Brian Eno
Keyboard Magazine, March 1989 & March 1995
There were many reasons why I was thrilled to be able to arrange an interview with Brian Eno: his production credits, obviously, plus his reputation as a wildly creative innovator foremost among them. What most intrigued me, though, were the anecdotes that crystalized these broader issues. I loved hearing that David Bowie had hired him to play keyboards with his band Spiders From Mars, even though Eno had no experience whatsoever as a keyboard player. And it was delightful to read about his graduate exam from art school: All the other students exhibited their work in the gallery. Asked where his were, Eno led the judges out of the building and across a field to a nearby stream. Beneath the water, his canvases were streaming watercolors like rainbows into the current.
So I was pleased to witness such a moment even before we began our first interview. We were seated outside the Shangri-La Hotel in Santa Monica; I was facing him, looking toward the hotel, while he gazed toward the wall at the edge of the plaza. Right as I began my first question, he held up his right hand.
“Look,” he whispered. “Do you see it? There’s a hummingbird in those vines. Isn’t he beautiful?”
Those vines were maybe fifty feet away. There’s no way I would have seen any details among them, much less a hummingbird. But there it was, an orange-tufted speck, flitting and darting and then hovering in place.
It struck me that this was another reflection of Eno’s methodology as an artist. The first thing I thought of at that moment was his ambient music, which hung like drapes in the sonic spectrum.
Physically slight, he spoke not pedantically but with confidence about how he sees the world and its effect on his work. I had a sense that he was well-read but spent more of his time thinking and doing in order to clarify creative possibilities. So I began with a broad question, assuming it would be his manner to reflect and explore its implications, a process I hoped would guide us as we spoke.
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In the past few years, you’ve been recording fewer solo albums and doing more visual installations. Are they connected in some way to the multimedia presentations you used to do with Roxy Music?
[Brian’s response is a perfect example of his associate, stream-of-thought process. One suggestion leads to the next and soon you’re on your way in an unexpected but often intriguing direction. In instances like this, the interviewer has to be on high alert.]
I don’t think it has much to do with my stage experiences. My installations really tap into a line of things that I was doing before I ever started playing onstage. I was working with light in dark rooms when I was in art college. I suppose my shows do react against the rock presentations in a certain way. I like to deliberately create slow-stimulus atmospheres, which are sort of the opposite of the pop video. The whole ethos of the pop video is to do as many edits as you can. Most commercial television is like that as well: There’s a continuous sense of forcing interest through rapid editing. I try to go the opposite way. I want to make things that are very slow and hypnotic, that draw interest not by attacking but by seducing. It’s very un-pop in that way. But in another way, it’s quite pop, in that it doesn’t set out to distance itself from the interests of ordinary people. A lot of fine art does, either inadvertently or intentionally. My work is really an attempt to show that it’s possible to make something subtle that people will like.
[Naturally at this point I pick up where Eno left off and push a little deeper.]
How do you perceive aspects of what you do in these installations as being things that people would like, rather than things that distance the work from its viewers?
Well, first of all, my tastes are not that different from other people’s. That’s really the arbiter. If I genuinely like something, not just if I think it’s clever or a bit of a trick, then I find that a lot of other people do as well.
But the second thing is this: Having found that which I respond to and which I therefore trust that at least some of the rest of the world is going to respond to as well, I then think about how I can make that experience as available and as comfortable for them as possible. All of my shows rely on having some concept of comfort. When you go to a show, you should be able to feel that you can sit down and stay there for half an hour. Most places [i.e., galleries] don’t even have seats in them. There’s very much a sense that you look through it quickly and leave. I try to make it so the people can choose to stay there for a while. I also try to make it so that there aren’t too many ergonomically awkward spots in the place — places where people could bash into each other. It’s like designing a shopping mall [laughs]. Quite apart from what you’re selling in the mall, can you make the place work? Can you make it so that people enjoy the experience of being there?
[Brian having made his intentions clear as far as exhibition places, this was the moment to steer the conversation back to music with respect to those intentions.]
As you’re putting these environments together, do you think differently about music that you do when you’re recording an album in a studio?
Oh, yes, very differently. In fact, I’ve never released any of the music that’s been used in these installations. Though I really like it in the installations, that’s where it belongs. I don't work abstracted from them. It must be that it was designed from those places, so it resides in them. I once actually mixed some music from an installation with a view toward releasing it on a record. But when I listened to it, it sounded like a relic. In my opinion, it didn’t stand as a piece on its own.
[Brian was an ideal interview subject, in that his answers always seemed to point the way toward follow-up questions that would encourage him to expand on his own comments, often in a surprising way as with his reference to never releasing music he had created from and for installations.]
“Nearly all of my installations have used variations on the same piece of music.”
How do your musical ideas evolve within the space of a specific art environment, as opposed to within a recording studio?
