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
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I've seen him a few times since then and I still can't decide. Whatever, he ain't like nobody else.
When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it.
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
Being an artist is a job for life.
One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.