Taking Tiger Mountain, And Other Things By Eno, By Strategy

Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (Island Records, 1974)

---. "Seven Deadly Finns/Further On" (Island Records, 1974)

---. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)/I'll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoes)"

---. My Squelchy Life (Opal, 1991)

---. Another Day On Earth (Hannibal, 2005)

Brian Eno and John Cale, Wrong Way Up  (Opal 1990)

Doug Hilsinger With Caroleen Beatty, Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (A Modern            Revolutionary Peking Opera) (DBK Works, 2004)

I started this blog back in 2020 during COVID when it seemed like all of the media we would eventually consume would have no physical counterparts. For example, the last film I went to see in theaters before everything shut down was The Rise of Skywalker, a terrible film made worse by the fact I went to see it to honor my late brother Cory, who had entered the hospital just as the film was coming out and passed before he had a chance to see it. My sister Jana and I made a trek to cineplex after his funeral to see it in his honor before it left theaters. We were the only people in the theater and there was something wrong with the audio. That was the last film I saw in a theater for at least a year. In fact, I don't really remember the first film I saw once theaters opened up again in 2021. In 2020, I was convinced that my film going experience would be bookmarked by A New Hope being the first film I saw in theaters and Rise of Skywalker would be the last. My entire film-going life being defined by a franchise film series that seemed to follow me my whole life. 

Purchasing music had a similar feeling around that time as well. I remember ordering the Pharaoh Sanders/Floating Points collaborative LP (something I want to write about at another time) and watching as each follow up email from the label described all sorts of pressing and shipping delays pushing the actual release of the album over a year after I had purchased it. Similar things happened with other records I ordered, and it seemed as if the process by which music would be put on physical formats was breaking down. This was only made worse by big name artists who decided to get back into physical formats shortly before the shutdowns of 2020 and 2021, thus clogging the already over-taxed extant pressing plants. It felt like something was ending and I wanted to think about what that ending might mean. It was within this context that I wrote about two releases for which there was no physical counterpart: Sonic Youth's Rarities 2 and the Beach Boys' Wake the World: the Friends Sessions and I Can Hear Music: the 20/20 Sessions. I wrote about them specifically because I felt that, at another time, all three of those releases would have had physical components. Both the Beach Boys and Sonic Youth are well-regarded bands with large fan bases that would have happily shelled out more money for actual tangible versions of the music. 

Obviously, movie theaters did open up as well as the pressing plants. The Beach Boys released both Feel Flows: the Sunflower and Surf's Up Sessions as well as Sail On Sailor: the Carl & the Passions and Holland Sessions in multiple deluxe formats. Sonic Youth have released a number of archival releases on physical formats as well. So, perhaps, I was a bit premature with the focus of my original blog. However, if I go back to the original Laurie Anderson piece for which the blog is named, maybe the digital future being both off and on continues to define our relationship to physical media. Therefore, the focus of the blog shouldn't just be releases that have no physical counterpart, rather the blog should encompass those releases that are both there and not, releases for which there might have been a physical release a long time ago but which doesn't exist now. In some cases, releases for which there was a physical release but that's all that exists: music that cannot be found on streaming services (aside from YouTube which still collects a lot of forgotten and physically unavailable music). 

For some reason, the first place I went to was Doug Hilsinger and Caroleen Beatty's full length cover of Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. A friend of mine introduced me to this project at my first job out of graduate school. Unless you want to purchase the very reasonably priced CD from a secondary market, the only way you can listen to this is through the same YouTube rip my friend played for me back in the 2010s (https://youtu.be/kZ5szyqkAHQ?si=eXfRTdrUxl5HVwp4). There is a link to a website where you can find an expired link to purchase the CD, a little background on the recording of the album and, most interestingly, Brian Eno's voicemail mentioning how much he liked their cover of his record. There's something so out of time about all of it: the website looks like a GeoCities site, nothing has been updated since the 2000s, and even the idea of Brian Eno leaving a voicemail for the musicians seems from another era. Doug mentions that he passed a burned CD copy of the recording to Eno at a lecture he gave, again echoing an era that has passed us in the era of streaming everything. 

