Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop and electronica. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures.

Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at the art school of Ipswich Civic College in the mid 1960s, and then at Winchester School of Art. He joined glam rock group Roxy Music as its synthesiser player in 1971, recording two albums with the group before departing in 1973. Eno then released a number of solo pop albums beginning with ''Here Come the Warm Jets'' (1974) and, also in the mid-1970s, began exploring a minimalist direction on influential recordings such as '' Discreet Music'' (1975) and '' Ambient 1: Music for Airports'' (1978), coining the term "ambient music" with the latter.

Alongside his solo work, Eno collaborated frequently with other musicians in the 1970s, including Robert Fripp, Harmonia, Cluster, Harold Budd, David Bowie, David Byrne and Judy Nylon. He also established himself as a sought-after producer, working on albums by John Cale, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Talking Heads, Ultravox, and Devo, as well as the no wave compilation ''No New York'' (1978). In subsequent decades, Eno continued to record solo albums and produce for other artists, most prominently U2 and Coldplay, alongside work with artists such as Daniel Lanois, Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, Slowdive, Karl Hyde, James, Kevin Shields, and Damon Albarn.

Dating back to his time as a student, Eno has also worked in other media, including sound installations, film, and writing. In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking. From the 1970s onwards, Eno's installations have included the sails of the Sydney Opera House in 2009 and the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in 2016. An advocate of a range of humanitarian causes, Eno writes on a variety of subjects and is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation. In 2019, Eno was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Roxy Music.

Early life

Brian Peter George Eno was born on 15 May 1948 in the village of Melton, Suffolk, the son of William Arnold Eno (1916–1988), a postal worker and clock and watch repairer, and Maria Alphonsine Eno (''née'' Buslot; 1922–2005), a Belgian national. Eno is the eldest of their three children; he has a brother, Roger, and sister Arlette. They have a half-sister, Rita, from their mother's previous relationship. The surname Eno is derived from the French Huguenot surname Hennot.

In 1959, Eno attended St Joseph's College in Ipswich, a Catholic grammar school of the De La Salle Brothers order. His confirmation name is derived from the school, taking the name Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. In 1964, after earning four O-levels, including one in art and maths, Eno had developed an interest in art and music and had no interest in a "conventional job". He enrolled at the Ipswich School of Art, taking on the newly established Groundcourse foundation art degree established by new media artist Roy Ascott. Here, one of Eno's teachers was artist Tom Phillips, who became a lifelong friend and encouraged his musical ability. Phillips recalled the pair doing "piano tennis" in which, after collecting pianos, the two stripped and aligned them in a hall and struck them with tennis balls. In 1966, Eno studied for a diploma in Fine Arts at the Winchester School of Art, from which he graduated in 1969. At Winchester Eno once attended a lecture by future Who guitarist Pete Townshend, also a former student of Ascott's; he cites this as the moment when he realised he could make music without formal training.

Whilst at school, Eno used a tape recorder as a musical instrument and in 1964 he joined his first group, the Black Aces, a four-piece with Eno on drums that he formed with three friends he met at the youth club he visited in Melton. In late 1967, Eno pursued music once more, forming the Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, an avant-garde music, art, and performance trio with two Winchester undergraduates. This was followed by short stints in multiple avant-garde and college groups, including The Maxwell Demon and Dandelion and The War Damage which featured Eno as frontman who adapted a theatrical persona on stage and later played the guitar.

Career

1970s

In 1969, after separating from his wife, Eno moved to London where his professional music career began. He became involved with the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia; Eno's first appearance on a commercially released recording is the Deutsche Grammophon edition of ''The Great Learning'' (1971) by Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra which features Eno as one of the voices on the track "Paragraph 7". Another early recording was the soundtrack to ''Berlin Horse'' (1970), a nine-minute avant-garde art film by Malcolm Le Grice. At one point, Eno had to earn money as paste-up assistant for the advertisement section of a local paper for three months. He quit and became an electronics dealer by buying old speakers and making new cabinets for them before selling them to friends.

