Brian Eno
Taking tiger mountain by strategy

THE REVIEW

An alien collector, or interstellar anthropologist, who amusingly contemplates everything he has gathered over years of raids from the planet Earth's junk shops, and who for fun constructs songs by haphazardly mixing that personal exotic bric-a-brac.

It's all strange, extravagant... but it flows smoothly... it runs... which in the end, even if alien, is pop music.

I've been listening to this album for years and have never been able to define it, nor to say in a few words the sensation it provokes in me every time, that is, a mix of pleasure, astonishment, and slight vertigo, as if the space/time coordinates were zero point one different from usual.

Then, of course, one can be more precise and technical and talk about different musical traditions interacting with each other almost without showing it, about the love from the art school for puzzles and surreal combinations, about the retrieval of childish and nursery-like things, about the recording studio that becomes an alchemical laboratory, etc., etc., etc...

One can say anything, but the essential is elsewhere, and that is in that sensation I attempted to define and in the fact that this music really seems to come from another planet, that you almost manage to see those vaporized and happy androids whistling these little songs on the street.

Because if it's true, as it is true, that here with decent advance a bouncing, frantic and somewhat neurotic sound is invented, meaning half new wave, it is equally unequivocal that this is a very, very fun album.

And I whistle too if you want to know (obviously only in quality of vaporized, not android)..

I use it as an antidepressant. And it works. But it hasn't always been like that. In the glorious times that were, to my young ears, this album seemed like a fabulous tease.

What was, for example, track two? A quadrille for old aunts, lost at a reception and holding tinkling Bohemian crystals filled with a delicious rose liqueur corrected with acid?

And seven? A lullaby for bored toddlers of a half baroque half futuristic planet?

And the song of the third uncle? The new rock'n'roll coming from who knows where? A parody?

And what was that wave-like, grated neurotic sound, that rasped certain songs, the result of the little chemist's experiments? And who knew the strategy to capture the tiger, maybe the fat lady of Limbourg?

And what about that monotone narrating voice? And above all to whom did it belong? To a bored dandy, to one who happened to pass by, to a cicisbeo or always to that little chemist forced to report the data of his extravagant musical laboratory to an uninterested audience?

I, poor little (not chemist), was baffled, even though the fat lady of Limbourg and the song of the third uncle suited me a bit since, despite the unsettling and unheard sounds, they were, after all, just an effective ballad and a classic rock tune.

And the explosive albeit somewhat caricatured guitar riffs of "Third uncle" I already aligned them with the super powerful ones of the Barrett's "Astronomy Domine" and the schizoid man of Professor Fripp. Mind you, these are things that have nothing to do with each other, except for the fact that they make you jump out of your chair.

Then there was another thing...

In “The great pretender”, the last track on side A, at minute 2 and 19, amidst crazy and undecipherable percussive sounds and among God knows what else, mechanical cicadas make their appearance or, if you prefer, something that looks like mechanical cicadas... and they don't just go away immediately, oh no!!!... and, indeed, in a kind of crescendo, they increasingly take the stage, only to spend the last thirty/forty seconds in perfect solitude. Now, if only this...

It's just that, I don't know by what trick, that sound never ended, it hesitated on the last chirping and if you wanted you could listen to it for hours. That the record player's needle, which usually lifted itself up, remained firmly in place.

More than music of the metal machine, music of the metal cicadas!!!

Now I wouldn't want to be wrong, but I think the cicadas also appeared at the end of the last track of side B (I say I think, because in the CD edition, there are no more at the end of side b). And the little game was repeated the same. To be clear it wasn't my record player being completely insane. And I don't think it was a defect in the album and, if by chance it was, it doesn't matter, sometimes the avant-garde comes by accident

But anyway, apart from the cicadas, the fat ladies, and the uncles, the rest seemed strange and boring. Mostly boring.

Well, I was little and I was wrong. It was just a record too far ahead. So much so that even today you can listen to it to exhaustion and discover something different every time.

And certainly I couldn't know that one could make music with a blender and a deck of instruction cards. And, whirl/whirl, out came that sound that wasn't there before.

But then, I've already said it, that sound is just a part... there's also the spark of genius... the spark of someone walking between rocks and cliffs, one day with the shoe on one foot, one day with the shoe on the other...

There is that anonymous and somewhat affected voice that is actually sly, ironic, surreal...

There is that the mood of the album is just the surface, a flashy coat of paint, but in every piece a quantity of things boils over that leaves you bewildered and dazzled...

There's that after a robotic rock, a rococo lullaby starts and after a guitar scraping and a synth that throws everything into chaos...

One thing is not there...

Except in the last track, which is a kind of rest after having gone on a ride...

There is no feeling, but the feeling in those early seventies, barring rare cases, was just rock rhetoric...

And anyway, there can't be feeling in a blender...