One of the most instructive things I did was to listen to Another Green World at a number of different speeds. Each time I heard something new that I had not heard before—a new sound that was buried in the mix, for example, or an effect, a heavily layered backing vocal, an abstruse lyric. Speeding up and slowing down Discreet Music taught me a lot, too; the title track of Discreet Music, or “Side One’’ if you happen to own the vinyl copy, is recorded at half-speed. So I listened to it at double-speed, to gain some insight into what the original material might have sounded like before Eno slowed it down. I also listened to it at quarter-speed, which I liked even more than Eno’s half-speed version.
I still haven’t gotten tired of these albums, though it’s possible that I may have listened to Another Green World more times than Eno has. I become more drawn to these records the more I listen. Recently, I put the album on after not listening to it for a while. I was really moved by it, playing it over and over and hearing something new in its flow each time. It was like I could see the pathways of all of the electronic music that came before it and after it, traveling through that record like so many streams.
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