Brian Eno

• 1. Introduction

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  Brian Eno once calculated that hearing every possible combination of a single one of his generative pieces would take almost 10,000 years. He is an English musician, record producer and visual artist, born Brian Peter George Eno on the 15th of May 1948. He describes himself as a "non-musician".

  In 2019, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Eno as a member of Roxy Music. He is best known for pioneering ambient music and electronica, and he is often named among popular music's most influential and innovative figures.

  Three questions run through his story. How does someone who rejects the title of musician end up reshaping rock, pop and a whole style of quiet, background-friendly sound? What happens to music when it stops being a fixed recording and begins to make itself? And what links a glam rock stage, a hospital reception area and a computer's start-up sound? The first clue sits in Melton, a village in Suffolk.

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• 2. Suffolk Beginnings

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  Melton, in Suffolk, gave Eno a childhood surrounded by clocks and pianos. His father, William Arnold Eno, was a postal worker who also repaired clocks and watches. His mother, Maria Alphonsine, was Belgian. His grandfather played the saxophone and bassoon, and he built and repaired pianos and church organs.

  Eno is the eldest of three children, with a brother named Roger and a sister named Arlette. The family was raised Catholic, and the surname Eno comes from the Huguenot name Hennot. Looking back on the landscape of his youth, Eno said: "I like melancholy and have never found it to be the same thing as moroseness or sadness." He called the area "a sort of lost place in a lost time".

  In 1959, Eno began at St Joseph's College in Ipswich, a Catholic grammar school run by the De La Salle Brothers. His confirmation name honoured the order's founder, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle. Outside class he listened to American R&B, blues and doo wop, and he singled out the Lafayettes, Don and Juan, the Silhouettes and Little Richard. The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian also caught his eye, through his uncle Carl Otto Eno, who collected art.

  By 1964, Eno had four O-levels, including art and mathematics, and no wish for a conventional job. He enrolled at the Ipswich School of Art on the newly established Groundcourse foundation degree, created by the new media artist Roy Ascott. One of his teachers was the artist Tom Phillips, who became a lifelong friend and encouraged his musical ability. Phillips remembered a game of "piano tennis", in which the two stripped a collection of pianos, lined them up in a hall and struck them with tennis balls.

  That same year, 1964, Eno joined his first group, the Black Aces, a four-piece in which he played drums. The other three members were friends from the youth club he attended in Melton. At school he was already treating a tape recorder as a musical instrument.

  In 1966, Eno moved on to a diploma in Fine Arts at the Winchester School of Art, and he graduated in 1969. There he attended a lecture by Pete Townshend of The Who, who had also studied under Ascott. Eno cites it as the moment he realised he could make music without formal training. In late 1967 he formed the Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, an avant-garde trio of music, art and performance, with two Winchester undergraduates.

  In 1969, newly separated from his wife, Eno left for London.

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• 3. Roxy Music Years

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  The Great Learning, a 1971 Deutsche Grammophon release by Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, holds Eno's first appearance on a commercially released recording. He is one of the voices on the track "Paragraph 7". He also became involved with the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Another early recording was his soundtrack to Berlin Horse (1970), a nine-minute avant-garde film by Malcolm Le Grice.

  Money came from humbler work. For three months Eno was a paste-up assistant in the advertisement section of a local paper. After quitting, he bought old speakers, built new cabinets for them and sold them to friends.

  In 1971, a chance meeting with the saxophonist Andy Mackay led Eno to co-form the glam rock band Roxy Music. He later reflected: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".

  On the albums Roxy Music (1972) and For Your Pleasure (1973), Eno is credited by the single name "Eno". He played the EMS VCS 3 synthesiser and is also credited for tape effects, backing vocals and production. At first he stayed off the stage altogether. He operated the group's mixing desk from the centre of the concert venue, with a microphone for backing vocals.

  Once the band had secured a record deal, Eno joined them on stage with his synthesiser. His flamboyant, androgynous costumes and makeup partly stole the spotlight from the lead singer, Bryan Ferry. When the tour for For Your Pleasure ended in mid-1973, Eno quit, citing disagreements with Ferry.

  Almost at once he began a solo career, and his first release that year paired him with the King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.

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• 4. Birth of Ambient

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  (No Pussyfooting), the album Eno made with Robert Fripp, was worked on sporadically between August 1972 and September 1973. It used tape looping and delay systems that would later be known as "Frippertronics". The record is hailed as groundbreaking for the later development of drone and ambient music.

  Here Come the Warm Jets, Eno's first solo studio album, was released in February 1974 and features Fripp's guitar on several songs. Critics praised it on first release, and it came to be regarded as a classic. No singles were taken from it.

  In February 1974, Eno set out on his first solo tour, backed by the London pub rock band The Winkies. After the sixth date, at the Guildford Civic Hall, he suffered a collapsed lung and had to cancel the rest. His working relationship with the band ended, but the Winkies bassist Brian Turrington stayed on as a collaborator. Turrington played on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), released in November 1974. It includes "Third Uncle", later covered by Bauhaus.