The album is great: it really does find a kind of eternal pop spirit in Eno's experiments, while also sounding like a relic from 90s and 2000s alternative music culture. As Eno has said (almost to a fault) that he never intended to make pop music with his first couple of solo records, that each one he understood as a series of experiments: from the musicians recruited to the lyrics seemingly composed by chance and accident. As with his explanations of a "hands off" approach to his ambient records, I don't quite buy his arguments. Or, at least if that's where the albums started out I think the finished product(s) don't present themselves as such. In his message to Hilsinger and Beatty, Eno seemed to retrospectively say as much: 
"I wanted to say again how much I enjoyed your version of Taking Tiger Mountain... It's strange and enlightening hearing it through your ears - and very kind ears they are, too. I was very moved by many of your versions of my songs. When I did them they were very much experiments to me - I can honestly say that I wasn't thinking of them as music. I didn't know what they were. When I heard your versions I thought, Gosh, they were music after all! It was a bit like that fairy tale: "I am a swan!""

It's been ten years since I wrote an almost book length essay on Brian Eno's 2016 album the Ship (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2016/06/brian-eno-ship.html) t's been so long, in fact, that the album itself was "remastered" in 2023--as if the recording limitations of 2016 needed to be updated for the 2020s. Judging by the view count, this appears to be the most popular piece of writing on my blog. I can't decide if it's because it's good or there just isn't much written about "late period" Brian Eno records. Eno certainly thought a lot of the record: he eventually performed the album live in 2023, something he has rarely done since the 1970s (https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/feature_ships-2023.html). I'm not particularly keen on writing more about Brian Eno: he's an artist for whom there is certainly enough written. Yet, it's appropriate to return to him not just because of original material from which Hilsinger and Beatty's CD is based upon, but, because like these two more obscure musicians, Eno has a number of works which fall into the on again/off again nature of releases in the digital void. And, perhaps what is most interesting about that which is missing from Eno's officially streamable online music, is that, like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, it's some of Eno's most accessible music out there. 

In my longer Eno piece, I mentioned that Discreet Music was the first album of his that I bought. It shaped how I understood Brian Eno as a musician (or non-musician as he would say) and what his work assumedly sounded like. But, that was the Eno featured in Thomas Holmes' History of Electronic and Experimental Music, which I read religiously and helped me figure out which records I ought to listen to (https://archive.org/details/electronicexperi0000holm_l7h2/page/n5/mode/2up). There was another Eno I was almost completely unaware of when I first started getting into him: Eno the pop star. I discovered that figure in the back of my grandparents' closet where my aunt had stashed some of her records and books. She had one of those mass paperback collections of writings from Creem and in it was reprinted Lester Bang's thoughts on Eno's first song collection Here Come the Warm Jets: 

"Don't worry, Eno may like synthesizer but this isn't one of those doodley-squats like George Harrison's Electronic Sounds -- these are hard-driving, full-out rock'n'roll songs with consistent percussive force, slashingly economical guitar solos by Fripp and Roxy's Phil Manzanera (who is the most exciting new guitarist since James Williamson, whom he technically far surpasses), and the consistent acidulous edge of Eno's vocals."

Surprisingly, though being a fan of Eno after hearing Discreet Music, I hadn't heard any of his pop records and was only vaguely aware of his contributions to the first two Roxy Music records. As far as I was concerned, Eno was an academic electronic music artist who enjoyed writing essays about his various systems, philosophies and methods. I didn't actually hear Eno's pop records until purchasing the Vocals box set from 1993 (https://www.discogs.com/release/691819-Brian-Eno-II-Vocal) Not only did this box set contain most of the music on his four pop records from the 70s, it also had a few singles, b-sides and unreleased music from all phases of his career up to the early 90s. A lot of this stuff is still unavailable on streaming and hasn't been collected elsewhere. "Seven Deadly Finns," the song from which my main blog takes its name, only showed up on a weird digital ep entitled "Tracing Your Steps" in 2024. The b-side of that single "Further On" has never been reissued. The politically explicit b-side "R.A.F.," named for the Red Army Faction in Germany, hasn't been added to streaming (perhaps he doesn't want to retrace those steps). His lovely cover of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)" is nowhere to be found. 

