(No Pussyfooting) (1973)

I don't have to think very long or hard about my favorite collaboration between Brian Eno and Robert Fripp—I like all of them, but this first has always been special, the one that most stood out to me, and by a good margin, for its ability to cohere the vaporous trails and impulses of ambient music into something textural and dense with presence, for Robert Fripp's guitar-playing which is supernaturally beautiful or maybe that's the ethereal tone I'm catching, and for sounding so good every time I play it. It's not that often, admittedly, and then I'm likely as not to make the beeline for Terry Riley first. But the omnipresent ghost that attends nearly all of Eno's work, the one that dictated the Oblique Strategies deck that he always seems to manage so skillfully, is vividly alive and well here, moving through every passage and decision—how, I can't say exactly. That's part of the mystery of it, the ghost equally present here as much as he (or it) is there on "Always Crashing in the Same Car," on "Baby's on Fire," on "1/1" of Music for Airports—maybe even more so. I've said elsewhere and perhaps ad nauseam by this point that I think Eno's greatest skill is the one that is perhaps least visible: a sensitivity and unique knack that he brings to the art of collaboration, somehow finding ways to draw the inner Eno out of all his accomplices, which is there almost incidentally practically for the sake of continuity alone. He is able to make projects somehow greater than the sum of their parts, reliably. In the immediate aftermath of King Crimson's heyday this could hardly have been what fans of Robert Fripp were prepared for, yet it's him all right: lyrical, constrained, plunged into a lush aural ecosystem that complements his nuances down to the tendrils. It's very fine, lovely, patient, beguiling work, and I mean on the part of both of them equally. This is made with love, as the giddy cook says emerging from the kitchen. It's palpable, even. A masterpiece of smoldering affect. And something that is capable of suiting every mood.