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Overview Brian Eno, born 1948, is a British experimental musician and multimedia artist, producer and digital-age philosopher / a esthetician . Eno is known for his range of innovations as an artist, producer, and thinker. He has experimented with a wide variety of musical and multimedia forms and technologies, and has collaborated with and produced other ground-breaking artists like David Bowie, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. Eno is also known for inspiring controversy and altering perspectives with his musings on creativity, technology, art, culture, and the social change that new aesthetic experiences could catalyze. Enos Range: Devotion to Process Eno is best known for his public debut with Roxy Music in the early 1970 s and for the recordings and musical collaborations, ranging from new age " ambient" music to what has been called " assaultive" rock, that he has generated since. However, he has also experimented with makeup and costume design, composed soundtrack material featured on film, television and interactive multimedia, and developed gallery video installations.
In the late 70 s Eno established the Obscure record label to promote experimental music. He has served as producer for music projects that run the gamut from the New York punk scene to the avant garde artists to a hammer dulcimer player to Edikanfo, a pop group from Ghana. Enos mission is, in part, to defy categorization and embrace paradox. Some of his work, for example, blends elemental tribal rhythms with postmodern fragments sampled from pop culture. Despite recognizing that most of his work relies utterly on contemporary recording studio technologies, he often expresses contempt for any uncritical celebration of new media technologies, claiming that " only neo-vegetables enjoy using computers the way they are at the moment. " As a musician, he calls himself a non-musician and associates his artistic identity with a non-musicians perspective: " Retaining my lack of proficiency, " he says, " allows me to make interesting mistakes. " A motto of his art school days in the 60 s, " process not product, " sustains him Eno gives most of his focus and importance to the next experiment on the horizon, always mindful of remaking his own creative strategies. When some serious fans put together an Eno site on the World Wide Web, Eno thanked them for making him " gratefully connected to (his) own culture, " but declined to participate in the project.
He expressed some " guilt for deserting my audience, " but " Id rather not feel this guilt so I avoid finding out about situations that cause it. " He feels that " admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism, " generating a " strong pressure to do more of the thing we all liked so much, " instead of " just following my nose wherever it wants to go. " Eno feels that " Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results dont at first compare with the lauded works of the past. " The futures potential for experimentation and spontaneity notwithstanding, Enos finished products of the past testify to an artist with a well-developed system of accumulated aesthetic and philosophical signatures that influence each new project. Eno in the Studio: Painting With Sound Eno says his " real instruments" are the tape recorder and the recording studio. In his lecture " The Studio as Compositional Tool, " Eno points out that the advent of recording marked a revolutionary change in the nature of music. Before recording, music " disappeared when it was finished, so that it was something that only existed in time. " Recording, on the other hand, " takes music out of the time dimension and puts it into the space dimension. " The audience can listen to a performance again and again, becoming familiar with details and nuances, so " the composer can think in terms of supplying material that would actually be too subtle for a first listening. " Eric Tamm, a musicologist who turned his doctoral dissertation into the popular press book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, characterizes Enos use of the studio in terms of: sustaining an open mind and childlike curiosity about the infinite range of musical possibility; taking command of technology's array of music-making equipment, from tape recorders to synthesizers to mixing consoles; generally working within a relatively narrow range of expressive possibilities for any given piece; and accepting happy accidents at any stage of the process. Eno says he works with sound the same way he works with light in his video installations. The ability to record each instrument and voice on a separate track allows Eno to execute a " painterly" approach to the creation of sounds.
As Tamm puts it, " magnetic tape is his canvas, and he applies his sound substances to that canvas, mixes them, blends them, determines their shape (with) enough instrumental technique to give him his pigments" After all tracks are on tape, the mixing process specifically addresses the spatial components of music. Eno identifies the mixer as " really the central part of the studio. " The pan, for example, locates the sound within the stereo spectrum of space, and the echo determines what Eno calls the " artificial acoustic space" of the sound. The studio adds new criteria on which an audience evaluates music: " many different rock records, " in Enos opinion, " are predicated not on a structure, or a melodic line, or a rhythm, but on a sound; this is why studios and producers keep putting their names on records" Enos Ambient Music: A Sense of Place Eno pioneered what he calls " ambient" music, a heavy influence on both the Techno grooves that drive Rave crowds and the New Age music that smoothes the way toward inner calm for Birkenstock Buddhists and other stress dodgers. For Eno, ambient music is a way of expanding his exploration of the spatial aspects of music.