  In January 1975, a taxi hit Eno as he crossed the street, and he spent several weeks recovering at home. His close friend Judy Nylon brought him a record of 18th century harp music. After she left, he put it on and lay down. Then he noticed that the amplifier volume was very low and one stereo channel was dead, but he lacked the energy to get up and fix it.

  Once he recovered, Eno began experimenting at Island Studios, and between July and August 1975 he recorded Another Green World. It came out on the 14th of November 1975 and charted in neither the United Kingdom nor the United States. Most of its tracks are instrumental, across about 40 minutes. The critic Robert Christgau gave it an A+ and called it "the aural equivalent of a park on the Moon; oneness with nature under conditions of artificial gravity".

  Discreet Music, also from 1975, was the first Eno record to carry his full name. Its title piece runs 30 minutes and uses synthesised tape delays in an echo configuration, a method he diagrammed on the back cover. The second side holds three variations on Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, arranged and performed by Gavin Bryars and The Cockpit Ensemble. David Bowie named it a favourite record, and that admiration led to the pair working together on Bowie's Berlin Trilogy.

  During sessions for Bowie's album Low in 1977, Eno began his next solo project. It appeared in 1978 as Ambient 1: Music for Airports, and it gave the genre its name. Eno meant ambient music to modify the listener's perception of the surrounding space. His liner notes state: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

  Three more Ambient records followed. The Plateaux of Mirror brought in Harold Budd, Day of Radiance featured the American composer Laraaji, and On Land (1982) was a solo effort. Before making On Land, Eno was played Miles Davis's "He Loved Him Madly" by Robert Quine. He credited Teo Macero's production on that track with the "spacious" quality he was after.

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• 5. In the Producer's Chair

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  Lucky Leif and the Longships, by Robert Calvert, was the first album to credit Eno as a producer. Demand for his services began with his solo career in 1973. He used the word "treatments" for his alterations to the sound of instruments, to set his role apart from that of a traditional instrumentalist. His skill at using the studio as a tool for composition helped lead him toward producing.

  Credits from the mid-1970s show how unusual his methods seemed. On Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway he is credited with "Enossification". On Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard he appears for a "Direct inject anti-jazz raygun". On John Cale's Island albums he is listed simply as "Eno". In the 1970s he also co-developed Oblique Strategies, a pack of cards carrying aphorisms meant to spur creative thinking.

  Bowie's Berlin Trilogy, covering 1977-79, consists of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger. On Low, Eno created most of the spacey effects on a portable EMS Synthi A synthesiser. He later worked on Bowie's album Outside and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". After Bowie died in January 2016, Eno said they had been discussing taking Outside "somewhere new", and he regretted that they could not.

  In 1978, Eno travelled to New York to produce the second Talking Heads album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. There he attended a five-night underground festival at Artists Space that featured ten local bands. On the final two nights he heard DNA and the Contortions, then Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Impressed, and urged on by Diego Cortez, he proposed a compilation album to document the no wave scene, with himself as producer. It became No New York.

  With his frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, Eno co-produced U2's The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991) and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000). He produced Zooropa in 1993 with Mark "Flood" Ellis. In 1995, U2 and Eno recorded as a group called Passengers, and their album Original Soundtracks 1 reached No. 12 in the UK Albums Chart. Its single "Miss Sarajevo" reached number 6 in the UK Singles Chart. The album lists films for each song, but all except three are bogus. Eno chronicled the collaboration in a 1996 diary titled A Year with Swollen Appendices.

  The Manchester band James worked with Eno on Laid (1993), which found notable critical and commercial success in both the UK and the United States. Coldplay's fourth studio album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, was produced by Eno in 2007 and released in 2008 to acclaim. Eno won the best producer award at the BRIT Awards in 1994 and again in 1996.

  The 1994 trophy was not the only surprise of that year. A very different commission arrived from two designers at Microsoft.

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• 6. The Microsoft Sound

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  Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk, designers at Microsoft, approached Eno in 1994 to compose music for Windows 95. The result became known as "The Microsoft Sound", the start-up sound of the operating system. Eno told the San Francisco Chronicle's Joel Selvin that he had been "completely bereft of ideas" and quite lost in his own work. He welcomed someone handing him a specific problem to solve.

  The agency's brief asked for music that was inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental and emotional. Then, at the bottom, came the final demand: "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." Eno found this funny, and then irresistible. He called the task "like making a tiny little jewel" and said, "In fact, I made eighty-four pieces."

  The exercise changed how he heard time. Eno said he became so sensitive to microseconds that it "really broke a logjam" in his own work. When he returned to pieces about three minutes long, they seemed like "oceans of time".

  On the BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, Eno revealed the tool behind the sound. "I wrote it on a Mac," he said. "I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them."

  In 2025, the Library of Congress selected the Microsoft Sound for preservation in the National Recording Registry, calling it culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. It was a tiny jewel, and it was the opposite of the work Eno had been pursuing since the 1960s, music that could make itself.

