Evening Star (Fripp & Eno album)

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Evening Star, which opens with the National Geographic-esque titled "Wind on Water," maintains its ebullient tone throughout its first half. But the second side, the almost 30-minute track, "An Index of Metals," shows the sinister side of the duo, with less synthesizer bounce and more iciness. It’s less playful than the first half, and more shocking. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the 1970s, when others made ambient music that felt allegorically about life and death, the two locked in some eternal competition. Rather than co-mingle the two, Fripp and Eno split them like some kind of fork in the road.

Matthew Schnipper, "The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time", Pitchfork . [1]

AllMusic described Evening Star as "a less harsh, more varied affair [than (No Pussyfooting) ], closer to Eno's then-developing idea of ambient music than what had come before". [2] The first three tracks consist of Frippertronics accented with effects, synthesizer and piano by Eno. Track four, "Wind on Wind", is a remix of a short excerpt from Eno's Discreet Music , released a week after Evening Star. Eno had originally intended for Fripp to use the material which became Discreet Music as a backing tape to play over in improvised live performances.

The second side of the album consists entirely of a twenty-eight-minute piece of Frippertronics-based drone music titled "An Index of Metals", in which distortion increases as the track progresses. This side of the album is described as "less playful" and "more shocking" than the first half. [1]

Release

Evening Star
Fripp & Eno's Evening Star.jpg
Studio album by
ReleasedDecember 1975
Recorded1974–1975
Genre Ambient · experimental · drone
Length47:43
Label Island
Producer Brian Eno & Robert Fripp
Fripp & Eno chronology
(No Pussyfooting)
(1973)
Evening Star
(1975)
The Equatorial Stars
(2004)
Robert Fripp chronology
Red
(1974)
Evening Star
(1975)
Exposure
(1979)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svg [2]
Christgau's Record Guide B+ [3]
Pitchfork 8.6/10 [4]
Record Collector Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svg [5]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svg [6]
Spin Alternative Record Guide 8/10 [7]
Tom Hull – on the Web B+ [8]

Evening Star was released in December 1975 by Island Records. It was Fripp's only album to be released during his brief retirement.

Artwork

The album's cover is a painting by Peter Schmidt.

Legacy

Tracks from Evening Star were used in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Primary Phase . "Wind on Water" and "Wind on Wind" were included on the soundtrack to the 1983 film Breathless .

Pitchfork placed the album at number ten on its 2016 list of the best ambient albums of all time. [9]

Track listing

All tracks written by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, except "Wind on Wind" by Eno.

Side A
  1. "Wind on Water" – 5:30
  2. "Evening Star" – 7:48
  3. "Evensong" – 2:53
  4. "Wind on Wind" – 2:56
Side B
  1. "An Index of Metals" – 28:36

Personnel

References

  1. 1 2 "The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time". Pitchfork. 26 September 2016. Retrieved 8 June 2025.
  2. 1 2 Mills, Ted. "Evening Star – Fripp & Eno / Robert Fripp / Brian Eno". AllMusic . Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  3. Christgau 1981.
  4. Howe, Brian (9 January 2009). "Fripp & Eno: No Pussyfooting / Evening Star". Pitchfork . Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  5. "Fripp & Eno: Evening Star". Record Collector . p. 89. [A]n essential album for any modern record collection...
  6. Considine 1992, p. 266.
  7. Powers 1995, p. 129.
  8. Hull, Tom (26 November 2023). "Grade List: Robert Fripp". Tom Hull – on the Web . Retrieved 26 November 2023.
  9. Pitchfork (26 September 2016). "The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time". Pitchfork. Retrieved 8 June 2025.

Works cited