… All these were ways of giving the message: ‘that isn’t the important bit, necessarily.’ That’s only one part of the landscape.”
If
Another Green World
had a filmic equivalent, it might be in some of the early scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate movie
Barry Lyndon
, also released in 1975. The movie, a period film based on a William Makepeace Thackeray novel, stretches for almost three hours, moving at a stately pace. The soundtrack is all baroque and classical music—Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Handel. The most striking feature of the film is not the soundtrack, but the cinematography.
Barry Lyndon
doesn’t look like many other films out there; every scene is shot in what appears to be natural light, and several scenes appear to be lit with the aid of candles alone. Kubrick did employ artificial light, and the most cutting-edge studio techniques, throughout the making of the movie. But by shooting with special lenses capable of a huge aperture, Kubrick was able to shoot the film under extremely low-light conditions—like a candle’s dim flicker—giving the whole movie a naturalistic feel.
In one particularly painterly early scene from the film, which happens to be one of Eno’s favorite scenes, Barry Lyndon, the protagonist, leaves home to seek his fortune. As he leaves, all you see is a sweeping landscape of misty green Irish countryside, with the foggy sky and craggy mountains soaring behind him. Barry, in contrast, looks so very small on his horse in the foreground; you almost don’t notice that he’s there. He seems to melt right into the cinematic grandeur of the backdrop. The background becomes the foreground, and vice versa.
“When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground,” said Eno in an interview with
Artpress
in 2001. “It was the background that interested me. As in a painting, I wanted to get rid of the element that up to then had been considered as essential in pop music: the voice.”
Most of the tracks on
Another Green World
, nine out of the 14, don’t have lyrics at all; they are purely instrumental pieces. “Most people don’t realize that that’s the proportion—that was quite a bit of sleight of hand,” Eno told
The Wire
in 1995. ‘‘People tend to think of that as a song record. But it isn’t—it’s an instrumental record with the odd bit of vocal.”
Part of the reason why
Another Green World
is perceived as a “song record” is because the five trackswith words, besides being distinctive and memorable, are evenly spaced through the album; about one in every three tracks has lyrics. There’s “Sky Saw,” the first track, “St Elmo’s Fire,” the third, “I’ll Come Running,” the sixth, “Golden Hours,” the tenth, and “Everything Merges with the Night’’—the thirteenth. The songs could have just as easily been organized like David Bowie’s
Low
, released in 1977 (an album in which Eno played a legendary role)—with all of the tracks with lyrics on one side, and all the ambient instrumentals on the other. Instead of having a clear separation, on
Another Green World
there is no divide; the ambient tracks are integrated smoothly and evenly into the whole record.
Another reason why
Another Green World
’s instrumental tracks blend so well into the so-called “song album’’ is because the songs are, on average, much longer than the instrumental tracks. The songs are also slower and more meditative, blending in well with the ambient pieces—there aren’t any nervy and spastic rockers, like “Baby’s on Fire” on
Here Come the Warm Jets
, or “King’s Lead Hat” on
Before and After Science
.
Most of the ambient pieces on
Another Green World
are only about two minutes long; some are even shorter. They’re more like segues. The songs, in contrast, are all three minutes or longer.
Low
is the opposite—thesongs on Side One are sharp, jagged little
If
Another Green World
had a filmic equivalent, it might be in some of the early scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate movie
Barry Lyndon
, also released in 1975. The movie, a period film based on a William Makepeace Thackeray novel, stretches for almost three hours, moving at a stately pace. The soundtrack is all baroque and classical music—Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Handel. The most striking feature of the film is not the soundtrack, but the cinematography.
Barry Lyndon
doesn’t look like many other films out there; every scene is shot in what appears to be natural light, and several scenes appear to be lit with the aid of candles alone. Kubrick did employ artificial light, and the most cutting-edge studio techniques, throughout the making of the movie. But by shooting with special lenses capable of a huge aperture, Kubrick was able to shoot the film under extremely low-light conditions—like a candle’s dim flicker—giving the whole movie a naturalistic feel.
In one particularly painterly early scene from the film, which happens to be one of Eno’s favorite scenes, Barry Lyndon, the protagonist, leaves home to seek his fortune. As he leaves, all you see is a sweeping landscape of misty green Irish countryside, with the foggy sky and craggy mountains soaring behind him. Barry, in contrast, looks so very small on his horse in the foreground; you almost don’t notice that he’s there. He seems to melt right into the cinematic grandeur of the backdrop. The background becomes the foreground, and vice versa.
“When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground,” said Eno in an interview with
Artpress
in 2001. “It was the background that interested me. As in a painting, I wanted to get rid of the element that up to then had been considered as essential in pop music: the voice.”
Most of the tracks on
Another Green World
, nine out of the 14, don’t have lyrics at all; they are purely instrumental pieces. “Most people don’t realize that that’s the proportion—that was quite a bit of sleight of hand,” Eno told
The Wire
in 1995. ‘‘People tend to think of that as a song record. But it isn’t—it’s an instrumental record with the odd bit of vocal.”
Part of the reason why
Another Green World
is perceived as a “song record” is because the five trackswith words, besides being distinctive and memorable, are evenly spaced through the album; about one in every three tracks has lyrics. There’s “Sky Saw,” the first track, “St Elmo’s Fire,” the third, “I’ll Come Running,” the sixth, “Golden Hours,” the tenth, and “Everything Merges with the Night’’—the thirteenth. The songs could have just as easily been organized like David Bowie’s
Low
, released in 1977 (an album in which Eno played a legendary role)—with all of the tracks with lyrics on one side, and all the ambient instrumentals on the other. Instead of having a clear separation, on
Another Green World
there is no divide; the ambient tracks are integrated smoothly and evenly into the whole record.
Another reason why
Another Green World
’s instrumental tracks blend so well into the so-called “song album’’ is because the songs are, on average, much longer than the instrumental tracks. The songs are also slower and more meditative, blending in well with the ambient pieces—there aren’t any nervy and spastic rockers, like “Baby’s on Fire” on
Here Come the Warm Jets
, or “King’s Lead Hat” on
Before and After Science
.
Most of the ambient pieces on
Another Green World
are only about two minutes long; some are even shorter. They’re more like segues. The songs, in contrast, are all three minutes or longer.
Low
is the opposite—thesongs on Side One are sharp, jagged little
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