Customer Reviews

No Pussyfooting

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The late Charlton Williams said, back in the days before CD's, that if he was stuck on a deserted island and could only take 10 albums, he'd take 10 copies of "No Pussyfootin'." Could I argue. Robbie once said that its the album to play on a boom box on one hill and go sit on another hill. Bil replied that it's also a goo one to put in one end zone of a football field and listen from the oposite end zone. A few people have said "Have you got anything else we could listen to?"

My only problem with the album is that the titles are misnamed. "The Heavenly Music Corp" goes great with the scene in "The Boys From Brazil" where the fat German women walk into the room and awaken all the blonde nazi girls being used to breed Hitler clones. Also, the music goes great with documentaries of Concentration camps. "Swastika Girls" on the other hand is very heavenly and reminds me of casinos. If you don't believe me, go to the back of the first floor casino in the Imperial Palace in Biloxi, MS. Close your eyes, and it's there!

I love this album. No words can describe my feelings. I'll leave it at that.

...that looping didn't catch on after this record was released. but then, what could anyone do with the medium after Fripp and Eno perfected it? This album is certainly ahead of it's time, and ahead of our own time for that matter. This is music from the future.

Track one, even though it was recorded more than thirty years ago, still sounds new and fresh, even after scores of listenings. It is made up of two guitar lines - but one of them is an incredibly complex, ever-changing loop that continually unfolds out of itself and interacts with the lead line. It's almost like Fripp is soloing over an entire band. but beware the sonic onslaught of the track's last three minutes - if you don't have good speakers the low notes will probably rip your woofers apart.

Track two presents a sunnier, happier side of looping, this time with Eno supplying the loop on his synthesizer. Fripp's entry (at 7:42) is fascinating. Throughout the solo he plays riffs and figures that he still uses to this day.

A great record for listening to in a large room in the dark, lodly.

Back in the late 80s a friend at work recommended Fripp and Eno. I finally found a cassette of "No Pussyfooting" and was totally engulfed by the sounds that Fripp and Eno created on this album. I cannot believe what year this album is from when I look back at the stuff I was listening to. All that time No Pussyfooting was sitting for a decade waiting for me to discover it.
To me, this album is almost perfect, sure there are some technical glitches. Do I care? No. This was music that I was looking for, even though I didn't know it. Even now when I listen to Ambient and Dark Ambient music I use No Pussyfooting as a benchmark to judge them by.

There is no better and never will be.

Although I have to say I'm not a big fan of Robert Fripp's, Brian Eno's eclectic career as a producer, composer and arranger always throws up something different. 'No Pussyfooting' was his first real attempt at a pseudo-solo album. As can be seen from the photo on the cover, he was still a member of Roxy Music at the time, but obviously felt limited by their 'pop' image in terms of his music making. Ironically Eno was probably the most outrageous looking member of Roxy Music (which maybe one of the reasons Brian Ferry wanted him to leave). But since beginning his solo career his music has become the very epitome of the "non-image". Music that never speaks to the emotions or the intellect but simply floats in and around your environment or situation.

On the 'Heavenly Music Corporation' most of this ambience is created by Fripp, developing a technique that would later be described as 'Frippertronics'. Track after track is layered on top of each other as Fripp plays dense harmonies in tune with each other. In fact most of the background track is just a dense layer of protracted harmony, dispensing with any notion of melody altogether. But when Fripp starts to improvise his pseudo-stadium rock solos, the effect can be mildly soothing. At the end of the piece Fripp's dive-bombing effects are quite startling, endlessly looping a false ending. 'Swatika Girls' sounds mostly like the work of Eno but unfortunately is not as inventive as the first track. Too many instruments vie for attention and when Fripp's improvisations come in at the end, they sound like the cry of something uncontrollable trying to break free from a repetitive 'Groundhog Day' backing track.

Back in the late 80s a friend at work recommended Fripp and Eno. I finally found a cassette of "No Pussyfooting" and was totally engulfed by the sounds that Fripp and Eno created on this album. I cannot believe what year this album is from when I look back at the stuff I was listening to. All that time No Pussyfooting was sitting for a decade waiting for me to discover it.
To me, this album is almost perfect, sure there are some technical glitches. Do I care? No. This was music that I was looking for, even though I didn't know it. Even now when I listen to Ambient and Dark Ambient music I use No Pussyfooting as a benchmark to judge them by.

There is no better and never will be.

"No Pussyfooting" is the start of well known collaborations within Fripp & Eno and start of a new musical ideas in compositions and plying. This is a experimental ambient music, at this time there was not anything like this, and i'm proud with this noordinary album, between 10 0000000 albums this cd sapareted with his original sound, playing and thinking.Two of a represented composition's here is a resalt of mindblowing experiments within TWO VIRTUOSO MUSICIANS and it's works, it gaves me huge impression, and well known Frippertronics from that time start. If you know something (not only from this period), like this please tell me.

