Scan barcode
amjammi's review
4.0
Bought in an Austin TX record shop. Read on the F train in Brooklyn. All the right vibes.
Also, the parallels between Eno and media ecology are triggering all kinds of fun new connections in my brain.
Also, the parallels between Eno and media ecology are triggering all kinds of fun new connections in my brain.
lindsayb's review
4.0
While only one chapter actually delved into an exploration of each song (and even then, some were rather brief), I really enjoyed Dayal's approach to one of my most favorite albums of recent years. I loved her structuring the book around some of the Oblique Strategies and all of the wonderful background placing Another Green World as well as Eno's work in general in context with the pop and new music world. I also appreciate that she stuck to the facts, more or less, no matter how abstract, rather than give a personal account of her relation to the music. AGW is definitely an intimate album, as Dayal well proves here, and I'm glad to keep my experience with it fairly pure, enhanced only by the detail of its creation.
aleffert's review
4.0
This is a little book about Brian Eno's album Another Green World.
I didn't really know much about Brian Eno before picking this up except that he was kind of legendary, and involved in a whole bunch of things, most notably to me, working with the Talking Heads. I picked this book up because when the author was a college student I took a class she taught for local high school students titled "Intellectual Hodgepodge." The main topics I remember were rock music and neuroscience. I have a very vivid memory of an explanation of how SSRIs (like prozac) work and watching some REM videos. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this, but sometimes I'll see her byline somewhere like Wired and think, that is pretty cool.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I didn't give a crap about this album until I picked up this book. Before I actually sat down and read it, I listened to the album a number of times and I was pleasantly surprised. I have a lot of trouble listening to stuff that's too ambient, but there were enough vocal tracks that I never felt lost and the whole thing is a pretty enjoyable and textured experience.
Having read this book, I don't feel like I learned anything deeply insightful about the album. It actually spends relatively little time on the album itself and more on Eno's working style and the stuff he produced around the album on both sides, positioning it as a sort of transitional work. Transitional in a foundational way, not in a wishy washy way. But reading about Eno's process was super interesting, his general sense of playfulness and exploration and the weird things he would do in that direction, like the time he was working with David Bowie and brought in characters for everyone in the band to play from the perspective of. Or the oblique strategies cards, which I was previously vaguely familiar with.
I didn't really know much about Brian Eno before picking this up except that he was kind of legendary, and involved in a whole bunch of things, most notably to me, working with the Talking Heads. I picked this book up because when the author was a college student I took a class she taught for local high school students titled "Intellectual Hodgepodge." The main topics I remember were rock music and neuroscience. I have a very vivid memory of an explanation of how SSRIs (like prozac) work and watching some REM videos. I forget exactly how I stumbled on this, but sometimes I'll see her byline somewhere like Wired and think, that is pretty cool.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I didn't give a crap about this album until I picked up this book. Before I actually sat down and read it, I listened to the album a number of times and I was pleasantly surprised. I have a lot of trouble listening to stuff that's too ambient, but there were enough vocal tracks that I never felt lost and the whole thing is a pretty enjoyable and textured experience.
Having read this book, I don't feel like I learned anything deeply insightful about the album. It actually spends relatively little time on the album itself and more on Eno's working style and the stuff he produced around the album on both sides, positioning it as a sort of transitional work. Transitional in a foundational way, not in a wishy washy way. But reading about Eno's process was super interesting, his general sense of playfulness and exploration and the weird things he would do in that direction, like the time he was working with David Bowie and brought in characters for everyone in the band to play from the perspective of. Or the oblique strategies cards, which I was previously vaguely familiar with.
spiderfelt's review
4.0
The most interesting part of this book was the discussion of Oblique Strategy cards as a tool for breaking creative blockages. As far as music writing goes, the author discusses the process of building the sounds in this album in an engaging way. It gave me an appreciation for the complex layers in the music I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. I wish I'd read this book while I was still studying sound production in university.
colophonphile's review
This is an OK book about a great album. The book is only partially about Brian Eno's album Another Green World. Some songs get barely a sentence of direct comment. There's a whole chapter about an entire other Eno album, Discreet Music, and enough general writing about Eno to serve as a mini-biography.
larsinio's review
2.0
Theres about 10 pages on Another Green World's tracks. About another 30 pages on the musicians assembled for its recording.
I learned a good amount about brian eno and the contemporary musicians of the time in 1975 and the history of some of the art music movements of hte later 60s. However i learned very ltitle about another green world. Its basically an afterthought. IN this purpose, the book has utterly failed.
This mediocre book made me want to read better books about Brian Eno.
I learned a good amount about brian eno and the contemporary musicians of the time in 1975 and the history of some of the art music movements of hte later 60s. However i learned very ltitle about another green world. Its basically an afterthought. IN this purpose, the book has utterly failed.
This mediocre book made me want to read better books about Brian Eno.
More...