| Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, usually shortened to Brian Eno, (born May 15, 1948 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England), is an electronic musician, producer, and music theorist. He was educated at Ipswich Art School, where he
developed an interest in using tape recorders as musical instruments, but
transferred to the Winchester School of Art, where he experimented with his first (sometimes improvisational) bands. After graduating in 1969, he moved to London where eventually he started his professional musical career playing keyboards with the band
Roxy Music from 1971 to '73. Between 1973 and 1978 he created four influential
solo-albums that followed somewhat in the genre of Roxy Music, in their having recognisable tunes and lyrics -- Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By
Strategy), Another Green World and Before and After Science. He also played with Phil Manzanera in the band 801. He continued his career by producing
a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely cited as coining the term
"ambient music" in his Ambient series (Music for
Airports, The Plateaux of Mirror,
Day of Radiance and On Land).
Eno describes himself primarily as a "non-musician" and is indeed best known for "treating" instruments rather than playing
them himself. 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-70s) as being unique, so much so that on one album he contributed to
(Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) he is credited with "Enossification."
He collaborated with David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was one of the first albums not associated with
hip hop to extensively feature sampling. Eno collaborated with David Bowie as a
writer and musician on Bowie's influential "Berlin trilogy" of albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger, on Bowie's later album 1. Outside, and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". Eno has also collaborated with Robert Fripp of King Crimson,
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
composer Harold Budd and others.
In 1975, Eno released Discreet Music. The second side
consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's canon to which
various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognisable. Side 1 consisted of a tape loop system
for generating music from relative sparse input. These tapes were later used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with
Robert Fripp, and the methodology (not entirely original with Eno) was used by Fripp (on his Frippertronics albums) and
others.
Eno has acted as a producer for a number of bands, including
Talking Heads, U2,
Devo, and James. He has contributed to albums by
artists as varied as Nico, Robert
Calvert, Genesis, Edikanfo, and Zvuki Mu. He won the best producer award at the
1994 and 1996 BRIT awards. He is an innovator across many fields of music and recently he has collaborated on the development
of the Koan algorithmic
music generator.
Eno started the Obscure label in Britain in the early 70s to release works by less-known composers. Only 10 albums were
released. Works released included early albums by John Adams, Michael
Nyman, Gavin Bryars (the famous The Sinking of the Titanic),
John Cage, and others. At this time he was also active in the Fluxus movement and his work with the Portsmouth Sinfonia came out of this.
In 1996 Brian Eno, and others, started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public into thinking about the very long term future of society.
Brian Eno is also a columnist for the British newspaper, The Observer.
Eno has also been active in other artistic genres, producing videos for gallery display and collaborating with visual artists
in other endeavors. One is the set of "Oblique Strategies"
cards that he produced in the mid-70s, which was described as "100 Worthwhile Dilemmas" and intended as guides to shaking up the
mind in the process of producing artistic endeavors. 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.
His younger brother, Roger Eno is also a musician, who combines ambient styles
with classical music instruments on some of his albums.
The band A Certain Ratio took their name from the lyrics of Eno's
song "The True Wheel" (on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)). British 1990s band The Warm Jets were named
after Eno's 1973 album.
Brian Eno is also responsible for the start-up sound to the Windows 95
operating system (which he created on his Apple Macintosh). From an
interview of his interview with the San Francisco
Chronicle:
- 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 3 1/4 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.
Discography
External links
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