This first collaboration between Fripp and Eno joins two vastly creative minds under the same banner, exploring new territory in studio techniques and expanding musical perceptions and borders, setting the stage for the dawning ambient genre, and even for the less ambitious 'new age' genre. There are many fine moments on this disc, as it urges you along on a spectacular journey of soundscapes and overlapping layers which seem to seep into every nook of your soul. I give it four stars because I think their second collaboration, 'Evening Star' is more successful, but this one is well worth investigating. 'Evening Star' is quieter in mood than this, if that helps you to choose between the two. At points, Heavenly Music Corporation makes me think of how the soundtrack to Blade Runner would have sounded if Jimi Hendrix had sat in on the sessions. Swastika girls is more tinkly and jangly and less to my liking.

No Pussyfooting is in my view the finest album of so-called ambient music ever made. Hypnotic, dreamy, captivating... Listen w/ the lights off and let it take you away. None of Eno's other ambient works achieve the heights found here -- thanks to the beautiful and inspired guitar work of Robert Fripp, particularly on The Heavenly Music Corporation w/ its soaring, sweeping, swooping lines. Just an indispensible album that belongs in any music fan's collection. 1000 stars.

It's hard to over-state the shock this album caused me on its original release in 1973. Being only 14, I had heard nothing like it before. As an impoverished schoolboy, I could not believe that anyone would pay good money for what seemed rubbish at the time. (Indeed I'm not sure EG Records had any idea themselves who would buy it) I cannot remember whether Eno had quit Roxy Music by the time of the release of 'No Pussyfooting', but he had already established a short but magnificent track record with the band. For many of us, 'For Your Pleasure' was and remains a masterpiece. We knew Eno contributed some of the more offbeat elements to Roxy, but we had no idea how weird his solo albums would seem to our unaccustomed ears.

I borrowed the LP from a schoolfriend and, when he returned to collect it, I asked him incredulously how he could listen to it. "I can work to it," came his reply, which seemed shocking at the time. We were used to giving 100% of our attention and involvement to the likes of Deep Purple's 'Made in Japan' and Bowie's 'Ziggy Stardust'. The idea of music which you could ignore seemed ridiculous. The music you listened to was a social and political statement -- you could get beaten up at bus stops by other schoolboys simply for saying you preferred Slade when you should have said T. Rex. Before the advent of video and videogames, music was far too important to be classified simply as wallpaper.

Well that was then, and by now I must own nearly 100 ambient albums and many Eno or Eno-tinged CDs. I have to say that in retrospect this album owes as much to Robert Fripp as it does to Eno. Its sound is closer to 'Lark Tongues' or 'Red' than it is to 'For Your Pleasure', 'Warm Jets' or 'Tiger Mountain'. Fripp and Eno both belonged to the EG stable, and you'll find in Fripp's sleevenotes to several of King Crimson's recent CDs just how appalling EG were in the area of management. If one of the two hadn't belonged to EG, then this album could have been made.

This music was designed to be listened to via headphones. And yes, 28 years on, I find I CAN work to it.

Swastika Girls builds up slowly with curious looped curlicues and odd sounds like birds in pain. Then Fripp starts to solo. At some point, he lets out a line which curves upward and explodes out of the roof of the music, and suddenly stops. Typical Fripp. He suddenly CONNECTS with that thing we know he NEEDS to express, and then gets embarrassed. It's like a spaceship leaving the atmosphere, or a fast, unexpected orgasm. Totally electrifying. Thereafter, he hits unusual angles implicit, but extremely unobvious, in the scales he is working with, swapping scientological transcendence just for the expression of a supreme, but less explosive, elegance. The music is like fantastical, unaffordable alien furniture; or the pricier Prada shoes. Heavenly Music Corporation is organic, like a breathing peat bog sending out electrical signals. It prefigures Eno's 'On Land'. At the roots of ambient are epiphany (SG), and darkness (HMC). These guys had it covered long ago...

The record was made in 1973. That really WAS a long time ago. The creativity and vision Eno and Fripp harness here is awesome. After this, a whole tranche of 'ambient' rock. The pretty stuff: Sylvian, Cocteau Twins; the dark stuff: Main. This key record sounds like it was knocked up fast and rather casually while Fripp would have been worrying about Larks' Tongues and Eno obsessing over Taking Tiger Mountain. (At the time, Island released 'Pussyfooting' as a budget imprint. Tellingly, the vinyl label design is the best they ever came up with.) But don't forget, the protagonists are both bloody geniuses (Fripp a frustrating one, tho') who have never done anything less than influential. Did I mention the possibility of your considering purchasing it? Galvanising, life-enriching stuff; the very finest aural wallpaper money can buy.