BRIAN ENO vinyl "TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN BY STRATEGY" LP 1974 UK Roxy Music
$
99
Favourite Auctions
To save auctions to your favourites, please login
If you don't have an account, please register
Description
1974 original UK pressing.
A gatefold sleeve just for art's sake, so that two more iterations of the Peter Schmidt artwork can be included.
One of the three or four greatest albums Eno ever recorded. This is the height of his progressive rock/art rock/experimental/eccentric and beautiful pop song phase. Later (soon) would come his invention of ambient music, and a retreat from the glorious excess represented here.
In some obscure way this is based on a Chinese opera of the same name, a Maoist product of the Cultural Revolution, but this is both more fun and much more free. If he wants to use a manual typewriter as percussion, if he wants to use the intentionally hapless Portsmouth Sinfonia as sweetener (more of a citrus blast really), if he wants to sing about monsoons and burning airlines and spies with numbers whose tongues are more sensitive than a spectrograph...
...well he just does, and makes of it what I hesitate to call a pop song. I don't want to give you the idea that this sounds like pop. The melodies are tuneful, the lyrics are hilarious, but the musical textures are unbelievably adventurous and inventive. At the time (I bought this at the time) we felt that Eno was, either as a member of Roxy Music or by himself, the figurative Beatles of the era. But "we" weren't a very big audience, and shortly he would retreat from even his cult following and disappear into a more esoteric and less emphatic presence/absence...while making side careers as record producer (Talking Heads, U2), and visual and video artist, along with probably a lot of other things I'm not even aware of.
This particular artifact, a first UK pressing from 1974, incudes a run-out "lock groove" which I don't honestly know if it does or doesn't appear on other pressings (but which I guarantee isn't on the CD or streaming). For those who follow these things, the matrix numbers are A-3U "Rays" and B-4U "Rays".
NM/NM- Very slight surface sound at start of Side 2, doesn't affect the music. Very nice UK gatefold sleeve with a bit of edgewear.
Free shipping and insurance.
I would guess: if you're reading this, you will utterly love this music.
price rating