It's inarguable that Brian Eno is one of the most influential (non) musicians alive. I always wonder, however, what of his art is most influential. Clearly, the genre of ambient music owes him a debt, however when pop musicians cite Eno as an influence are they thinking of Music for Airports  or On Land? Maybe, but the later of those two albums is quite abstract and difficult to bring into focus at times. There's his extensive production work: there's a whole genre of album (U2's Achtung, Baby and Zooropa; Coldplay's Viva La Vida; James' Wah Wah) that seems like a blueprint for what artists want when they want to take a left turn from their more pop oriented material and hire Brian Eno to help them. Then there are, of course, the 70s pop records (Devo's Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo; Talking Heads' Fear of Music and Remain in Light especially) where Eno was less a "sound for hire" and more someone who wanted to shape the sound of pop music moving forward. As with his coyness regarding the use value of ambient music, he's always been coy about his relationship to popular music. He seems to always presents himself as estranged from the processes and outcomes of what makes a popular record, although both The Unforgettable Fire and the Joshua Tree were massive successes thanks in no small part to Eno's synthesizer work on both records. His acolyte, Daniel Lanois (with whom he recorded the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks record) was instrumental in creating the sweeping heartland sound of mid-to-late 80s American (or American influenced) rock, with Eno's fingerprints all over the sound. So you can definitely make the argument that Eno has a massive influence on pop music, but his own self-constructed relationship to popular music is one of an outsider looking in. 

In 2016 while promoting The Ship, Eno discussed his favorite records with the excellent music website The Quietus (https://thequietus.com/interviews/bakers-dozen/brian-eno-favourite-records-interview/). In the preface, William Doyle offers this little bit of behind the scenes information: 

"Throughout the course of our conversation, Brian selects tracks to play out from his fairly extensive vinyl and CD collection. He has piles of things that amount to more than we have time for today, which unfortunately means that, although included for possible selection in this feature – and played for us to listen or sing along to – we don’t get a chance to delve into Neu! 2 or CrazySexyCool by TLC."

Is CrazySexyCool the biggest pop record that Eno has championed? In the 1970s, he was a big fan of Donna Summer's records with Giorgio Moroder, although it could be argued that Summer and Moroder's connections to as well as credibility with disco's dominant and subterranean cultures still places his taste somewhere on the outside. In this list of records, Eno mostly picks international music, gospel music and Steve Reich. Two albums he picks that are pop music (insofar as they sold a lot of copies and charted) are Fresh by Sly and the Family Stone and Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell. It's worth quoting some of what he has to say about each album, revealing what he thinks of pop music in general: 

On Fresh: 

"[O]ne evening in 1971 I was round the house of this bunch of London musos who I’d kind of fallen in with and they were all sort of jazz-influenced people. They used to smoke a lot of grass. I didn’t, but the room was full of enough stuff to probably affect me. They were all talking about this album and how it set the scene for something totally new, and I was interested because they were the very serious people who were into Coltrane and Charlie Parker, yet this was a pop record."

And on Court & Spark: 

"The record is such an incredibly serious record, it’s one of the most grown-up records ever made in that the things she’s talking about and thinking about are such serious and complicated emotional situations[...]I’ve always said that country music is grown-up and she came more out of country than out of pop. Whereas pop is always about the problems of adolescence really, hooking up with someone and whether she really likes you or not, when you get to country music it’s about mortgages and divorce and things like that [laughs]. It seems to me to be about real-life, grown-up issues and so seems much more interesting to me lyrically."

In both instances, Eno seems a little embarrassed for people who listen to pop music. In the first case he's somewhat ambushed by stoned, serious music friends into listening to Sly Stone. In the second, he makes a distinction between the seriousness of country music (what would he say about country music now) against the "adolescence" of pop music. For someone who had a pretty significant role in shaping the sound of popular music, it's an odd stance to take. 