In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "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". Eno played on their first two albums, ''Roxy Music'' (1972) and ''For Your Pleasure'' (1973), and is credited as "Eno" with playing the VCS 3 synthesiser, tape effects, backing vocals, and co-producer. Initially Eno did not appear on stage at their live shows, but operated the group's mixing desk at the centre of the concert venue where he had a microphone to sing backup vocals. After the group secured a record deal, Eno joined them on stage playing the synthesiser and became known for his flamboyant costumes and makeup, partly stealing the spotlight from lead singer Bryan Ferry. After touring ''For Your Pleasure'' ended in mid-1973, Eno quit the band. He cited disagreements with Ferry and the frontman's insistence on being in command of the group, which affected Eno's ability to incorporate his own ideas.

Almost immediately after his exit from Roxy Music, Eno embarked on his solo career. He released four albums of electronically inflected art pop: ''Here Come the Warm Jets'' (1973), ''Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)'' (1974), ''Another Green World'' (1975), and '' Before and After Science'' (1977). ''Tiger Mountain'' contains the "Third Uncle" which became one of Eno's best-known songs, owing in part to its later cover by Bauhaus and 801. 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." During this period, Eno also played three dates with Phil Manzanera in 801, a supergroup that performed more or less reworked selections from albums by Eno, Manzanera, and Quiet Sun, as well as covers of The Beatles and The Kinks.

In 1973, King Crimson founder and guitarist Robert Fripp collaborated with Eno and his tape delay system to make experimental, ambient, and drone music. The result was ''(No Pussyfooting)'' (1973), released as their duo name of Fripp & Eno. Fripp subsequently referred to the tape delay recording method as Frippertronics. The pair followed their debut with a second album '' Evening Star'' (1975), and completed a European tour. Eno produced the albums ''The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics'' (1974) and ''Hallelujah! The Portsmouth Sinfonia Live at the Royal Albert Hall'' (1974) by the Portsmouth Sinfonia, both of which feature Eno playing the clarinet. He also deployed the orchestra's dissonant string section on ''Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)''. Eno went on to work with several performers in the orchestra on his Obscure label, including Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. Later in 1974, Eno and Kevin Ayers contributed music for the experimental/spoken word album '' Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy'' (1974) by poet June Campbell Cramer.

Ambient music

Eno released a number of eclectic ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He coined the term "ambient music", which is designed to modify the listener's perception of the surrounding environment. In the liner notes accompanying '' Ambient 1: Music for Airports'', Eno wrote: "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."

In January 1975 Eno was hit by a taxi while crossing the street and spent several weeks recuperating at home. His girlfriend brought him an old record of harp music, which he lay down to listen to. He realized that he had set the amplifier to a very low volume, and one channel of the stereo was not working, but he lacked the energy to get up and correct it. "This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and sound of the rain were parts of the ambience."

Eno's first work of ambient music was '' Discreet Music'' (1975), again created with an elaborate tape-delay methodology which he diagrammed on the back cover of the LP; it 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)'' featuring Harold Budd on keyboard, '' Day of Radiance (Ambient 3)'' with American composer Laraaji playing zither and hammered dulcimer, and ''On Land (Ambient 4)'').

1980s

Eno provided a film score for Herbert Vesely's ''Egon Schiele – Exzess und Bestrafung'' (1980), also known as ''Egon Schiele – Excess and Punishment''. The ambient-style score was an unusual choice for an historical piece, but it worked effectively with the film's themes of sexual obsession and death.

Before Eno made ''On Land,'' Robert Quine played him Miles Davis' " He Loved Him Madly" (1974). Eno stated in the liner notes for ''On Land,'' "Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the 'spacious' quality I was after, and like Federico Fellini's 1973 film ''Amarcord'', it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently."