It draws on the avant garde experiments of John Cage, which sought ways of receiving ordinary sounds from various environmental contexts as art, and followed the maxim " everything we do is music. " Ambient music could be thought of as Enos response to Erik Saties call for " music which is like furniture a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. " Eno cites " two major meanings" for ambient music: One is the idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. music that can be background or foreground or anywhere Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of.
You could pay attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something while it was on. Ambient music allows many different types of attention. The other meaning is creating an ambiance, a sense of place that complements and alters your environment. Ambient music exemplifies Enos use of electronic recording tools to discover whole systems of artistic expression, and he is more interested in how the system will evolve on its own than in the particular artifacts he can sign his name to. " I usually dont want to slavishly make something in detail, " he says, " I want to produce the conditions from which it and many its could come into existence.
Making a record for me is inventing a new way of making music. " Eno the Catalyst: Oblique Strategies Eric Tamm sums up " Enos approach to music (as) inventing systems and setting them in motion. " This aptly describes Enos approach to producing and collaborating with other recording artists as well. Musicians seek Eno out, knowing that when hes thrown into the mix theyll be asked to discard old assumptions and approaches and expected to play with new ones. Eno has been called one of the " archetypal Art Floozies of the pop music world, " never hesitating to plunge into a casual encounter with a new concept. Eno describes his collaborative strategy as trying to make " an experience instead of music. " When he worked with David Bowie, Eno wrote individual " roles" and " scenarios" for the musicians and kept them from knowing what roles any of the others played. One scenario, for example, tells the musician: It is 1999, the eve of the millennium. The world is holding its breath and things are tense internationally.
You are playing atonal ice-like sheets of sound that hang limpid in the air. When you are featured, you cascade through glacial arpeggios. Between these cascades, you fire out short staccato bursts of knotty tonality. A system Eno used with Laurie Anderson involved " making the sound of a landscape" : we would spend a lot of our listening time staring out of the window over the water, watching huge boats drift noiselessly into the harbor. For a few days, we followed a rule that everything we made had to make sense with that view. It was liberating in that it allowed us to accept some quite " unmusical" things because they worked with the view.
In the early 70 s Eno and his painter friend Peter Schmidt discovered they each had separately been jotting down precepts that described the " principles underlying" their approaches to various projects and served as ways of moving through creative blocks. Eno and Schmidt collaborated on a deck of cards, each containing one of more than one hundred " Oblique Strategies, " which they also referred to as " worthwhile dilemmas. " Eno would often draw a card at random and, in the spirit of tossing I-Ching coins, associate the corresponding written aphorism with a current need for a shift in perspective. Some examples: Disciplined self-indulgence Emphasize the flaws Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic Ask your body Honor thy error as a hidden intention Three versions of the decks were released for sale in limited editions between 1975 and 1979. Enos three-album stint as a producer for the Talking Heads, as well as his collaboration with Heads front man David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, drew heavily on the perspective-questioning approach of the Oblique Strategies. In Talking Heads: The Band and Their Music, David Gans credits Eno with helping the Heads " to embrace instinct and spontaneity and the virtue of randomness. " Gans describes the Oblique Strategies deck as arrogant, the enemy of logic and control, reflecting contempt of tradition and propriety and in dealing with the Talking Heads, it was the right tool for the job.
