This week, as previously mentioned, I’ve been listening to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. This is generally considered one of Eno’s “song” records, though it’s halfway to being an ambient album. In truth it’s a mutant that’s not quite like anything else he or anyone has ever done.

Geeta Dayal’s 33 1/3 book was a good read but at barely 100 pages only scratched the surface. One thing she never talked about was the title, which is an absolutely perfect three-word distillation of the album’s contents. It’s an alien planet to be sure, but a lush and verdant one, so you feel safe there.

You could say the same thing about Discreet Music, which was recorded around the same time. And here I’m talking specifically about the title track, a piece of “automatic music” where Eno set up a couple of slightly-out-of-sync tape loops and let them run. Shortly after starting, he says, “people started knocking on the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it.”

The released track is 31 minutes long because that’s the maximum amount of music that would fit on a side of vinyl at the time. (I think it still is.) It could just as easily have been 3 minutes or 300; “Discreet Music” has some special quality that makes it stand outside of time. And though Eno called it “music that didn’t impose itself on your space” and encouraged listening to it at a barely audible level, it stands up just as well to being blasted at top volume.

Some people, including its creator, believe that “Discreet Music” has mysterious healing properties. I don’t know about that, but there definitely is something magical about it. Supposedly David Bowie listened to it a lot in Berlin when he was trying to clean up his life. That’s good enough for me.