From Mother Jones:
The experimental music icon's relentless pursuit: making art that makes itself.
Previously:BECAUSE SHORT, vowel-heavy nouns are in finite supply, the makers of crossword puzzles resort to familiar tricks: Charlie Chaplin's fourth wife (OONA), Jacob's hirsute brother (ESAU), Kwik-E-Mart's manager (APU). Most of these people are known for exactly one thing, so the clues tend to be repetitive. ENO—that is, the 64-year-old British polymath Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno—is an exception to the rule. All of the following crossword clues have been used to describe him: "Roxy Music co-founder"; "Ambient music pioneer"; "David Byrne collaborator"; "Grammy-winning Brian"; "Producer of Paul Simon's newest album"; "Composer of The Lovely Bones' music"; "Creator of the 'Microsoft sound' played when Windows 95 starts"; "Brian who produced several U2 albums"; "Generative music pioneer." (He has also helped chartbuster Coldplay hone its sound. "Brian doesn't work with many people, so if he wants to work with you, you want to do it," frontman Chris Martin told Pitchfork.) Some of his other epithets—abstract painter, inventor of iPad apps, subject of an eponymous song by the band MGMT—are too obscure even for crossword prodigies.Eno makes his own music, too. His four experimental pop albums from the mid-1970s were universally revered and have influenced generations of indie rockers. But listeners began to stray—little surprise, since only one of his albums since 1977's Before and After Science has included vocals. Bored with the rock format and intrigued by minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Eno began to think less about melody and more about texture. He called his experiments "ambient" music—works intended for a particular place or to set a particular mood. With 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Eno was not merely being cute; he'd recently visited the gleaming new terminal in Cologne, Germany, and thought it strange that the architects were so careful with their floor plan but had neglected to provide a soundtrack. (The album was later used for an Eno installation at LaGuardia.)
LUX, released in November, is Eno's 17th album and his first solo album in seven years. "I'm sure somebody that doesn't know my work well would think, 'That sounds like another piece of clinky-clonk Brian Eno music,'" he told me when I interviewed him recently. "Actually, to me, it's different." Eno doesn't call LUX an ambient album, but it evolved out of music commissioned specifically for the Great Gallery, a high-ceilinged hall in an 18th-century palace near Turin, Italy. The space is full of light—hence the title—but Eno lives in gloomy London and wrote the piece at home. When he went to the Great Gallery to preview his work, he thought it sounded too "interior," so he revised it.
He was happy with the second attempt, as were the curators—for the next five years, visitors will hear LUX in the background—but he still didn't think of it as an album. "I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs," he says. "On my computer I've got, I think, 3,480 pieces of music that I've never released." But he and his friends particularly enjoyed listening to LUX, and "I assume that if I really like something, I'm probably not that different from everybody else."
I flew to North Carolina not long ago to watch Eno give a lecture. On the way, I listened to Music for Airports, and though it complements sleek European interiors better than it does the Asheville Regional Airport under renovation, it did have a slight narcotic effect. Eno came onstage at his event wearing stylishly muted colors, like a docent from the 23rd century.
The crowd greeted him with a standing ovation, which he received with unsmiling British reserve. He placed a transparency on a projector and wrote out the "menu" for the talk—"Riley/Reich" (as in Terry and Steve); "cellular automata"; "cybernetics"; "haircuts"—and then flitted among these topics with a graceful combination of whimsy and earnestness. ("Amateur art theorist" and "Thinks big thoughts" would also be accurate, if unhelpful, crossword clues.) He explicated a Danish town's waterworks, projected a diagram of what Riley's seminal minimalist composition "IN C" sounds like, and pithily defined culture ("everything you don't have to do") and haircuts ("a little artwork that everyone carries around on their head").
But each of these thoughts led Eno back to his primary obsession, which he calls "generative art." As he explained to me, if a regular piece of art is a finished product, a generative artwork is a process. A rudimentary example is a wind chime: Its maker chooses the tones, but the wind controls the melody. More complex systems, like Eno's iPad generative-music app Scape, use computer algorithms to go on iterating indefinitely. In theory, it is a recipe for millions of pieces that no one will ever hear in full.
Eno has a clean-shaven head and a slightly grim expression, and he speaks in a mild Suffolk monotone. Witty and self-effacing, he refers to his albums as "little ships on an ocean of indifference," and doesn't mind if people use them as background music: "It doesn't have to be right at the center of your world. It can be a sort of aesthetic cushion."...MUCH MORE
April 22, 2010
Britain: "Did Brian Eno produce Clegg-mania?" and "Music for Earth Day"
... Two years ago today, I was working late, crabby and posted "Music for Earth Day: Baby's on Fire":
Maybe a bit darker than what you'll find at the face-painting booth but I've got work to do and I'm not happy.
Here's Brian Eno's masterpiece (one of 'em) done by "Venus in Furs" in the movie "Velvet Goldmine". Venus in Furs was the book by Sacher-Masoch. And the song by Lou Reed. As I said, dark.
Here's something a little more green than Eno, Lou doing "Sweet Jane".
Also at Mother Jones: 11 Killer Albums Brought to You by Brian Eno
1977: Eno played a key role in Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy" of Low, Heroes, and Lodger.
1978: Eno was the genius behind Devo's weird and wonderful debut.
1980: An amazing followup to 1979's Fear of Music, which Eno also produced.
1984: The beginning of Eno's long and fruitful collaboration with U2.