It must have been Eno who pried the fingers loose and set Talking Heads free, like a sometimes cruel big brother yanking a kids hands from the handlebars, to show (once the terror and panic subside) the joy of riding with no hands. The long list of top recording artists Eno has produced or collaborated with, which includes U 2, Devo, John Cale and Robert Fripp, testifies to his gift for reaching the core of an artists talent and bringing it to the surface. As David Byrne puts it: Eno gave me confidence in the studio, that method of not going in with anything prepared. He has a real interesting ear for what other people are doing. He doesnt come up with a lot of what you might call original ideas. But a lot of timeshare somebody else making a weird little sound, jumps on it, and says, " Hey thats great save that. " Eno the Thinker: Artistic Systems To recognize and build contexts for good snippets of other peoples work is, for Eno, the essence of contemporary art.
Eno thinks of the digital-age artists role as being much like that of a museum curator: An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. To create meanings or perhaps " new readings, " which is what curators try to do is to create. Period. cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them. Things become artworks not because they contain value, but because were prepared to see them as artworks, to allow ourselves to have art experiences from them, before them, to frame them in contexts that confer value on them.
Eno is one of the first artists to embrace what artificial intelligence pioneers have contributed to the composition process: digital technologies that can implement choice-making systems that aesthetic experimenters like Eno design. " Im lazy, " Eno explains, " thats why I like machines I can put things into them, and then I can see something happen there beyond what I would have had the time, the taste, or the endurance to have produced myself. " He foresees a time when fixed versions of commercial recordings will be eclipsed by " systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that already has a strong flavor to it" For Eno, the artistic process is not so much an assertion of the self as a way of receiving and perpetuating the evolving systems of culture. An artist gets to work with an " incredibly broad" palette" the whole history of art. " Art becomes, then, a way of simply allowing universal creative forces to express themselves. Eno sometimes refers to this process as tapping his " idiot energy, " a reservoir of awareness and revelation that he keeps returning to: All the musical experiences that have had an important effect on me have prompted the same feeling, of being faced with this strange connection of familiarity and mystery embodied in the same source, as if a door has unlocked into a whole universe of feeling that exists somewhere deep inside. Its the feeling of being awake, rather than automatic. You get hooked on that feeling; everybody who has once felt it wants it for the rest of their lives.
Essential Sources The two best ways to take a deeper dive into Brian Eno are 1) visit the unofficial Eno web site and just start surfing and 2) to read Eric Tamm's book: Brian Eno and the Vertical Color of Sound. Either of these can lead you to extensive discographies, bibliographies, best moments from interesting interviews, and quirky Eno accoutrements like the Oblique Strategies cards. Eno, Brian " Pro Session: The Studio as Compositional Tool, " in two parts, Down Beat 50 (July 1983), pp. 56 - 57, and Down Beat (Aug. 1983), pp. 50 - 52 Gans, David Talking Heads: The Band and Their Music (New York: Avon Books) 1985 Kelly, Kevin " Gossip is Philosophy, " interview with Brian Eno, Wired 1995 Tamm, Eric Brian Eno and the Vertical Color of Sound (updated edition) (New York: De Capo Press) 1995 Selected Bibliography Eno, Brian and Mills, Russell with commentaries by Rick Poor " More Dark Than Shark" (Faber and Faber) 1986 (lyrics, paintings, essays) Loder, Kurt " Eno" Synapse Vol 3 No 1, Jan/Feb 1979, (interview with Eno) Rose, Cynthia " Into the Spirit World Brian Eno The White Mans Grave Look to Africa" NME, 26 July 26, 1980, 20 22 McKenna, Kristine " Voyages in Time & Perception" Musician: No 48 Oct 1982 Tannenbaum, Rob " A Meeting of Sound Minds / John Cage + Brain Eno" Musician: No 83, Sep 85) (interview with Cage and Eno) Prendergast, Mark " Brian Eno: Thoughts Words Music and Art" in two parts: Sound on Sound January 1989, Sound on Sound February 1989 Doershuck, Robert L. " One vision beyond music" Keyboard, June 89 (interview with Eno) Oldfield, Paul " Eno: A Patter of Life and Death" Melody Maker, October 13 1990 (interview with Eno)
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