Although, perhaps not: in another piece on the late, great David Thomas from Pere Ubu, I talk about the seeming outsider artist who clearly knows how to make good pop music. Eno, along with his frenemy John Cale (more about him later), seems to be the pinnacle of this figure. Eno started his recording career playing on the recording of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning, but could write pop songs as great as anyone in the early to mid 1970s. I would argue that "St. Elmo's Fire" might be one of the finest pop songs ever written. "I'll Come Running" from the same album, Another Green World, sounds like a loving parody of the very lyrical concerns Eno mentions with regard to Mitchell's album: what's more adolescent than running to do anything for your crush? He undercuts it by having the task be something mundane, rather than broadly romantic. Yet, if your crush's laces are untied, what could be a more romantic than tying their laces? 

Eno's interest in making pop music is mostly confined to four solo records he released in the 1970s: the aforementioned Taking Tiger Mountain as well as Another Green World, Here Come the Warm Jets and Before and After Science. After the latter record, Eno kept his involvement with popular music to production. Yet, oddly enough, that wasn't quite true. Every so often after that period Eno will dip his toe back into making vocal music that hews closely (if not outright embraces) popular music. The first post-70s period to mark this return is the one I'm most interested in because it seems so diffuse and unexpected. In 1988, Eno surprised everyone by contributing a song with vocals to the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme's film Married to the Mob. The song is "You Don't Miss Your Water," a song originally recorded for Stax Records in 1961. It might seem like an odd choice for Eno, but Eno has always professed his love for 50s and 60s R&B. It's a fascinating song about regret and loss, more blatantly lyrically emotional than Eno's own lyrics, and Eno takes the song seriously as evidenced by his vocal performance. There's an also perhaps a meta-commentary in the song about his own abandonment of his voice and burgeoning pop career. Maybe the well of his ambient career and started to run dry and he realized that "Burning Airlines" had given him so much more. 

This started what can only be described as a pop renaissance for Eno. Shortly after this recording, Eno recorded two projects with John Cale: a setting of Dylan Thomas poems entitled Words for the Dying and a collaborative album Wrong Way Up. The latter is Eno's first true pop oriented album since Before and After Science. It's production, sound and album art work are endearingly dated in a way, interestingly, that Eno's 1970s albums aren't. There's a lot of clanky, industrial-styled percussion and loops. What wins the listener over even in 2026 is the power and clarity in which both Eno and Cale are singing. And as much as Eno still prattled on about how the lyrics were nonsensical, it's hard not to hear "Lay My Love" and "Spinning Away" as two middle aged men genuinely moved by life. Eno's daughter had just been born and Cale was in the middle of trying to get clean after a decade and a half of drug addiction. "Spinning Away" is the song that seems to be most remembered from the album, partially due to the inexplicable Sugar Ray (they of "Every Morning" and "Fly" fame) cover of the song (https://youtu.be/MJas7Q_yXXY?si=9d4RR6e_h7J-K2dW). 

The song is about holding the beauty of the world at bay while the artist attempts to translate it into some kind of legible form. However, the singer admits he "has no idea exactly" what he's drawn. The only way he can understand this representation of what he's drawn is as "some kind of change/ some kind of spinning away" the pencil merely attempting to capture all of it but only "moving further out in time." If you think about the Eno of the early ambient works, creating within a chance environment but very specific about those works ought to be listened to as well as how they were initially conceived, there's something novel about how out of control both the creator and the universe are. He finally admits "I draw, but my drawing fades in the stars." It's worth thinking about this song in contrast to Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, an album that literally uses the stars as its inspiration. I enjoy that record, but it's never been one of my favorite Eno ambient works. Eno himself has said that the music is "very concerned with space in a funny way. Its sound is the sound of a mythical space, the mythical American frontier space that doesn’t really exist anymore." 

