Brian Eno’s ‘Another Green World’

by Geeta Dayal
Continuum, 112 pp., $10.95 (paper)

Divided into chapters titled with rules from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, Geeta Dayal approaches 1975 experimental pop masterpiece Another Green World from a different perspective. Eno used Oblique Strategies in the studio to get out of creative funks – or rather, get into them – and Dayal makes the case that the ideas behind the album are more important than the man who dreamed them up. She follows his lateral thinking by giving insight into the oft-whimsical studio process and weaving in older interviews with Eno. It’s more a curse than a blessing that the author gets no new input from Eno, though she does interview collaborators such as guitarist Robert Fripp and former girlfriend Judy Nylon. Dayal also touches on 1975’s Discreet Music and the car accident that inadvertently led Eno into his ambient phase, which might be distracting to some, but it marked a change in tides nonetheless. As she states upfront, there are already enough Eno biographies, so there’s not much that’s revelatory here. Continuum’s 33¹/³ series is great for bite-sized nuggets, but for an album this layered and a personality so grand, you lose sight of the bigger picture.

This article appears in June 11 • 2010.

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