Another Green World - Production

Production

Another Green World was recorded at Island Studios in London during the months of July and August 1975. Brian Eno originally viewed his new album as an experiment and entered the recording studio with nothing written or prepared beforehand. For the first four days in the studio, Eno failed to be productive. To look for new ideas, Eno turned to his instructional cards, the Oblique Strategies, and began coming up with new ideas as he did with his previous album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Some of the album credits for the instruments have fanciful names that describe the sound they make. The "Castanet Guitars" are electric guitars played with mallets and are electronically treated to sound something like castanets. The "Leslie piano" is an acoustic piano miked and fed through a Leslie speaker with a built-in revolving horn speaker. Eno described the "snake guitar" and "digital guitar" by stating "the kind of lines I was playing reminded me of the way a snake moves through the brush, a sort of speedy, forceful, liquid quality. Digital guitar is a guitar threaded through a digital delay but fed back on itself a lot so it makes this cardboard tube type of sound."

Like his previous two solo efforts, Eno had several guest musicians contributing to Another Green World. Unlike his previous albums, Eno worked on more solo material. Seven songs on the album have Eno playing all the instruments himself, including electronic and nonelectronic keyboards, guitars, and percussion. Among the guest musicians was Phil Collins, who played drums on Tiger Mountain and got along with Eno, which led to calling him and fellow Brand X bandmate Percy Jones to play on Another Green World. On recording the album, Collins recalled

" gave us all a bit of paper, and we made lists from one to 15. Eno said 'No. 2, we all play a G; No. 7 we all play a C sharp'; an so on. So it was like painting by numbers... used to love me and Percy; we'd go in and run through our dictionary licks and he'd record them and make a loop of them."

Robert Fripp, who worked with Eno on (No Pussyfooting) and Here Come the Warm Jets, performed the solo on "St. Elmo's Fire". Eno asked Fripp to improvise a lightning-fast guitar solo that would imitate an electrical charge between two poles on a Wimshurst high voltage generator.