Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (born 15 May 1948), commonly known as Brian Eno (Template:PronEng), is an English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist and singer, who, as a solo artist, is best known as the father of ambient music.

Eno studied at art school, taking inspiration from minimalist painting, but he had little musical education or playing experience when he joined the band Roxy Music as their keyboards and synthesisers player in the early 1970s. Roxy Music's success in the glam rock scene came quickly, but Eno soon tired of touring, and he left the group after their For Your Pleasure (1973), beginning his solo career with Here Come the Warm Jets (1973) and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974). Eno's reach extended further into abstract musical territory in (No Pussyfooting) (1973), Another Green World (1975) and Discreet Music (1975). His pioneering efforts at "sonic landscapes" began to consume more of his time beginning with Ambient 1/Music for Airports (1978). Eno nevertheless continued to sing on some of his records, ranging from Before and After Science (1977) to Another Day on Earth (2005).

Eno's solo work was influential, but he introduced the concepts of chance music to popular audiences partly through collaborations with other musicians. By the 1970s' end, Eno had worked with David Bowie on the avant-garde "Berlin Trilogy"; helped popularise the American punk rock band Devo and the punk-influenced "No Wave" genre; and begun to work frequently with Harold Budd, John Cale, Cluster, Robert Fripp and David Byrne. He produced three albums by Byrne's Talking Heads, including Remain in Light (1980); produced seven albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree (1987); and worked on records by James, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay and Slowdive, among others.

As an artist, Brian Eno pursues ventures in parallel to his music career: art installations, a newspaper column in The Observer, and "Oblique Strategies", with Peter Schmidt, a deck of cards wherein each card has a cryptic remark or random insight meant to resolve a dilemma. In 2008, he released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today with David Byrne, designed the sound for the video game Spore and wrote a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky).

Education and early musical career

Brian Eno was educated at St. Joseph's College, Birkfield, Ipswich, and at Ipswich Art School in Roy Ascott's Groundcourse, and the Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1969. In school, he used a tape recorder as musical instrument, and experimented with his first, sometimes improvisational, bands. St. Joseph's College teacher and painter Tom Phillips encouraged him, recalling "Piano Tennis" with Eno, in which, after collecting pianos, they stripped and aligned them in a hall, striking them with tennis balls. From that collaboration, he became involved in Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. The first, released recording in which Eno played is the Deutsche Grammophon edition of Cardew's The Great Learning (rec. Feb. 1971), as one of the voices in the recital of The Great Learning Paragraph 7. Another early recording was the Berlin Horse soundtrack, by Malcom Le Grice, a nine-minute, 2 x 16mm-double-projection, released in 1970 and presented in 1971.

Roxy Music

Main article: Roxy Music

Brian Eno's professional music career began in London, as a member (1971–1973) of the glam/art rock band Roxy Music, playing the mixing desk, altering the band's sound with a VCS3 synthesizer, tape recorders, etc., and singing back-up. In the event, he appeared on stage as member of Roxy Music, flamboyantly costumed. He quit the band on completing the promotion tour for the band's second album, For Your Pleasure because of disagreements with lead singer Bryan Ferry and boredom with the rock star life.

In 1992, he described his Roxy Music tenure as important to his career: "As a result of going into a subway station and meeting Andy [saxophonist Andy Mackay], I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I'd walked ten yards farther, on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".

Solo work

Eno embarked on a solo career almost immediately. Between 1973 and 1977 he created four solo albums of electronically inflected pop songs – Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World and Before and after Science. Tiger Mountain contains the galloping "Third Uncle", one of Eno's best-known songs, due in part to its later being covered by Bauhaus. Critic Dave Thompson writes that the song is "a near punk attack of riffing guitars and clattering percussion, 'Third Uncle' could, in other hands, be a heavy metal anthem, albeit one whose lyrical content would tongue-tie the most slavish air guitarist."

