Brian Eno

I personally like Taking Tiger Mountain the best. His collab. with David Byrne - My Life In the Bush of Ghosts is also totally captivating and he has a great collab. with Robert Fripp that I forget the name of...have a burned CD without name...but its awesome too. You're on a good track with Eno and may want to check out other artists that he worked with or produced, like Modern Lovers, early Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club's first 2 albums,...yeah.

Well, I personally would look into "Ambient 1: Music for Airports". It's a bit younger than your mentioned records, it's from 1978. This release is said to have basically created the ambient music. It's beautiful, you can listen to samples here: link to Ambient 1 on Amazon.

Ciao,
Marcus

I second both 'My life in the bush of ghosts' and 'Music for airports' and would also add that 'Discreet music' is fantastic.

Really like Eno...You should also try his latest 'Another Day on Earth'..very tasty. I also second his 'Music for Airports'..in fact all his ambient series of recordings are good.

-Nac...

Yeah, love all those 4 Eno vocal albums from the 70s. That first song on Warm Jets is classic and includes possibly Robert Fripp's best guitar solo ever, or at least my favorite. He really goes insane, even seems to leave Eno spellbound, almost like the song takes a different lyrical direction after the solo. Could he really have been improvising those strange, surrealistic lyrics as some say? Incredible, if true. They did a live album called 801 Live that is also essential from that period.

Taking Tiger Mountain is great too. There's a band called Head of Femur and one of the highlights on their debut a couple years ago, Ringodom or Proctor, is a cover of "The True Wheel" from that second album. It's a faithful, yet much more manic cover. It's almost like they have a little better feel for where the song could go than Eno did at the time. Of course, they don't have Phil Manzanera playing some of his most flipped-out lead guitar ever, but you can't have everything! It rocks much harder than the Eno/Manzanera version and drops the guitar solo so has a different and much more spastic feel, while still being faithful, albeit less subtle.

A similar thing happened when I heard the cover of Eno's "Somber Reptiles" by the band Tracker a couple years ago on their Polk CD. It gave me a whole new appreciation of the original, while also loving the new version. I wish even more bands would include a well done cover on their albums to help me keep the cobwebs off my record collection

Anyway, my favorite Eno album is the two Virgin box sets. Oh wait, that's cheating, so the real answer is Before and After Science. I've always loved this one the most. 5 stars. Seems to be a near perfect combination of his new wave leaning quirky pop on the first side with the beautiful, more ambient leaning pop on the second side. Just listen to "Julie with..." or "Spider and I" from that ethereal second half - actually the whole side is something very special. But the first side is no slouch either. Of course you lose a little of that division with the CD. Complex rhythms, funny lyrics and great musicians throughout including some very tasteful drumming by Phil Collins and both Fripp and Manzanera togther on guitars. Beautiful recording as well. I have a JPN Polydor vinyl copy that sounds just amazing, although the US domestic release sounded fine too, and so do all the CDs I've heard.

I was going to pun that you should listen to "Before and After Science" before and after anything else, but Davey beat me to it.

To get a full sense of Eno's tremendous influence, I would also make sure you check out the Bowie trilogy, Low/Heroes/Lodger, and Talking Heads' Remain in LIght.

Yeah, Remain In Light often gets singled out, but it's really a Talking Heads trilogy as well. All are just as good to me, even though these days More Songs has moved to the top and Remain In Light to the bottom. Love that wacky "King's Lead Hat" Talking Heads anagram song that closes out the first side of Eno's Before and After Science. He had just started working with them at the time. Also love those first couple Roxy Music albums with Eno. Fun times when Eno was mixing it up with Ferry and Manzanera. Lots of great albums over the years with Eno's name on them someplace.

Slowdive's Souvlaki is another great one, and you even have Eno lending support on a couple tracks, one of which is titled "Here She Comes" and is slightly reminiscent of Eno's own "Here He Comes" which opened the second side of Before and After Science. And the following "Souvlaki Space Station" is just too cool, with all the swirling, churning, ebb and flow effects. Seems like every time I play it, I think it's one of the best of the 90s, and the opening "Alison" is surely one of the most beautiful songs of the 90s. And on the ones that Rachel Goswell takes the lead with her incredibly sexy voice, I could listen all day, floating away in a dreamworld. This is like the Cocteau Twins at their best, but with the amps and effects cranked a bit and some of those (at times) overly sweet Liz Fraser gossamer threads stripped away. Yeah, this is one of my favorites, but guess that should be a different thread, eh?

Fripp & Eno - 'Evening Star'

I can't believe that no one has mentioned Fripp & Eno's 'Evening Star.' Simply beautiful ambient atmospheres, with a little more going on than in 'Music For Airports' (which I like, don't get me wrong).

That's the one I was thinking of...and of course now King Crimson could enter the scene if this was a different thread.

Sounds definitely interesting. With regard to "Music for Airports", I just searched the internet for some samples and information on "Evening Star" and found a paragraph somewhere about "Music for Airports" which basically says that this album was REALLY intended to be played at Airports. Never thought that the album title would have had such a real background.

This may be a stretch, but I would also recommend Philip Glass's "Music with Changing Parts." Eno and Bowie saw a performance of this in 1970 or so, and you can here echos of it in Eno's stuff.

Have to resurrect this one... if only to bang on about the first track on Warm Jets. That's Chris Spedding, not Robert Fripp.

 

And the nothing short of awesome "Baby's On Fire" solo is always attributed to Fripp too. Sounds nothing like him. That's 3 minutes of Paul Rudolph doing the real shredding, and Fripp doing the underneath drone accompaniment.

 

And final recommendation. 801 Live. Bill MacCormack's bass playing is just something you could listen to for ever.

and here i was thinking it was neither fripp nor spedding, but manzanera.

either way, it's one of the most whack guitar solos.
 

Edited by TheWuss - 8/19/10 at 6:06am