Brian Eno
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

THE REVIEW

Sounds Out of Place,

or How to Capture the Mountain Tiger with the Oblique Strategy

That Brian Eno was a genius, we had already understood from the time of Roxy Music and the way he reinvented their sound behind Bryan Ferry's back. It then happened that Ferry grew weary of that movement behind him and after various furious arguments, he invited Eno to the emergency exit, so the Roxy Music were never the same, and the genius of electronics set off not alone but in good company (Phil Collins, Phil Manzanera, Robert Wyatt, and Andy MacKay were with him) towards a path that led him to an artistic renewal more significant than the Roxy ever achieved in the following years. This man has the merit (and blame) of having "invented" ambient and aleatory music, and it's for albums like "Music For Airports" or "Discreet Music" that he's remembered, but before "boring" us with long instrumental suites and more or less daring experiments, and especially before producing U2, he released a "rock" tetralogy, if it can be called that (and it can't) which approaches in a speculative and personal way the various genres from glam to ambient.

Today we talk about "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)", Eno's second solo album, released in 1974. The rock element is still very present but is continuously ridiculed, and Eno uses all the instruments at his disposal to mock its function: the songs keep escaping from a fixed structure, we are surprised by the sudden entries of choirs and symphonic inspirations, the synthesizers work precisely on slide guitars... this is just part of what we can find in the ten songs. Eno's voice is the first thing that keeps changing: first, it's very high ("Back In The Judy's Jungle"), then tomb-like ("The Great Pretender"); if in some tracks we have solemn and oriental-inspired movements ("The Fat Lady Of Limbourg", "China My China"), in "The Third Uncle" we find ourselves overwhelmed by incendiary and robotic punk. In a single album, we move from the lullaby of "Put A Straw Under Baby" to the synthetic waltz of "Put A Straw Under Baby" and again to the choral sweetness... always of "Put A Straw Under Baby"! Logically, we could say that Eno's message is that pop-rock as we knew it is ending its vital functions and that the only way to give it energy is to infuse it with the sap of electronics and compositional and methodical upheaval (the so-called oblique strategies)... but one wonders if after the treatment it is still rock. The reviewer and critic should not assume the responsibility, and the arrogance, of the answer: the English artist already takes care of it with "The True Wheel", a track that summarizes all the sounds and suggestions of the album. We know we are at a turning point.

It becomes pointless to talk about everything that precedes and follows Eno's work (punk iconoclasm, prog technicality, dance detachment, ambient minimalism, and collaboration with Bowie and Iggy Pop) when all the questions and anxieties of this musical panorama of extreme changes fade into the piano lightness of "Taking Tiger Mountain," the zen poetry that closes this masterpiece. If by "mountain tiger" we mean something like an embryonic imagination, which does not yet exist, and I don't mean a chimera and a utopia, but which can really exist and will exist and will transform, then we can say that the eccentric Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno with his oblique strategies has captured this something in a net that escapes any musical definition and classification.

fromPut A Straw Under Baby"
"Let the corridors echo,
As the dark places grow
Hear Superior's footsteps
On the landing below.
There's a place in the orchard
Where no-one dare go
The last one who went there
Turned into a crow