All four of his vocal albums were remastered and reissued in 2004 by Virgin's Astralwerks label. Due to Eno's decision not to add any extra tracks of the original material, a handful of tracks originally issued as singles have not been reissued. ("Seven Deadly Finns" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" were included on the deleted Eno Vocal Box set and the single mix of "King's Lead Hat" has never been reissued.)

During this period, Eno also played three dates with Phil Manzanera in the band 801, a "supergroup" that performed more or less mutated selections from albums by Eno, Manzanera, and Quiet Sun, as well as covers of songs by The Beatles and The Kinks.

In 1972, Eno developed a tape-delay system first utilized by Eno and Robert Fripp (from King Crimson), described as 'Frippertronics', and the pair released an album in 1973 called (No Pussyfooting). It is said the technique was borrowed from minimalist composer Terry Riley, whose tape delay feedback system with a pair of Revox tape recorders (a setup Riley used to call the "Time Lag Accumulator") was first used on Riley's album Music for The Gift in 1963. In 1975, Fripp and Eno released a second album, Evening Star, and also played several live shows in Europe.

Eno was a prominent member of the performance art-classical orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia - having started playing with them in 1972. In 1973 he produced the orchestra's first album The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics (released in March 1974) and in 1974 he produced the live album Hallellujah! The Portsmouth Sinfonia Live At The Royal Albert Hall of their infamous May 1974 concert (released in October 1974.) In addition to producing both albums, Eno performed in the orchestra on both recordings - playing the clarinet. Eno also deployed the orchestra's famously dissonant string section on his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). The orchestra at this time included other musicians whose solo work he would subsequently release on his Obscure label including Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. That year he also composed music for the album Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy, with Kevin Ayers, to accompany the poet June Campbell Cramer.

Eno continued his career by producing a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely credited with coining the term "ambient music", low-volume music designed to modify one's perception of a surrounding environment.

His first such work, 1975's Discreet Music, (again created via an elaborate tape-delay methodology, which Eno diagrammed on the back cover of the LP ), is considered the landmark album of the genre. This was followed by his Ambient series (Music for Airports (Ambient 1), The Plateaux of Mirror (Ambient 2), Day of Radiance (Ambient 3) and On Land (Ambient 4)). Eno was the primary musician on these releases with the exception of Ambient 2 which featured Harold Budd on keyboard, and Ambient 3 where the American composer Laraaji was the sole musician playing the zither and hammered dulcimer with Eno producing.

In 1981, having returned from Ghana and before On Land, he discovered Miles Davis' 1974 ambient jazz dirge "He Loved Him Madly": "Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the "spacious" quality I was after, and like "Amarcord", it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently."

In 1980 he provided a film score for Herbert Vesely's Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung also known as Egon Schiele Excess and Punishment. The ambent style score was an unusual choice for a historical piece but fits the film's themes of sexual obsession and death and is highly effective, possible his best film score.

Eno describes himself as a "non-musician" and coined the term "treatments" to describe his modification of the sound of musical instruments, and to separate his role from that of the traditional instrumentalist. His skill at using "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" (the title of an essay by Eno) led in part to his career as a producer. His methods were recognized at the time (mid-1970s) as unique, so much so that on Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he is credited with 'Enossification'; on Robert Wyatt's Ruth is Stranger Than Richard with a Direct inject anti-jazz raygun and on John Cale's Island albums as simply being 'Eno'.

Obscure Records label

Main article: Obscure Records

Eno started the Obscure Records label in Britain in 1975 to release works by lesser-known composers. The first group of three releases included his own composition, Discreet Music, and the now-famous The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) by Gavin Bryars. The second side of Discreet Music consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition which Eno had previously chosen to precede Roxy Music's appearances on stage, to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Side 1 consisted of a tape loop system for generating music from relatively sparse input. These tapes had previously been used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with Fripp, most notably on Evening Star. Only 10 albums were released on Obscure, including works by John Adams, Michael Nyman, and John Cage. At this time he was also affiliating with artists in the Fluxus movement.

