The Eno record I owned without knowing

Brian Eno changed the way I listen to music. His 1974 record Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) was my first foray into his large body of work, and music hasn't been the same for me since. (Must be said that this introduction came in the early 1990s; someone as avant garde as Eno wasn't exactly on every teenager's Walkman when I was in high school.) 

What makes Eno such an engaging figure, and what makes his music so inventive and inimitable, is that he pays attention to the way music is changed by elements not related to the music itself. That could mean the shape of the room it was recorded in, the mood of the artist creating it, the mood of the listener, the quality of equipment the record is being played on, accidents and happenstance with the instruments being used. Even the titles and the album artwork affect our perception of the sounds inside the package. Eno is known as the pioneer of ambient music, but even in his straightforward pop compositions, there's a sense he's more interested in the sonic nuances rather than the craftsmanship. Eno once offered up a method of jerry-rigging "surround sound" before the concept was even marketed, except his technique only involved a third low-fi speaker and a bit of wire. The instructions he gave on the back of his album sleeve were simple to follow and I still use his method today.

We know how certain songs are coloured by our memories of the times and places where we first heard them. What if someone could record an album that has those discretionary emotions built into it? It's that sort of question that Eno would ask and then attempt to pursue in his music.

Here's how Interview magazine put it: "If humans were able to hear light and parse the poetry of the spectrum, then perhaps there would be no need for Brian Eno, who seems to do it effortlessly. While the rest of us are generally content to hear sound, Eno can clearly see it. How else to explain the elaborate sonic color fields and glowing soundscapes that he creates, which feel as much like floating shapes and waves of light as they do music?"

It's not that I was never aware of these qualities in music, but now I was thinking about them in more active ways. Getting acquainted with Eno gave me a deeper appreciation for other artists who pursued music with a similar ethic – The Beatles, for instance, when John Lennon asked his engineers to make him sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a Himalayan mountaintop in "Tomorrow Never Knows", or Brian Wilson trying to capture the mood of lost innocence on Pet Sounds. While Eno's approach to music isn't entirely unique, he's been able to pursue his ideas further than any other pop artist by eschewing commercial expectations. (As inventive as The Beatles were, for instance, they still had to churn out singles for radio airplay and abide by contractual obligations.) You listen to Eno's body of work over the past 40 years and it's hard to find anyone comparable who's created such a wide-ranging catalogue of music that is exhilarating in its invention, both cerebral and unpretentious, all of it having miraculously found its audience with no mainstream radio airplay.

And I heap that praise without really liking most of his work. The albums I do enjoy are just that much more special, because I approach them with no expectations, ready to be grabbed (or sedated) in unlikely ways. The albums of his I don't particularly care for are regardless full of wonderful ideas that are likely to be inspirational to someone else with a different perspective.

I vaguely recalled that Eno pulled the name Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) from the English translation of a famous Chinese opera, which brings me to the ostensible point of this post. Having held this and other Eno albums in high regard, it was hard not to smile when I serendipitously discovered that I have actually had the original Chinese opera in my collection for the past six years – and I had, in fact, written about it on my blog a few weeks ago, completely unaware of the connection. A friend, with my previous blog post fresh in his mind, sent me a link to a record-collector website where he had been browsing for Eno rarities. My pal stumbled upon an LP that looked a lot like one from the collection of Chinese revolutionary operas I picked up in a Shanghai antiques market.

While the covers were distinctly different, the painted figures on both were alike, with their capes and pistols and feisty poses. The title, though, took me aback:Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera. Looking carefully at the Chinese writing on both this cover and my own, it looked like I had a match. I just had to figure out if the writing was indeed the title, and not something generic found on all Chinese records at the time, such as, "Another fine platter of clanging and caterwauling presented to you from Chairman Mao's personal collection," or "Stereo, also playable mono."

A bit of crowdsourcing on Facebook confirmed it. A couple of the translations offered up by friends were Taking Tiger Mountain by Wisdom and Taking Mighty Tiger Mountain by Wit.

Realizing that I now had both Tiger Mountain records, I pondered that aspect of Eno that makes him and his work so admirable – his authenticity. His own experiences and dreamlike perception of the world are at the heart of all his music, and I like to imagine that his own story of coming across this title might be as memorable as my own. 

One video, two songs: "Under" (1993), "Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)" (1974):