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• 7. Music That Makes Itself

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  Wind chimes are the example Eno gives when he explains generative music, a system that plays itself. He traces his interest to the mid-1960s. "I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really," he said, "when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders."

  Tape loops came first. When CDs arrived, he recorded several discs of material designed to work together musically under random playback, so that the music had no fixed duration. In 1995, he began working with the company Intermorphic on programmed algorithms. In 1996 he helped develop the SSEYO Koan system, created by Pete Cole and Tim Cole, and used it to compose Generative Music 1. It played only on the Koan software for PC. For the first time, generative music could be heard at home. Wander (2001) and Dark Symphony (2007) followed.

  Eno traces the principle to Music for Airports, where he says one piece is structurally very simple. Three women and Eno himself sang notes, and one note sits on a long tape loop that ran around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank's studio. That loop repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. The next lowest repeats about every 25 7/8 seconds, and the third about every 29 15/16 seconds. Because the cycles are incommensurable, they are unlikely to line up again. "This is music for free in a sense," he said.

  Spore, the 2008 video game from Electronic Arts, gave Eno another outlet. He composed most of its music with his long-term collaborator, the musician and programmer Peter Chilvers, and much of it responds to the player's position in the game. The experience led the pair to set up generativemusic.com and release iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad apps: Bloom (2008), Trope (2009), Scape (2012) and Reflection (2016).

  Reflection offers little more than Play and Pause. Eno described the process as three stages: choosing sonic materials and a mode, letting algorithms permutate them, and then listening. He spent days and weeks watching what the system did. "It's a lot like gardening," he said: "you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like."

  Reflection also exists as an album, released on the 1st of January 2017 and nominated for a Grammy Award. It lasts 54 minutes, and in an interview with Philip Sherburne, Eno explained how he picked that stretch. He generated 11 pieces, set them on random shuffle in iTunes and listened over several evenings. He noticed that the last 40 minutes of one and the first 25 minutes of another were lovely, and he edited the two together. "It was like the birth of rock'n'roll," he said. "I'm allowed to do that! It's not cheating."

  A price change gave the app an odd footnote. After Brexit, the fall of the pound led Apple to raise UK app prices by 25%, so Eno and Chilvers lowered Reflection's price. They gave existing buyers a free four-track album called Sisters, each track lasting 15:14.

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• 8. Light and Quiet Rooms

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  In 1978, a roadie from Foreigner, working in a studio next door to Eno and Talking Heads, wandered in and asked whether anyone wanted to buy video equipment. Eno bought a Panasonic industrial camera. A design flaw meant it could not sit upright without a tripod, so he filmed in vertical format and turned the television on its side to watch. He called the results "video paintings", explaining: "I make videos that don't move very fast."

  Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan (1980) and Thursday Afternoon (1984) were made this way. For the first, Eno filmed static views of New York and its drifting clouds from his thirteenth-floor apartment. The author John Coulthart called it "The first ambient film." The video works were shown in New York and Tokyo and gathered on the compilation 14 Video Paintings in 2005.

  Eno's installations date from 1979, beginning with 2 Fifth Avenue and White Fence at the Kitchen Centre in New York. He said of that period, "video for me is a way of configuring light, just as painting is a way of configuring paint." He soon treated televisions as light sources. Ziggurats placed on top of the screens pushed the light upward, and he named these sculptures Crystals. They were first shown in Boston in 1983, then developed for the Pictures of Venice exhibition at the Cavallino Gallery in 1985.

  Sound became sculpture too. For the I Dormienti show in 1999, Eno placed speakers in each of the 12 tunnels leading from a circular room that held Mimmo Paladino's sleeping figures. His "speaker flowers" are small chassis speakers on tall metal stands that sway with the sound they emit. The first were shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1984.

  The Quiet Club series, running from 1986 to 2001, aimed to give visitors a place to reflect. Eno said he enjoyed watching "lots of people sitting quietly watching something that has no story", and added: "I find people are begging for experiences that are longer and slower, less 'dramatic' and more sensual." At the SFMOMA show in 2001, visitors to his Compact Forest Proposal often lingered for a considerable time.

  In late 2006, Eno and the programmer Jake Dowie released 77 Million Paintings for home computers. Nearly all of its visual elements were hand-painted by Eno onto glass slides. The program overlays between one and four of them at a time and lets each slowly dissolve, so no two viewings match. The work has been projected onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House in 2009, the Carioca Aqueduct in Brazil in 2012 and the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in 2016.

  At an exhibition at Fabrica Brighton in 2010, the orthopaedic surgeon Robin Turner noticed how calming visitors found the work. He asked Eno for a version for the Montefiore Hospital in Hove. In 2013, Eno made two permanent installations there. In reception, eight plasma monitors form a flower-like pattern. The Quiet Room, open to patients, visitors and staff, has three large panels of shifting colour reminiscent of Mondrian.

  Eno's light boxes are now also in hospitals, including Chelsea and Westminster. The Macmillan Horizon Centre in Brighton has a three and a half metre lightbox in its sanctuary room.

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