Evening Star is the second studio album by British musicians Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. It was recorded from 1974 to 1975 and released in December 1975 by Island Records.

Background and recording

Evening Star and the preceding seven-show European tour by Fripp and Eno marked Fripp's first musical output after King Crimson disbanded for the first time, and his last before temporarily retiring from music to study at John G. Bennett's International Academy for Continuous Education.

Content

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

Release

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

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.

Track listing

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

Personnel