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
Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.
I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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.
Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.
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.
Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.
I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.