Eno's New World
Review of the Bloomsbury Academic 33 and 1/3 paperback (October 22, 2009) released simultaneously with the eBook.

This is a fairly unorthodox entry in the 33 and 1/3 series of pocket books dedicated to music record albums. Only a single chapter details information about the individual 14 pieces of music on the Brian Eno Another Green World (1975) album. The rest is a discussion of Eno's career up to that point when he began to break away from the rock/pop star career he had since being part of the initial Roxy Music band. Afterwards he became much better known as the so-called godfather of ambient music and the album producer for other artists, especially U2 (The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, etc.) and Talking Heads (Fear of Music, Once in a Lifetime, etc.).

See album cover at https://i.discogs.com/gGs89O3oMGuKzaaW9_sicRzuK53rk95ju81X8wwCQC0/rs:fit/g:sm/q:...
The album cover for Another Green World by Brian Eno from 1975. Image sourced from Discogs.

Just as Eno did with his recording, Dayal makes use of the Oblique Strategies set of instructions in the writing of the book, even using some of the card texts as chapter headings. The Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas* (1975) are a set of offbeat texts printed on cue cards as assembled by Eno together with artist Peter Schmidt. They are to be used as a method of breaking out of an impasse or writer's block in an artist's work.

See painting at https://i.pinimg.com/originals/aa/93/12/aa9312a5186e72606e69c0ceb9438dff.jpg
The painting "After Raphael(?)" (1973) by Tom Phillips (1937-2022). A cropped portion of this painting was used for the album cover of "Another Green World." Image sourced from Pinterest.

I enjoyed this revisit to one of the early precursor albums of ambient music. Curiously, although Dayal details quite a lot of documentation about Eno's career and music, she doesn't mention his composition of the Microsoft Windows 95 opening theme, a piece of music (albeit short) which was probably heard billions of times.

Soundtrack
Listen to the full 14-track Another Green World album via a YouTube playlist which starts here or on Spotify here.

Footnote
* I'm somewhat surprised that the NABers (i.e. Not A Bookers) have not found and deleted this one yet. But perhaps their activities have become more restrained since the NAB Wars of 2020-2021. ( )

While only one chapter actually delved into an exploration of each song (and even then, some were rather brief), I really enjoyed Dayal's approach to one of my most favorite albums of recent years. I loved her structuring the book around some of the Oblique Strategies and all of the wonderful background placing Another Green World as well as Eno's work in general in context with the pop and new music world. I also appreciate that she stuck to the facts, more or less, no matter how abstract, rather than give a personal account of her relation to the music. AGW is definitely an intimate album, as Dayal well proves here, and I'm glad to keep my experience with it fairly pure, enhanced only by the detail of its creation. ( )

This is an OK book about a great album. The book is only partially about Brian Eno's album Another Green World. Some songs get barely a sentence of direct comment. There's a whole chapter about an entire other Eno album, Discreet Music, and enough general writing about Eno to serve as a mini-biography.