(b Woodbridge, 15 May 1948). English composer and producer. While attending art school in Ipswich and then Winchester he developed an interest in ‘systems’ music, and much of his work can be seen as continuing the work of composers such as John Cage. He first worked professionally from 1970 to 1973 with the seminal art-rock band Roxy Music, lending their first two albums, Roxy Music (Island, 1972) and For Your Pleasure (Island, 1973), a quirky surrealist edge. By treating the group's live sound electronically with a tape recorder and VC5 3 synthesizer, he defined a role for himself as an ‘aural collagist’. After leaving Roxy Music in 1973, Eno developed this interest in the timbral quality of music further with the albums No Pussy Footing (Island, 1973; with King Crimson's Robert Fripp) and the seminal Another Green World (Island, 1975), the latter a brilliant combination of quirky songs and pastoral instrumentals. In 1975 his interest in aleatory music led him to produce with Peter Schmidt ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards, a collection of ‘over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas’, which formed a sort of musical tarot, each card containing a directive on how to proceed to the next creative stage. He then collaborated on three of David Bowie's most innovatory albums (Low, ‘Heroes’ and Lodger), produced new-wave bands such as Talking Heads and Devo, and released two important ambient instrumental albums, Music for Films (EG, 1978) and Music for Airports (EG, 1979).
In the early 1980s Eno developed an intensely cerebral stance towards music and culture, collaborating with David Byrne (of Talking Heads) on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Polydor, 1981), which combined African music and segments of radio broadcasts, and with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois on The Pearl (EG, 1984). He also worked on installations (combinations of light, video, slides and sound), developed an interest in cybernetics and self-generating music systems, and embarked on lecture tours. In the second half of the 1980s and in the 1990s Eno was much in demand as a producer and collaborator, working with such artists as U2, James, Laurie Anderson, John Cale and Bowie. His ideal, in musical terms, is a piece which ‘plays itself’, an almost imperceptibly ever-changing musical work. His own work has often sought to deconstruct the notion of music being a reflection of authorial intention. Eno sees himself as a curator and coordinator of sounds rather than as an originator of new ones.
Eno exerted a decisive influence on the development of ambient music in the 1970s, and became one of the leading producers in pop and rock music. Although his ambient music has often been compared with such genres as muzak or new age meditative music, it is in fact more complex. His best work is usually in his collaborations, which show a maverick intellectualism, an innate sense of the bizarre and a rare ability to fit into listeners' lives. In 1978 he wrote that ‘an ambience is defined as an atmosphere or a surrounding influence, a tint’, adding that 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’.
E. Tamm: Brian Eno: his Music and the Vertical Colour of Sound (London, 1990)
R. Chapman: ‘They Came from Planet Bacofoil’, Mojo, no.25 (1995), 68–82
M. Cunningham: ‘The Oblique Strategist’, Good Vibrations: a History of Record Production (Chessington, 1996), 299–314
B. Eno: A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary (London, 1996)
DAVID BUCKLEY