Brian Eno 'Another Day on Earth' album

In a career spanning almost thirty five years and an astonishing range of artistic practice, Brian Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture. As an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker, he has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last thirty years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the enquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.

Best known in the field of music, Eno’s discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator includes some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono and Peter Gabriel have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar driven rock to film scores and electronica.

And yet music is only one strand of Eno’s creative project. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, his opinions and ideas have been requested by institutions and think tanks on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art. The publication by Faber & Faber of his diary for 1995, under the title ‘A Year With Swollen Appendices’, proved a best seller and gave some indication of the extraordinary range and diversity of Eno’s activities.

Eno’s roots are in the progressive art education systems of the middle to late 60’s. As a student at Winchester School of Art he was already regarded as a controversial figure for his determined questioning of how the role of artist might be dismantled and redefined. Combining a natural brilliance for numerical problem solving, with a vivid literary and visual imagination, Eno came to recognize the unexplored potentials of music making as a valid new form for contemporary art. As early as 1969, in fact, Eno had refuted the distinctions between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, preferring to pursue a dialogue between the two which could give rise to wholly new works and, more importantly, new ways of working. His immediate involvement with such avant gardists as Cornelius Cardew, the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonietta, can now be seen to establish the foundations of Eno’s career-long interest in self-generating systems of creativity – a form which he would refine nearly twenty five years later, in 1996, through his creation of ‘Generative Music’ software.

Vitally, however, Eno’s early dedication to the music avant garde was always steeped in wit and a passionate regard for the classic history of purely popular music – from black American doo-wop through the volatile lullabies of The Velvet Underground to the eerie soundscapes of Can. Speaking in 1997, Eno defined his relationship to pop in a characteristically succinct and aphoristic aside: “I have never thought that popular music was about making music in the traditional sense of the word” he said, “ it is about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them.”

With this in mind, Eno’s role as a founder member of the art rock group Roxy Music, in 1971, can still be regarded as one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of pop. By colliding a highly stylised selection of popular music forms – from French chanson to surfer rockabilly by way of Johnnie Ray – with an uncompromising backdrop of atonal, electronically massaged atmospherics, Roxy Music were and remain the most eloquent and spectacular testimony to Eno’s definition of pop.

But Eno’s creativity required a broader laboratory and playground in which to renew itself, unboundaried by the specific demands of working within a rock group. Departing Roxy Music subsequent to their second album, ‘For Your Pleasure’, in 1972, a typically eclectic yet interconnected set of projects immediately followed.

Two solo albums, ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ and ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ matched Eno’s exuberant surrealism as a lyricist to his warmly melodic vocal style. They also maintained his fusion of avant garde freedoms with snarling rock theatricality and a near Beat Boom pop sensibility – as though Klaus Nomi had tutored The New Seekers to an original score by Mervyn Peake. It is the honed and detailed musical texture of Eno’s songwriting which has granted this strand of his work its timeless modernity and renewed acclaim from successive generations. Heard now, they link glittered melodrama – “Baby’s on fire – better throw her in the water…”, one lyric memorably begins – to the poignant meditations on time, place and love exemplified by Eno’s now legendary ‘Another Green World’ and ‘Before And After Science’ albums, release in 1975 and 1977 respectively. This meticulous crafting of songs has always run parallel to Eno’s instrumental recordings – the artistic starting points of which are related to notions of time as much as instrumentation. Hence his creation of ‘Ambient’ music – first using the term in 1978 – would provide the cultural lexicon with one of its principal epoch-defining concepts.

In the early and middle 1970’s, his recordings with the former King Crimson guitarist, Robert Fripp – ‘No Pussyfooting’ and ‘Evening Star’ – established a template for luxuriously minimalist recordings that contained within their sheer aesthetic gorgeousness and new approach to how music might be made, and, as important, how it might be heard and listened to.

In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the ‘Oblique Strategies’ set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude which can make an immediate intervention into the creative process. In effect, this simple yet highly refined mechanism pre-figures the current vogue for re-patterning creative thinking – as life-coached today through NLP programmes – by nearly a quarter of a century.

