One of the most common misconceptions in the recording of music is that the production element really isn’t all that important. To the uninitiated, the production portion of an album’s birth is merely a time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The production period is largely the time in which an album gains it’s soul and color. It’s the results of skillful and diligent production work that can take an album from the realm of good to that of legend. (Or from good to horrible.) Perhaps no one person on this planet is more adept with these elements than studio master Brian Eno. He made many influential albums, but the 1975 album Another Green World is largely seen as the gold standard of both his catalog and studio production work. Most music critics worship the ground this album walked on, but it still seems like tragically few people know about it.

Like Kraftwerk, we listen to these tracks now and they seem almost dated. Much of his work from this album inspired the entire ambient music scene. But again imagine yourself in 1975 and listening to this album for the first time. What would you make of it? You want to know what some of top singles in 1975 were? They included Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, the Bee Gees’ Jive Talkin’, and Nazareth’s Love Hurts. All good songs, except for the last one, but it should give you a context of the type of popular music at the time. And here comes Eno with this ambient masterpiece that presented music many years before its time. He practically invented the genre as we know it today. But almost more important that creating a whole genre, Eno explored the limits of the abilities of production equipment like no one before or since. It was this work that largely inspired music as a whole.

The album itself can best be described as atmospheric. Eno creates entire musical environments through painstaking production skill and the use of many different audio pieces blended into one cohesive element. My favorite track on the album “I’ll Come Running” is one of only five songs on the album that even feature lyrics. The title track of the album is also a favorite. This is the kind of music that you play on headphones, as it’s all about the use of music to create texture and scene.

Later works from the likes of Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and Massive Attack borrow largely from the trail that Eno blazed, and you better believe that the Flaming Lips‘ Wayne Coyne listened to this album a time or two. But Eno by no means stayed in the Ambient realm. He was later responsible for producing legendary work including Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Sure there had been ambient-esque music before, but never had it been crystallized into such a cohesive album.