(NO PUSSYFOOTING)

As innovative and important as it is to the development of the ambient genre, and even though it's a good album, at the end of the day No Pussyfooting almost, but doesn't quite, manages to transcend its origins as two guys messing about with musical instruments and electronics at home and putting the results on vinyl. Eno's tape system and Robert Fripp's guitar playing combine to create a forerunner of Frippertronics, but there's no getting around the fact that this is a highly experimental work and, as with any true experiment, would be rather hit and miss. (After all, anyone whose experiments always succeed is being unambitious.)

The first side of the album, The Heavenly Music Corporation, is the better one, the more prickly Swastika Girls having been recorded later on in a second session to make the album release viable. Superior drone-ambient outings had already emerged from the Krautrock scene in the form of Tangerine Dreams' Zeit and Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht and Cyborg, and whilst the album would prove to be an important turning point in the career of both participants, in some respects the album is more interesting as a technical demonstration revealing the ambient sounds which can be wrought from guitar - typically not an instrument associated with the ambient style - than it is in its own right. Good, but later Fripp & Eno releases would be even better.