored room” cover art and two elongated, gently quavering tracks evocative of American minimalist composer Terry Riley.
Even with these omens, Another Green World arrived like a transmission from another galaxy. It seamlessly merged five (sort-of) conventional rock songs with nine highly-distinctive instrumental fragments.
There had never been anything like Fripp’s coruscating “Wimshurst guitar” solo on the typically atypical Eno song, St. Elmo’s Fire. There had never been anything to resemble the sumptuous, stately drift of The Big Ship (used to great effect in the 2015 film Me and Earl and the Dying Girl).
No ostensible rock artist had ever come up with something like the title track, a snippet of tranquillity that became widely recognised as the title theme to the BBC’s Arena documentary series.
Just as unheralded was the sampling of the distant lilt of children’s voices in a playground, as featured on Zawinul/Lava.
A plethora of influences
Much has been made of Eno’s use of “oblique strategies” cards when making Another Green World. Developed with his artist friend Peter Schmidt, the card system works to encourage lateral thinking and overcome cerebral impasses.
But while this proved valuable in dealing with heat-of-the-moment tangles in the studio, there are more crucial contexts in terms of the music’s provenance.
First is the mindboggling range of influences impinging upon Eno around that time. Steve Reich’s manipulated sound collages, African American doo-wop and gospel music, German bands Can and Cluster, Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu, the Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, Mondrian’s paintings, cybernetics, avant-garde cinema …
The list is virtually endless.
This broad palette fed into the incredible variety of projects Eno was involved with around that time. He had recently established the Obscure Records label, which introduced composers such as Gavin Bryars, Jan Steele and Michael Nyman to wider audiences. He was also on the cusp of what would be momentous liaisons with David Bowie and Talking Heads.
Then there was Eno’s own Obscure release Discreet Music, which came mere weeks after Another Green World and more or less invented the ambient genre. Arriving in the same absurdly fecund final months of 1975 was the Fripp/Eno album Evening Star (featuring An Index of Metals, a sinister epic which anticipated the rise of the noise and dark ambient categories by a decade).
‘One singular vision’
A further key to Another Green World can be found in its creator’s claimed role as a “non-musician”. Just as punk was emerging as a scruffy, do-it-yourself antidote to bloated classic rock, Eno was revelling in his own self-taught status and upending the inevitable career trajectory foisted upon rock and pop stars.
With no interest in fronting a band or being in the spotlight on stage, by 1975 Eno had begun to see making music as analogous to painting. Another Green World reflects this philosophy. Unlike almost all other rock albums from the period, it is a meticulously constructed collection of studio “atmospheres” that could never be duplicated in a live setting.
With reference to Eno’s oeuvre, critic William Doyle says
Another Green World brings together the strands of Eno’s work that came before it while simultaneously laying the groundwork for everything that he created afterwards, in one singular vision.
Music writer Geeta Dayal takes this even further: she argues that listening to the album, one sees “the pathways of all the electronic music that came before or after it, travelling through that record like so many streams”.
Another Green World finds Brian Eno hovering at the intersection of left-field rock and ambient tranquility. It is a masterpiece of tact, introversion and serenity that has only become more relevant in a 2025 world inundated with ostentation, hubris and bluster.
Authors: Dean Biron, Teaches in School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology
