Brian Eno: Another Green World | Hacker News Reader

Brian Eno: Another Green World

port-magazine.com

91 pointsconanxin23 comments

i love brian eno so much. one of my favorite musicians. such a unique voice. i don't always love everyting he does, but i trust his instincts enough that i am willing to go wherever he's leading.

i am a completist, i.e., for my favorite musicians, i try to get all their records. checking my music collection, i see that i have 31 eno records. i would guess that i am probably less than half-way done.

when you count all his solo records, and the ones he made when he was in roxy music, and the collaborations he's done with david byrne and robert fripp and other artists, and the weird one-off records like "headcandy" that were only released on macos CD-ROM format, and all the records he made to accompany museum exhibits ... well, you're just never going to get them all. there is always one you don't have yet. but i will keep trying!

And how about the turn-your-tv-sideways Thursday Afternoon laserdisc, the Oblique Strategies card deck, and the Windows 95 startup sound? He sure is eclectic!

>Oblique Strategies card deck

Tim Harford (BBC/FT) talks [1] about how useful this game of random instructions is at releasing the creative process in a recording studio if it gets stuck. He says Brian Eno will pull out the cards when the flow slows down. A card might say two people should exchange instruments for a while. Anything to get people out of their comfort zones to explore new creative territory and shake things up. The results speak for themselves.

[1] https://timharford.com/2019/12/cautionary-tales-ep-7-bowie-j...

I first heard Brian Eno as kid watching Starfleet (X-bomber). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zux1-a2rRHc

and have loved his music since then.

I you are curious you can find the episodes on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST7QrlLLtLI

having spent many hours researching brian eno’s discography, that didn’t ring any bells for me. on inspection, it appears that you are talking about someone named brian may, rather than brian eno.

Never understood why Eno was known first and foremost as an ambient musician. His first four “rock” albums are as good a quartet as any 20th century artist released.

They are also great pop albums. A ton of memorable tunes in a surprisingly accessible format.

I think I discovered him when listening to the ambient station on di.fm (digitally imported). Perhaps he gained a following from that?

I discovered him through Coldplay. I can't remember which ones but he produced at least one of the early records.

I'd suspect most people are aware of him as some tangential element to a band or bands that are far better known:

Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, U2 ... almost all of it getting some subtle Eno flavor. He never struck me as overbearing or obvious on his work, generally just adding a little bit of him on top of whoever he was producing/working with.

Here I'll admit that I think Another Green World starts really strong and falls off. It's a beloved album but I'll happily take my downvotes in preferring HCTWJ.

I bought HCTWJ first but Another Green World is the one I really wore out the grooves on. And I think the ambient stuff after that is so-so.

I think it's because while he certainly wasn't the first to come up with spatial / furniture-y music - with Ambient 1 he officially coined "ambient" as a genre name (as a brand, as it were), by all accounts. That album was also probably the first introduction that kind of music for a great many people. It certainly was for me.

Also, like the iPod or iPhone, they weren't the first but they did set the standard for the product category. Ambient 1 is the same for ambient music.

Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets" is probably my favorite album of his.

"Music for Airports" (released in 1978) was the first album of his (of anyone really) to be released under the genre of "Ambient."

Love that Jeff Vandermeer is interviewing him. fun little intersection there. if you haven't read the "Southern Reach Trilogy," It's amazing.

I didn’t clue in who the author was. Thanks for pointing it out. I just finished southern reach. It’s still churning in the background.

One warning: Vandermeers writing is definitely weird. As in, at some point in every novel, you'll have no idea anymore what is real and what is fake or more likely, what is even happening. Sort of like an LSD trip in words.

He's describing a person and suddenly that person is an amorphous blob rolling over a landscape and suddenly that blob is traveling through space and time.

Personally that is not my thing and just looking at the plot summaries of his novels you might not expect it.

This interview makes the point that art has a role in the environmental movement in allowing us to evaluate and feel what it could be like to live in possible futures. I remember a similar discussion is a climate one podcast https://www.climateone.org/audio/storytelling-through-climat...

It also covers the idea of "scenius". The interwoven context that gives rise to works of genius. I found this helpful for expressing something that has been bugging me about doing art in metropolitan Japan. There is a lot of creative people, there is a lot of output, but everyone feels very siloed in their own genre, or school, or .. source of funding. I havn't had a sense of a diverse ecosystem of exchanging ideas or jointly creating of society.

My favorite Brian Eno essay is "Composers as Gardeners".[1]

Eno's collaborative, organic vision of composition is radically different from the way composition is traditionally seen -- as a very deliberately planned approach which stems entirely from the composer alone.

This really resonates with me, and he expresses it much more eloquently than I ever could.

[1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...

From the build system of Ardour, a cross-platform DAW, the code that generates the "name" for a release based on the number:

https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/blob/master/gtk2_ardour/wsc...

Last year I stumbled upon a great dicussion with some good bits by Eno: Complicité's Ways of Listening ("Simon McBurney is joined by legendary pioneers Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno and Nitin Sawhney to explore the act of listening") [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAvi0oI9fiI

The Fat Lady of Limburgh (sp?) was one of my first childhood introductions to narrative music, and has always stuck with me

I was lucky enough to have purchased a two volume Brian Eno CD box set in the 1990s which I still own. I've listened to it many, many times and still cherish it all these years later.

Ambient 4: On Land

Reply on news.ycombinator.com