In 1980 to 1981, during which time Eno travelled to Ghana for a festival of West African music, he was collaborating with David Byrne of Talking Heads. Their album '' My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'', was built around radio broadcasts Eno collected whilst living in the United States, along with sampled music recordings from around the world transposed over music predominantly inspired by African and Middle Eastern rhythms.

In 1983, Eno collaborated with his brother, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois on the album '' Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks'' that had been commissioned by Al Reinert for his film '' For All Mankind'' (1989). Tracks from the album were subsequently used in several other films, including '' Trainspotting''.

1990s

In September 1992, Eno released ''Nerve Net'', an album utilising heavily syncopated rhythms with contributions from several former collaborators including Fripp, Benmont Tench, Robert Quine and John Paul Jones. This album was a last-minute substitution for ''My Squelchy Life'', which contained 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,'' and the entire album was eventually released in 2014 as part of an expanded re-release of ''Nerve Net.'' Eno also released ''The Shutov Assembly'' in 1992, recorded between 1985 and 1990. This album embraces atonality and abandons most conventional concepts of modes, scales and pitch. Emancipated from the constant attraction towards the tonic that underpins the Western tonal tradition, the gradually shifting music originally eschewed any conventional instrumentation, save for treated keyboards.

During the 1990s, Eno worked increasingly with self-generating musical systems, the results of which he called generative music. This allows the listener to hear music that slowly unfolds in almost infinite non-repeating combinations of sound. 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 achieves this through the blending of several independent musical tracks of varying length. Each track features different musical elements and in some cases, silence. When each individual track concludes, it starts again re-configuring differently with the other tracks. He has presented this music in his own art and sound installations and those in collaboration with other artists, including ''I Dormienti (The Sleepers)'', '' Lightness: Music for the Marble Palace,'' ''Music for Civic Recovery Centre,'' ''The Quiet Room,'' and ''Music for Prague.''

In 1993, Eno worked with the Manchester rock band James to produce two albums, ''Laid'' and ''Wah Wah''. ''Laid'' was met with notable critical and commercial success both in the UK and the United States after its release in 1993. ''Wah Wah'', in comparison, received a more lukewarm response after its release in 1994.

One of Eno's better-known collaborations was with the members of U2, Luciano Pavarotti and several other artists in a group called Passengers. They produced the 1995 album ''Original Soundtracks 1,'' which reached No. 76 on the US ''Billboard'' charts and No. 12 in the UK Albums Chart. It featured a single, "Miss Sarajevo", which reached number 6 in the UK Singles Chart. This collaboration is chronicled in Eno's book ''A Year with Swollen Appendices,'' a diary published in 1996.

In 1996, Eno scored the six-part fantasy television series ''Neverwhere''.

2000s

In 2004, Fripp and Eno recorded another ambient music 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 he continued with ''Everything That Happens Will Happen Today''). The album differs from his 1970s solo work due to the impact of technological advances on musical production, 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.
An unusual interactive marketing strategy was employed for 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". This allowed listeners to remix and upload new mixes of these tracks to the website for others to listen and rate them.

In late 2006, Eno released ''77 Million Paintings'', a program of generative video and music specifically for home computers. 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 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 June 2007, when commissioned in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California, Annabeth Robinson (AngryBeth Shortbread) recreated ''77 Million Paintings'' in Second Life.

The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition mobile phone, released in late 2006, features exclusive ringtones and sounds composed by Eno. Although he was previously uninterested in composing ringtones due to the limited sound palette of monophonic ringtones, phones at this point primarily used audio files. 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 2007, Eno's music was featured in a movie adaption of Irvine Welsh's best-selling collection '' Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance''. He also appeared playing keyboards in ''Voila'', Belinda Carlisle's solo album sung entirely in French.

Also in 2007, Eno contributed a composition titled "Grafton Street" to Dido's third album, ''Safe Trip Home

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