"Spinning Away" isn't about space as the space race or a frontier: it's about being in the middle of the very space you are trying to describe. It's an aesthetic experience of space, a sublime feeling translated through a frankly beautiful pop song. This seems to be a theme running through the record. Possibly my favorite track on Wrong Way Up is "Empty Frame," which is about something similar. Here, instead of an artist attempting to draw the spinning stars with his pencil, it's a ship of fools trying to figure out "when their poor feet would touch the land." It's only when the voyagers on the ship realize, captain or not, they seem to be "going around in circles" (again, hints of the spinning in "Spinning Away") that everything is now "the wrong way out and the wrong way up." This leads them to push "the empty frame of reason out the cabin door" and "they won't be needing reasons any more." I'm not trying to psychologize Eno (well, maybe a little) but it does seem that the Eno of Wrong Way Up isn't interested in explaining the "reasons" of the artistic choices he makes. Wrong Way Up, returning to the theme of this essay, was out of print and unavailable to stream as late as 2017, only to have been reissued in 2020. 

It's clear that Eno's return to pop music inspired him because shortly after recording and releasing Wrong Way Up he started recording his next solo project My Squelchy Life. According to the liner notes from the 2015 official release of the record, Eno recorded My Squelchy Life at the same time as The Shutov Assembly, marking the first time since the 1970s that he would release a song based album and an ambient album around the same time. Eno had wanted to release My Squelchy Life in September of 1991 but Warner Brothers, the label which was distributing Eno's label Opal at the time, wanted him to release it in February 1992. Eno refused, and the album was shelved (albeit bootleg copies, sourced from a few promotional cassettes that had been sent out to reviewers, proliferated in its absence). In 1992 Eno released Nerve Net which was sort-of a vocal album but was far more abstract and electronic than My Squelchy Life. The album would haunt Eno for the next couple of decades as various songs from the album made it onto the Cool World soundtrack, the Vocals box set as well as his 2006 solo record Another Day On Earth. Eventually the album would be officially released as a double LP and as a bonus disc to the Nerve Net CD reissue. 

I think My Squelchy Life is better than Wrong Way Up. It's a commitment to the type of songwriting Eno was doing in the 1970s more than the spotty collaboration that is Wrong Way Up. Here, Eno does have to negotiate with Cale, whose work ethic was quite different from Eno's. The opening track "I Fall Up" echoes "Sky Saw" and "No One Receiving" in its loose funk anchored by a fretless bass. Moreover, Robert Fripp plays guitar on "I Fall Up" once again recalling his work on the 1970s albums. The second track "Not To Fall In the Harness" is incredibly catchy, with Eno playing all the instruments. What is most shocking about the album is how poppy it actually is: "Stiff" clearly would have been the single from the record, given the fact that Eno shot a bunch of video footage for a possible music video that was eventually re-edited by Gary Hustwit, the director of the "Eno" documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-dnmHpUdFw&list=RDz-dnmHpUdFw&start_radio=1). There's a reason why Eno kept re-recording "Under," he recognized that it was one of his finest melodies. "Some Words" and "Over" wouldn't have been out of place on Before and After Science. Indeed, perhaps by intention or perhaps not, My Squelchy Life does sound like the album Eno should have made after Before and After Science, but Eno doesn't really do anything that he should do so it remained unreleased (it currently is unavailable to stream). 

In recent years it seems that Eno has become more comfortable with his voice, his singing and, perhaps therefore, the idea of making more pop oriented music. As I've written before, his version of "I'm Set Free" by the Velvet Underground which ends The Ship, is beautiful. Although he doesn't sing lead on any of the songs, the 2008 collaboration with David Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, has moments that echo previous collaborations between Eno and Byrne as well as unmistakable backing vocals and harmonies. The Eno-Hyde collaborative albums genuinely embrace electronic pop with Eno's voice front and center. So, perhaps, after all these years Eno feels much more comfortable with being a pop artist (although so much of the ephemera from his most pop-oriented material still remains unavailable), or perhaps its because that which we consider pop music has bent towards whatever it is Eno has been doing for all of these decades.