Brian Eno

Featuring: Phil Collins, Phil Manzanera

condition (record/cover): VG+ (marks not affectig play but minimal surface noise in some quiet parts) / EX- (small tag on front and minimal wear)

SXT pressing. No promotional innersleeve.

The second of Brian Eno's post-Roxy Music solo records, recorded at Island Studios in London in spring 1974 and released that November on Island. The original vintage UK pressing on ILPS 9309 with the pink-rim labels, the first edition before the EG/Polydor European reshuffle.

Where Here Come The Warm Jets had felt like a cocktail party with the volume left on the wrong setting, Taking Tiger Mountain is more disciplined, more lyric-driven and altogether stranger. The title comes from an episode of the Cultural Revolution-era model opera repertoire. The songs that fill the record glance at international politics ("China My China", "The Great Pretender") through Eno's deliberately disorienting lens. Robert Wyatt sings backing vocals across most of side one. Phil Manzanera, Robert Fripp, Andy Mackay, Phil Collins (on a single track, with deliberate restraint) and the Portsmouth Sinfonia all turn up.

"Burning Airlines Give You So Much More" is the closest thing the record has to a hit single, a perfect three-minute miniature of paranoid pop. "Mother Whale Eyeless" is a side-two showpiece that turns repeated patterns into emotional engineering, anticipating Eno's later interest in Steve Reich. The closing title track is a sustained drone over a single chord, the song where Eno effectively wrote the manifesto for everything ambient that would follow. The original vintage Island pressing of one of the four early Eno solo records.