Evening Star (Fripp & Eno album)

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Evening Star is the second studio album by British musicians Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. It was recorded from 1974 to 1975 and released in December 1975 by Island Records.

Background and recording

Evening Star and the preceding seven-show European tour by Fripp and Eno marked Fripp's first musical output after King Crimson disbanded for the first time, and his last before temporarily retiring from music to study at John G. Bennett's International Academy for Continuous Education.

Music

Evening Star, which opens with the National Geographic-esque titled "Wind on Water," maintains its ebullient tone throughout its first half. But the second side, the almost 30-minute track, "An Index of Metals," shows the sinister side of the duo, with less synthesizer bounce and more iciness. It’s less playful than the first half, and more shocking. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the 1970s, when others made ambient music that felt allegorically about life and death, the two locked in some eternal competition. Rather than co-mingle the two, Fripp and Eno split them like some kind of fork in the road.{{#if:|

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AllMusic described Evening Star as "a less harsh, more varied affair [than (No Pussyfooting)], closer to Eno's then-developing idea of ambient music than what had come before".<ref name="AllMusic">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The first three tracks consist of Frippertronics accented with effects, synthesizer and piano by Eno. Track four, "Wind on Wind", is a remix of a short excerpt from Eno's Discreet Music, released a week after Evening Star. Eno had originally intended for Fripp to use the material which became Discreet Music as a backing tape to play over in improvised live performances.

The second side of the album consists entirely of a twenty-eight-minute piece of Frippertronics-based drone music titled "An Index of Metals", in which distortion increases as the track progresses. This side of the album is described as "less playful" and "more shocking" than the first half.<ref name="Pitchfork T50">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Release

Evening Star was released in December 1975 by Island Records. It was Fripp's only album to be released during his brief retirement.

Artwork

The album's cover is a painting by Peter Schmidt. It depicts the island of La Palma as seen from Tenerife.

Legacy

Tracks from Evening Star were used in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Primary Phase. "Wind on Water" and "Wind on Wind" were included on the soundtrack to the 1983 film Breathless.

Pitchfork placed the album at number ten on its 2016 list of the best ambient albums of all time.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Track listing

All tracks written by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, except "Wind on Wind" by Eno.

Side A

1. "Wind on Water" – 5:30
2. "Evening Star" – 7:48
3. "Evensong" – 2:53
4. "Wind on Wind" – 2:56

Side B

1. "An Index of Metals" – 28:36

Personnel

• Robert Fripp – electric guitar
• Brian Eno – tape loops, synthesizer, piano
• Peter Schmidt – artwork

References

Works cited

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External links

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