Best known in the field of music, Eno's discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator includes some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono and Peter Gabriel have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar driven rock to film scores and electronica.
And yet, music is only one strand of Eno's creative project. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, his opinions and ideas have been requested by institutions and think tanks on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art. The publications by Faber Faber of his diary for 1995, under the title 'A Year With Swollen Appendices', proved a best seller and gave some indication of the extraordinary range and diversity of Eno's activities.
Eno's early dedication to the musical avant garde was always steeped in wit and a passionate regard for the classic history of purely popular music – from black American doo-wop through the volatile lullabies of The Velvet Underground to the eerie soundscapes of Can. Speaking in 1997, Eno defined his relationship to pop in a characteristically succinct and aphoristic aside: "I have never thought that popular music was about making music in the traditional sense of the word;" he said, "it is about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them."
With this in mind, Eno's role as a founder member of the rock group 'Roxy Music', in 1971, can still be regarded as one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of pop. By colliding a highly stylised selection of popular music forms – from French chanson to surfer rockability by way of Johnnie Ray – with an uncompromising backdrop of atonal, electronically massaged atmospherics, Roxy Music were and remain the most eloquent and spectacular testimony to Eno's definition of pop.
Departing Roxy Music subsequent to their second album, 'For Your Pleasure, in 1972, a typically eclectic yet interconnected set of projects immediately followed. Two solo albums 'Here Come The Warm Jets' and 'Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)', matched Eno's exuberant surrealism as a lyricist to his warmly melodic vocal style. Heard now, they link glittered melodrama to poignant meditations on time, place and love, exemplified by Eno's now legendary 'Another Green World' and 'Before And After Science' albums, released in 1975 and 1977 respectively.
This meticulous crafting of songs has always run parallel to Eno's instrumental recordings – the artistic starting points of which are related to notions of time as much as instrumentations. Hence his creation of 'Ambient' music – first using the term in 1978 – would provide the cultural lexicon with one of its principal epoch-defining concepts.
In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the 'Oblique Strategies' set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude which can make an immediate intervention into the creative process. In effect, this simple yet highly refined mechanism pre-figured the current vogue for re-patterning creative thinking – as life-coached today through NLP programmes – by nearly a quarter of a century.
It was also in the 70's that Eno established the 'Obscure' label of recordings. Audaciously harnessing his by-now extensive fame as a 'rock' musician, to a progressive, curatorial role as a producer, Eno single handedly brought some of the most interesting and important musicians from the musical avant garde to the vast new audience commanded by rock. Thurs Michael Nyman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and The Penguin Café Orchestra, as well as many others, released albums on 'Obscure' in a series of uniform (yet slightly differing) black sleeves, and at a special lower cost to a mainstream pop or rock album. The series would include Eno's own 'Discreet Music' – a recording of simple variants of musical tones, and a founding example of Eno's creation of Ambient music. But, far from risking the earnest aridity of some 'intellectual' approaches to music making, the public perception of Eno's role as a good humoured and whole-heartedly generous combination of Noam Chomsky and Joe Meek made him a favourite with the music press as well as a new folk hero for liberal humanism.
By the late 70's, Eno's legendary collaboration with David Bowie on the latter's 'Low', 'Heroes' and 'The Lodger' albums, combined with his own 'Ambient' series and 'Music For Films' releases, enthroned Eno as the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well as his renewed curatorial role on the 'No New York' compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for the new groups enabled by punk.
A pioneer of extreme form of music making, Eno's brilliance as a producer lies in his ability to enable musicians to re-enchant their own creativity in new and dramatic ways. Thus his work with Talking Heads saw the group expand on their edgy, guitar driven songs of alienation and domestic unease, to achieve a soaring, epic version of themselves. His role as U2's producer – on 'Unforgettable Fire', 'The Joshua Tree', 'Zooropa', 'Achtung Baby' and 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', would transform the band from anthemic rockers into purveyors of multi-media spectacle – the anthemic rocking intact, but intensified into a hyper-stylised version of itself by the acuity of Eno's production.
It is a testament to Eno's standing as a musician that he has been cited as an inspiration by artists as varied in tone and temperament as Prince, Franz Ferdinand, Autechre and Public Enemy. His collaboration with David Byrne, 'My Life In The Bush of Ghosts', released in 1981, is still regarded as one of the founding models for the use of sampling in music – its pared down, febrile energy and funk guitars coming across like some sci-fi reclamation of a global media reaching critical mass. Eno's continued work in the musical field has been matched by his site specific and environmental media projects – notably in the form of audio-visual installation. Asked by the Tate Gallery to present the prestigious Turner Prize, Eno has been as much an art historical reference point of inspiration of young artists as Warhol or Jeff Koons, and it is the pan media yet holistically intact nature of Eno's work to which they most respond.
Eno's audio-visual work – shown internationally in venues as prestigious as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre, the Hayward Gallery London, the Marble Palace at The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg – makes eloquent the social philosophy which seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. These created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what 'looking at art' might involve and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.
Eno has spoken in the past of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking – rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between aesthetics, science and politics, that all of Brian Eno's remarkable achievements are ultimately combined.
