Fripp & Eno - (No Pussyfooting)

Released - November 1973

Genre - Ambient

Producer - Robert Fripp & Brian Eno

Selected Personnel - Brian Eno (Synthesiser/Keyboards/Treatments); Robert Fripp (Guitar)

Standout Track - The Heavenly Music Corporation

This is an album I've been familiar with for a good couple of years now, but I've literally only just decided today to include it on my list. My principal reason for not including it initially was purely down to the fact that it's a difficult album to listen to and really enjoy, and it's not one I go to particularly often. But it's an album of such huge historical significance, particularly with regard to a lot of music that I've gone on to really appreciate and get a huge amount of, that it feels churlish not to include it purely on grounds of its relevance. Throughout history, there are many albums that have been declared as "the birth" of a certain genre, and it's often a case of overstatement. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is often called the birth of psychedelic rock, despite the fact that it was actually a series of reactions and responses to a number of gradually evolving ideas in the music of a wide number of artists at the time. But it's very difficult to view (No Pussyfooting) as anything other than the definitive birth of ambient music. Not intentionally, of course - it would be another two years before Brian Eno sat down and deliberately tried to produce a piece of music with the specific aims and intentions of ambient music in mind, resulting in Discreet Music, and it would be another five years before he coined the term "ambient music" itself with Ambient 1: Music For Airports. But in (No Pussyfooting), he produced the first example of music that obviously had similar effects and qualities as the genre he would later spawn.

Unlike ambient music, the aim behind (No Pussyfooting) wasn't specifically to create music that could acclimatise to the textures of the room around it or that could be listened to as easily as it could be ignored. Such specific targets and goals for the genre were all to come. For the time being, all Eno was working on was the idea of treating sound in unusual ways to see just how much it was possible to achieve with limited resources. Since his first tentative forays into the world of music after his upbringing in fine art, Eno had never been attracted to the idea of playing conventional music on instruments, but rather to the idea of treating and manipulating sound, and most of his early work consisted of tape loop experiments with simple sound fragments, like striking a pen on a lamp, to see how one sound could be altered and shifted. As such, the VCS3 synthesiser became his instrument of choice due to its ability to manipulate samples of sound, and his work with Roxy Music consisted mostly of lending weird atmospherics and sonic textures to their music. Of course, by the time (No Pussyfooting) emerged, Eno's time with Roxy Music had finished (as I'm progressing alphabetically through each year, my review of their brilliant second album For Your Pleasure is still to come), and he decided to focus more attention on his own obsession, the treatment of sound to create unusual results. This he did in two ways, firstly by starting work on a more conventional "rock" record of his own that approached conventional songwriting from the same off-kilter, weird standpoint as early Roxy Music, and would result in 1974's Here Come The Warm Jets.

But Eno was keen to devote more time to a purer sonic experiment. He had devised a method of setting up a tape machine with too loops connected together so that it could record sound at the same time as playing back sounds recorded earlier at varying pitches. All he needed was an instrumental performance to subject to the process. Enter Robert Fripp. Fripp has become one of a handful of people, along with the likes of Peter Gabriel, to escape the unfashionable prog rock label. While early King Crimson had been the epitome of pure prog, as the genre became less and less fashionable, Fripp became less interested in complicated song suites and more interested in the idea of approaching rock music from the angle of sonic experimentation rather than conventional songwriting, much like Eno. Crimson had been on a moderate hiatus since 1971's Islands and when they returned in 1973 with Larks' Tongues In Aspic they were a very different beast, with their focus now very much on weird soundscapes rather than orchestral epics. As the 70s went on, Fripp would associate himself more and more with art rock's pioneers like Eno, Gabriel and David Bowie rather than his fellow prog rockers, who struggled to maintain a commercial following. As such, in 1973 it seemed like Fripp's changing attitude to music made him a prime candidate for Eno's experiment.

Put simply, the result of that experiment, which is titled "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and takes up all of side one, is more or less what you'd expect from its premise. The distorted, shimmering aural textures are the sound of Fripp's guitar, distended and distorted by Eno's tape loop treatments, while Fripp plays a second languid, slightly distorted guitar solo over the top of his earlier recording. As a whole, it's as fascinating piece of work and ably demonstrates Eno's mindset that even a single sound sample can be treated in such ways as to render it completely alien and endlessly transmutable. Given that it arose purely out of blind experiment rather than design, the piece does lack some of the warmth and sense of care of Eno's later ambient music. Music so formless and full of space and devoid of rhythm or structure is usually great to relax or even sleep to, but (No Pussyfooting) is harder - the music here isn't quite as airy or empty as ambient music would come to be, but feels harsher and weirder, more like some sort of alien soundscape than an experiment with the absence of music as ambient would become. Still, as difficult as it may be to sit through and really enjoy, it's an enduringly fascinating piece and a wholly crucial harbinger of a whole new movement and genre in music that was to come.

The second track, "Swastika Girls," was recorded almost a year later after Fripp and Eno decided they wanted to try the experiment a second time in order to generate enough material to actually release a record, is less successful. It's recorded using exactly the same techniques (albeit with a few more synthesiser tweaks from Eno himself on top of Fripp's guitar work) but feels a little too busy for the experiment to really work. Fripp's decision to try a faster bit of finger-picking rather than a slower, mournful wail as on the first track, results in there being altogether too much going on when we listen to the sounds layered on top of each other and treated as before. Anybody who does put on (No Pussyfooting) to try and sleep to and manages to drift off to "The Heavenly Music Corporation" might just get a rude awakening when the more hectic buzzing of "Swastika Girls" kicks in. But, difficult to listen to as it may be, it serves as a further indicator of Eno's theory that music production offered infinite possibilities and far more room to experiment than had been taken advantage of up to that point. In many ways, Eno in the 70s was following on from what Phil Spector did in the 60s, who first posited the theory that the recording studio could be used to alter the way we perceive sound and could sculpt a song using recording techniques as much as with instruments. The experiments showcased on (No Pussyfooting) are like a radical evolution of the idea, and as such place Eno as the next in a line of important producers over the twentieth century who would go above and beyond the idea of producing music just to entertain in order to really push the boundaries of what sound can do.

Fripp would continue working with King Crimson over the subsequent years, producing very different material to their earlier work, before taking a hiatus from the music industry as a whole (only to return later in the 70s as a regular collaborator with the likes of Gabriel and Bowie), while Eno would continue pushing his solo musical career into uncharted territories and looking for similarly unusual artists to collaborate and discover new things with. The Fripp & Eno partnership would reunite twice, once in 1975 for Evening Star, which is again interesting and actually more thoughtful and contemplative than (No Pussyfooting), but ultimately less memorable due to its repeating of an old formula, and again for The Equatorial Stars decades later in 2004, which manages to be easily the most enjoyable and beautiful album the duo produced together. But it'll be a while before I get around to reviewing that - we're still only on '73, after all...

Track Listing:

All songs written by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.

1. The Heavenly Music Corporation

2. Swastika Girls