MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS ~ Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

As my most purchased album, this is a prime candidate for my most loved album. I bought it on vinyl when it originally came out in 1974, then on cassette, CD and now as a download.  This is the album where Eno's use of Obscure Strategy Cards to direct or wrong foot his creative process starts to be experimented with. I remember being fascinated with trying to discern how the layering of sounds interacted, discovering somewhere in the back a little sqeak of a noise that was perhaps once the starting point for an idea that got abandoned. On vinyl the album ends with the grooves being caught in an endless loop, something you could only really do in that format. This album set the template for me of the sort of music I love to love - adventurous, arty, discordant, odd, exciting music, that's still strangely accessible.

He was interviewed on the radio at the time and he talked about noticing the similarities between reggae and waltz rhythms and what emerged from that was the track Back In Judy's Jungle. https://youtu.be/r3mrcxek67A

There's the proto-punk of  the Third Uncle which proceeds at a absolutely furious pace and descends by the end into outright cacophany with what sounds like a guitar, highly amped being played with a bow or a chair leg, take your pick. It remains for me a track that shows what the musical potential for punk was before it had even happened, something that punk, once it did arrive, never really fully explored.
https://youtu.be/2zSrkb5pkrQ

Put A Straw Under Baby is composed like a surreal lullaby that half way through has the Portsmouth Symphonia bursting in as if trying to wake the baby up.
https://youtu.be/xVajcgZk2Tc

The True Wheel starts off in a sort of ploddy rock mode that gradually turns the dial up as it becomes more avante garde, with a middle section where a recording of a string section is played backwards ontop of the original recording.
https://youtu.be/FByM0r-VOLc

After the eccentric rock /pop of his first album Her Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy resolutely places itself as an experimental album, with nonesense lyrics and often bizarre musical conjunctions. For me its a wonderfully daft, delightfilled album, simultaneously both serious and playful. It was Eno revelling in the potential of where ideas let free from his absolute total control would lead him.

After this album came Another Green World and his interest being drawn by the electronic landscaping of Cluster / Harmonia. What ultimately flows from that are his Ambient albums. We very rarely hear him sing nowadays, and the inventiveness and dry wit to be enjoyed in the Dadaesque lyrics of Taking Tiger Mountain, is hardly ever seen again. However much of a humourless brainbox he can sometimes appear to be, this is Brian Eno at his most oddball and human.