(Michael Bracewell, January 2005)
And yet, music is only one strand of Eno's creative project. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, his opinions and ideas have been requested by institutions and think tanks on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art. The publications by Faber Faber of his diary for 1995, under the title 'A Year With Swollen Appendices', proved a best seller and gave some indication of the extraordinary range and diversity of Eno's activities.
Eno's early dedication to the musical avant garde was always steeped in wit and a passionate regard for the classic history of purely popular music – from black American doo-wop through the volatile lullabies of The Velvet Underground to the eerie soundscapes of Can. Speaking in 1997, Eno defined his relationship to pop in a characteristically succinct and aphoristic aside: "I have never thought that popular music was about making music in the traditional sense of the word;" he said, "it is about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them."
With this in mind, Eno's role as a founder member of the rock group 'Roxy Music', in 1971, can still be regarded as one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of pop. By colliding a highly stylised selection of popular music forms – from French chanson to surfer rockability by way of Johnnie Ray – with an uncompromising backdrop of atonal, electronically massaged atmospherics, Roxy Music were and remain the most eloquent and spectacular testimony to Eno's definition of pop.
Departing Roxy Music subsequent to their second album, 'For Your Pleasure, in 1972, a typically eclectic yet interconnected set of projects immediately followed. Two solo albums 'Here Come The Warm Jets' and 'Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)', matched Eno's exuberant surrealism as a lyricist to his warmly melodic vocal style. Heard now, they link glittered melodrama to poignant meditations on time, place and love, exemplified by Eno's now legendary 'Another Green World' and 'Before And After Science' albums, released in 1975 and 1977 respectively.
This meticulous crafting of songs has always run parallel to Eno's instrumental recordings – the artistic starting points of which are related to notions of time as much as instrumentations. Hence his creation of 'Ambient' music – first using the term in 1978 – would provide the cultural lexicon with one of its principal epoch-defining concepts.
In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the 'Oblique Strategies' set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude which can make an immediate intervention into the creative process. In effect, this simple yet highly refined mechanism pre-figured the current vogue for re-patterning creative thinking – as life-coached today through NLP programmes – by nearly a quarter of a century.
It was also in the 70's that Eno established the 'Obscure' label of recordings. Audaciously harnessing his by-now extensive fame as a 'rock' musician, to a progressive, curatorial role as a producer, Eno single handedly brought some of the most interesting and important musicians from the musical avant garde to the vast new audience commanded by rock. Thurs Michael Nyman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and The Penguin Café Orchestra, as well as many others, released albums on 'Obscure' in a series of uniform (yet slightly differing) black sleeves, and at a special lower cost to a mainstream pop or rock album. The series would include Eno's own 'Discreet Music' – a recording of simple variants of musical tones, and a founding example of Eno's creation of Ambient music. But, far from risking the earnest aridity of some 'intellectual' approaches to music making, the public perception of Eno's role as a good humoured and whole-heartedly generous combination of Noam Chomsky and Joe Meek made him a favourite with the music press as well as a new folk hero for liberal humanism.
By the late 70's, Eno's legendary collaboration with David Bowie on the latter's 'Low', 'Heroes' and 'The Lodger' albums, combined with his own 'Ambient' series and 'Music For Films' releases, enthroned Eno as the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well as his renewed curatorial role on the 'No New York' compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for the new groups enabled by punk.
A pioneer of extreme form of music making, Eno's brilliance as a producer lies in his ability to enable musicians to re-enchant their own creativity in new and dramatic ways. Thus his work with Talking Heads saw the group expand on their edgy, guitar driven songs of alienation and domestic unease, to achieve a soaring, epic version of themselves. His role as U2's producer – on 'Unforgettable Fire', 'The Joshua Tree', 'Zooropa', 'Achtung Baby' and 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', would transform the band from anthemic rockers into purveyors of multi-media spectacle – the anthemic rocking intact, but intensified into a hyper-stylised version of itself by the acuity of Eno's production.
It is a testament to Eno's standing as a musician that he has been cited as an inspiration by artists as varied in tone and temperament as Prince, Franz Ferdinand, Autechre and Public Enemy. His collaboration with David Byrne, 'My Life In The Bush of Ghosts', released in 1981, is still regarded as one of the founding models for the use of sampling in music – its pared down, febrile energy and funk guitars coming across like some sci-fi reclamation of a global media reaching critical mass. Eno's continued work in the musical field has been matched by his site specific and environmental media projects – notably in the form of audio-visual installation. Asked by the Tate Gallery to present the prestigious Turner Prize, Eno has been as much an art historical reference point of inspiration of young artists as Warhol or Jeff Koons, and it is the pan media yet holistically intact nature of Eno's work to which they most respond.
Eno's audio-visual work – shown internationally in venues as prestigious as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre, the Hayward Gallery London, the Marble Palace at The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg – makes eloquent the social philosophy which seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. These created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what 'looking at art' might involve and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.
Eno has spoken in the past of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking – rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between aesthetics, science and politics, that all of Brian Eno's remarkable achievements are ultimately combined.
(Michael Bracewell, January 2005)