Collaboration

In 1975 Eno performed as the Wolf in a rock version of Sergei Prokofiev's classic Peter and The Wolf. Produced by Robin Lumley and Jack Lancaster, the album featured Gary Moore, Manfred Mann, Phil Collins, Stephane Grapelli, Chris Spedding, Cozy Powell, Jon Hiseman, Bill Bruford and Alvin Lee. In 1980-81 Eno collaborated with David Byrne of Talking Heads (which he had already anagrammatized as 'King's Lead Hat') on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was built around radio broadcasts Eno collected while living in the United States, along with sampling recordings from around the world. He worked with David Bowie as a writer and musician on Bowie's influential 1977-79 'Berlin Trilogy' of albums, Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, on Bowie's later album Outside, and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". In 1980 Eno developed an interest in altered guitar tunings, which led to Guitarchitecture discussions with Chuck Hammer, former Lou Reed guitarist. Following on from his No-Wave involvement which brought him in contact with the "renegade" artist Greg Belcastro, who introduced him to the guitar techniques of a fledgling Sonic Youth, Eno has also collaborated with John Cale, former member of Velvet Underground, on his trilogy Fear, Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy, Robert Wyatt on his Shleep CD, with Jon Hassell, with the German duo Cluster, with composers Harold Budd, Philip Glass and Roberto Carnevale. A new collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno titled Everything That Happens Will Happen Today was released digitally on 18 August 2008, with the enhanced CD released in October.

1990s

In 1992, Eno released an album featuring heavily syncopated rhythms entitled Nerve Net, with contributions from several former collaborators including Robert Fripp, Benmont Tench, Robert Quine and John Paul Jones. This album was a last-minute substitution for My Squelchy Life, which featured more pop oriented material, with Eno on vocals. (Several tracks from My Squelchy Life later appeared on 1993's retrospective box set Eno Box II: Vocals.) Eno also released in 1992 a work entitled The Shutov Assembly, recorded between 1985 and 1990. This album embraces atonality and abandons most conventional concepts of modes, scales and pitch. Much of the music shifts gradually and without discernible focus, and is one of Eno's most varied ambient collections. Conventional instrumentation is eschewed, save for treated keyboards.

During the 1990s, Eno became increasingly interested in self-generating musical systems, the results of which he called generative music. The basic premise of generative music is the blending of several independent musical tracks, of varying sounds, length, and in some cases, silence. When each individual track concludes, it starts again mixing with the other tracks allowing the listener to hear an almost infinite combination. In one instance of generative music, Eno calculated that it would take almost 10,000 years to hear the entire possibilities of one individual piece. Eno has presented this music in his own, and other artists', art and sound installations, most notably "I Dormienti (The Sleepers)", Lightness: Music for the Marble Palace, Music for Civic Recovery Centre, The Quiet Room and "Music for Prague".

2000s

In 2004, Fripp and Eno recorded another ambient collaboration album, The Equatorial Stars.

Eno returned in June 2005 with Another Day on Earth, his first major album since Wrong Way Up (with John Cale) to prominently feature vocals (a trend continued with Everything That Happens Will Happen Today). The album differs from his 70s solo work as musical production has changed since then, evident in its semi-electronic production.

In early 2006, Eno collaborated with David Byrne, again, for the reissue of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in celebration of the influential album's 25th anniversary. Eight previously unreleased tracks, recorded during the initial sessions in 1980/81, were added to the album, while one track, Qu'ran, was removed due to requests from Muslims. An unusual interactive marketing strategy that coincided with its re-release, the album’s promotional website features the ability for anyone to officially and legally download the multi-tracks of two songs from the album, "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody". Individuals can then remix and upload new mixes of these tracks to the website so others can listen to and rate them.

In late 2006, Eno released 77 Million Paintings, a program of generative video and music specifically for the PC. As its title suggests, there is a possible combination of 77 million paintings where the viewer will see different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched. Likewise, the accompanying music is generated by the program so that it's almost certain the listener will never quite hear the same arrangement twice. The second edition of "77 Million Paintings" featuring improved morphing and a further two layers of sound was released on 14 January 2008.

