Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDIis an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient and electronic music as well as his influential contributions to rock, worldbeat, chance, and generative music styles. A self-described "non-musician," Eno has advocated a methodology of "theory over practice" throughout his career, and has helped to introduce a variety of unique recording techniques and conceptual approaches into...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMusic Producer
Date of Birth15 May 1948
music
When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
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I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
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Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'
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I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
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In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
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Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.
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People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
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The big message of gospel is that you don't have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.
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I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.
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I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.
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When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
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Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.