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
I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.
I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don't particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle.With a label on it.
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.