In 2007, Eno's music was featured in a movie adaption of Irvine Welsh's best-selling collection Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance.

Also in 2007, Eno contributed a composition titled "Grafton Street" to Dido's third album, Safe Trip Home, scheduled for release in November 2008.

In December 2008 Paramount Pictures confirmed Brian Eno is scoring music for Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of “The Lovely Bones,” set to be released in December 2009.

Record producer and other projects

Record production

From the beginning of his solo career in 1973, Eno was in demand as a producer - though his management now describe him as a "sonic landscaper" rather than a producer. The first album with Eno credited as producer was Lucky Leif and the Longships by Robert Calvert. Eno's lengthy string of producer credits includes albums for Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Ultravox and James. He also produced part of the 1993 album When I Was a Boy by Jane Siberry. He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT Awards.

Despite being a self-professed "non-musician", Eno has contributed to recordings by artists as varied as Nico, Robert Calvert, Genesis, David Bowie, and Zvuki Mu, in various capacities such as use of his studio/synthesizer/electronic treatments, vocals, guitar, bass guitar, and as just being 'Eno'. In 1984, he (along with several other authors) composed and performed the "Prophecy Theme" for the David Lynch film Dune; the rest of the soundtrack was composed and performed by the group Toto. Eno produced performance artist Laurie Anderson's Bright Red album, and also composed for it. The work is avant-garde spoken word with haunting and magnifying sounds. Eno played on David Byrne's musical score for The Catherine Wheel, a project commissioned by Twyla Tharp to accompany her Broadway dance project of the same name.

Eno co-produced The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991), and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) for U2 with his frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, and produced 1993's Zooropa for the band alone. In 1995, U2 and Eno joined forces to create the album Original Soundtracks 1 under the group name Passengers; songs from OST1 included "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo". He also produced Laid (1993), Wah Wah (1994) and Pleased To Meet You (2001) for James.

Eno played on the 1986 album Measure for Measure by Australian band Icehouse. He remixed two tracks for Depeche Mode, "I Feel You" and "In Your Room", both single releases from the album Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993. In 1995, Eno provided one of several remixes of "Protection" by Massive Attack (originally from their Protection album) for release as a single. The single also included more remixes by DJs J-Swift, Tom D, and Underdog.

In 2007, he produced the fourth studio album by Coldplay entitled Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, which was released in 2008. Also in 2008, he worked with Grace Jones on her album Hurricane, credited for "production consultation" and as a member of the band, playing keyboards, treatments and background vocals. With frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, he worked on the twelfth studio album by U2, titled No Line on the Horizon. It was recorded in Morocco, South France and Dublin and due to be released in Europe on 27 February 2009 and worldwide on 2 March 2009.

The Microsoft Sound

In 1994 Microsoft corporation designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result — composed by Eno on an Apple Macintosh computer — was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, The Microsoft Sound. In the San Francisco Chronicle he said:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem — solve it."

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3¹/₄ seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

Generative music

In 1996, he collaborated in developing the SSEYO Koan generative music system (by Pete Cole and Tim Cole of intermorphic) that he used in composing the hybrid music in the album Generative Music 1:

Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesisers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved. Koan Software is probably the best of these systems, allowing a composer to control, not one, but one hundred and fifty, musical and sonic parameters, within which the computer then improvises (as wind improvises the wind chimes).

The works I have made with this system symbolise, to me, the beginning of a new era of music. Until a hundred years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances, and made it possible to hear them identically, over and over again.

But now, there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music, and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations — you can hear it when and where you want.

I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: "You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?"

As C.S.J. Bofop, in 1996, he said:

Each of the twelve pieces on Generative Music 1 has a distinctive character. There are, of course, the ambient works ranging from the dark, almost mournful "Densities III" (complete with distant bells), to [the] translucent "Lysis (Tungsten)". These are contrasted with pieces in dramatically different styles, such as "Komarek", with its hard-edged, angular melodies, reminiscent of Schoenberg's early serial experiments, and "Klee 42" whose simple polyphony is similar to that of the early Renaissance, but, of course, the great beauty of Generative Music is that those pieces will never sound quite that way again.