It was also in the 1970s that Eno established the ‘Obscure’ label of recordings. Audaciously harnessing his by-now extensive fame as a ‘rock’ musician, to a progressive, curatorial role as a producer, Eno single handedly brought some of the most interesting and important musicians from the musical avant garde to the vast new audience commanded by rock. Thus Michael Nyman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and The Penguin Café Orchestra, as well as many others, released albums on ‘Obscure’ in a series of uniform (yet slightly differing) black sleeves, and a special lower cost to a mainstream pop or rock album. The series would also include Eno’s own ‘Discreet Music’ – a recording of simple variants of musical tones, and a founding example of Eno’s creation of Ambient music as a genre and a softly philosophical statement.

As ‘Obscure’ records were a direct expression of Eno’s creative exploration of music as a fluid, physical, economic and conceptual form, so the releases brought him further recognition as a musician whose genius allowed the glamour of pop to have artistic and intellectual parity with conceptualism, theory and systems-making. Far from risking the earnest aridity of some ‘intellectual’ approaches to music making, the public perception of Eno’s role as a good humoured and whole-heartedly generous combination of Noam Chomsky and Joe Meek make him a favourite with the music press as well as a new folk hero for liberal humanism.

By the late 1970s, Eno’s legendary collaboration with David Bowie on the latter’s ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’ albums, combined with his own ‘Ambient’ series and ‘Music For Films’ releases, enthroned Eno as a the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well has renewed curatorial role on the ‘No New York’ compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for new groups enabled by punk.

A veteran pioneer of extreme forms of music making, with a lifelong interest in working outside of inherited or presumed roles, Eno’s brilliance as a producer lies in his ability to enable musicians to re-enchant their own creativity in new and dramatic ways. Thus his work with Talking Heads saw the group expand on their edgy, guitar driven songs of alienation and domestic unease, to achieve a soaring, epic version of themselves. His role as U2’s producer – on ‘The Joshua Tree’, ‘Zooropa’ and ‘Achtung Baby!’ would transform the band from anthemic rockers into purveyors of multi-media spectacle – the anthemic rocking intact, but intensified into a hyper-stylised version of itself by the acuity of Eno’s production.

It is a testament to Eno’s standing as a musician that he has been cited as an inspiration by artists as varied in tone and temperament as Prince, Franz Ferdinand, Autechre and Public Enemy. Hi collaboration with David Byrne, ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’, released in 1981, is still regarded as one of the founding models for the use of sampling music – its pared down, febrile energy and funk guitars coming across like some sci-fi reclamation of a global media reaching critical mass. But as Eno’s tireless creativity seems always to have been empowered by his balancing of opposites – systems and glamour, science and aesthetics, conceptualism and politics – so his continued work in the musical field has been matched by his site specific and environmental media projects – notably in the form of audio-visual installation.

An indication of Eno’s standing in the often closed and conservative world of contemporary art can be seen from the fact that he was asked by the Tate Gallery in London to present the prestigious Turner Prize – the winner that year being the young Damien Hurst. To many young visual artists, Eno has been as much an art historical reference point or inspiration as Warhol or Jeff Koons, and it is the pan media yet holistically intact nature of Eno’s work to which they most respond. For Eno blurred the boundaries between artistic media, and between ‘pop’ and ‘art’ systems of belief, long before such an approach was the norm. (His making music and ‘art’ for instance, as well as lecturing, writing books and engaging in political activism – all with creative parity with one another.)

Eno’s audio-visual work – shown internationally in venues as prestigious as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre, the Hayward Gallery, London, White Cube/Jay Jopling and the Marble Palace at the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg – makes eloquent the social philosophy which seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. These created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what ‘looking at art’ might involve, and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.

Eno has spoken in the past of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking – rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between aesthetics, science and politics, that all of Brian Eno’s remarkable achievements are ultimately combined.

(Michael Bracewell)

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

Tracklisting

Brian Eno - Another Day on Earth