Other work

Eno has also been active in other artistic fields, producing videos for gallery display and collaborating with visual artists in other endeavours. One is the set of "Oblique Strategies" cards that he and artist Peter Schmidt, produced in the mid-70s, described as "100 Worthwhile Dilemmas" and intended as guides to shaking up the mind in the process of producing works of art. Another was his collaboration with artist Russell Mills on the book More Dark Than Shark. He was also the provider of music for Robert Sheckley's In the Land of Clear Colours, a narrated story with music originally published by a small art gallery in Spain.

In March 2008 Eno collaborated with the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino on a show of the latter's works with Eno's soundscapes at Ara Pacis in Rome.

In 2008, Eno designed the procedurally-generated music for the video game Spore.

In October 2008, Eno collaborated with Peter Chilvers to create an application titled Bloom for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform.

Politics

Brian Eno has been active politically throughout his life, frequently writing letters to government ministers and appearing on political debates, and writing newspaper columns on his political views. He was sharply critical of the Thatcher government's decision to reduce funding to the BBC World Service, arguing that the £5million cut to its £25 million budget was damaging, and was the equivalent cost of "just one wing of one F16 fighter jet"- a reference to a large order of military hardware the government had just made.

In 1996, Eno and others started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public about the very long term future of society. He is also a columnist for the British newspaper The Observer.

In 2003, he appeared on a UK Channel 4 discussion about the Iraq war with a top military spokesman; Eno was highly critical of the war. In 2005, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, London. In March 2006, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration at Trafalgar Square; he noted that 2 billion people on this planet do not have clean drinking water, and that water could have been supplied to them for about one-fifth of the cost of the Iraq war.

Eno appeared as Father Brian Eno at the "It's Great Being a Priest!" convention, in "Going to America", the final episode of the television sitcom Father Ted, which originally aired on 1 May 1998 on Channel 4.

The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition mobile phone features exclusive music composed by Eno. Between 8 January 2007 and 12 February 2007, ten units of Nokia 8800 Sirocco Brian Eno Signature Edition mobile phones, individually numbered and engraved with Eno's signature were auctioned off. All proceeds went to two charities chosen by Eno: the Keiskamma Aids Treatment program and The World Land Trust.

In 2006, Eno was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions.

In 2007, he appeared playing keyboards in Voila, Belinda Carlisle's solo album sung entirely in French. In December that year, the newly-elected Leader of Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, appointed Eno as his youth affairs adviser.

In January 2009, Eno spoke out against Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip by writing an opinion for CounterPunch and participating in a large-scale protest in London.

Discography

Main article: Brian Eno discography

Bibliography

• Bracewell, Michael Roxy Music: Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Art, Ideas, and Fashion (Da Capo Press, 2005) ISBN 0-306-81400-5
• Eno, Brian, Russell Mills and Rick Poynor More Dark Than Shark (Faber & Faber, 1986, out of print)
• Eno, Brian A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary (Faber & Faber, 1996) ISBN 0-571-17995-9
• I Dormienti with Mimmo Paladino (2000). Limited edition of 2000.
• Sheppard, David On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Orion Books, 2008) ISBN 978-0-7528-7570-5
• Tamm, Eric Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound (Da Capo Press, 1995, first published 1989) ISBN 0-306-80649-5 (Full text available at author's website [1])
• Dayal, Geeta 33 1/3: Brian Eno's Another Green World (Continuum 2007) ISBN 978-08264-2786-1

External links

• BBC Collective video interview about 77 Million Paintings
• EnoWeb (unofficial website)
• The Eno newsletter
• More Dark Than Shark (unofficial archive)
• Brian Eno at IMDb
• Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound by Eric Tamm (free book) zip pdf
• Interview with Brian Eno from The Guardian, 19 May 2006
• Interview with Brian Eno from San Francisco Chronicle, 2 June 1996
• Audio of interview with Brian Eno from KPFA, 2 February 1980

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