Nearly all of my installations have used variations on the same piece of music. This was a piece that I did for my second big video show a long time ago. It worked very well. I was really pleased with it. When the next show came up, I did another piece. But when I took it down to that space, I didn’t like it as much. So I used the first one again but with quite a few variations in the mix, balance and so on. It became the underlay of whatever work I did. I would always have the music playing while [collaborator] Michael Brook and I set up the video show — in fact, when I was building the work as well. So the show grows out of the music quite a lot, rather than the other way around.
Then, in the summer two years ago, I did a new piece, in the same key and almost in the same mode as the first piece. Lately, I’ve been mixing these two pieces. In a show in Berlin, I used all of one piece plus one tape of the second piece. The blends can be quite complicated. What’s happening is that instead of being single site-specific works, these pieces are turning into modular units. I’ve recently added two more sections. I normally have only four tapes playing but I choose them from about ten different tapes made over a four-year period. The piece changes internally all the time when it’s playing in the space.
But it’s also changing globally, taking new forms outside of the space. The internal changes happen because I have four cassettes running on auto-reverse players. The cassettes are cut to be different lengths, which are not related in any simple mathematical way. It’s like having very long tape loops running, always combining in different ways. Jon Hassell and I were discussing this recently, and we agreed that music has narrowed down into being not that which is audible but which is recordable. A lot of things I’m interested in are not recordable.
So one of my points in doing these installations was to make music that could only be heard in that place. It goes back to the idea of music being linked to a certain moment in space and time and not being in any way transferable from it. I like that idea that people can’t go out and buy a record of this. There’s something interesting about making a place with music that belongs to it. You can’t take the music away, any more than you can take away the other elements.
Why are you so interested in obscuring sounds?
Well, first of all, whenever you hear a real instrument, or any real sound in the world for that matter, you hear it in a container of some kind. If you hear a guitar being played, you’re hearing all the formants in the body of the guitar, not just the strings. The synthesizer, on the other hand, is like just the strings. It’s a disembodied sound. Because of that, I’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to build a body around that sound. The problem with synthesizers is that the sound involves too few atoms. Once you get into the level of complex molecules involved, then you start to get into the richness that makes sound interesting.
Your mission, then, is to add electronics to the nucleus of sound.
That’s right [laughs]. I always criticize synthesizer manufacturers for making the most obvious technological choices, which are simply to multiply the number of options they put into the machine. If you’re printing chips, the easiest thing is to make a few more options. The hardest thing is to try and solve the problem of making these machines interface better or relate to human beings in new and interesting ways. How do we make them, for instance, anything like as responsible as some of the acoustic instruments, which, after all, are highly evolved? I would like to see two things. One is a type of synthesizer that doesn’t offer huge numbers of options in terms of stored or possible available sounds but does offer tremendous response to you as a player, so that you can actually start to feel what it’s like to play this instrument.
Acoustic instruments are based on the model of being as responsible as possible to human control. In electronic music, real-time control is only one of several priorities.
And that’s a shame because it gives rise to a certain kind of music. It’s very hard to imagine Jimi Hendrix playing his type of music on a synthesizer. It’s easy to copy him on a synthesizer, but it's hard to imagine coming up with playing like his on such a non-physical instrument as most synthesizers are. Synthesizers have fulfilled their promise in the sense that they’ve made it possible for the player to have anything on the menu. But they’re completely under-evolved in the other direction. They’re not much more sophisticated in terms of the rapport you have with them than they were twenty years ago. Young people often talk about the options on each synthesizer. But options are not important. Rapport is important. … The flute doesn’t offer you a lot of options. The drums offer you very few. From the synthesizer perspective, the idea of a bloke spending his life bashing bits of wood is absurd.
How would you propose to deal with the more limited tactile playability of electronic versus acoustic instruments?
I’ve been developing an idea for a programming style that I call evolutionary. Let’s say the synthesizer offers you thirty-two sounds when you switch it on. You listen to those quickly and say, “Right, number fourteen is quite close to what I want. Number eighteen is sort of close as well.” You press those two, and the synthesizer gives you thirty-two mutations of those sounds. Then you go, “New number fifteen is pretty good. Let’s hear some mutations of that.” As you close in on something you like, you can reduce the rate of mutation. What’s interesting about this is that you don’t need to have any idea at all what the synthesizer is doing, although it can be as internally complex as you can imagine.
In other words, you’re taking the idea of user control over sound and separating it from any need for technological understanding.
That’s the idea. The only thing the player needs to exercise is judgment. They don’t need to be able to exercise skill. If you worked like that for a while, you’d end up with a library of sounds that you had discovered by that process. After a couple of weeks, you would have a synthesizer that’s entirely unique to you, with your special sounds.
The Technique Trap
If you had developed strong keyboard technique as a child, would that have hindered your musical development?
Certainly. I used to build up harmonies not by playing chords, because I didn’t know any, but by playing each line at a time. So if I wanted what would be a harmonized chord sequence for anybody else, I would play one line, then I would play another line over it, then I’d play another one. I’d find my way through, almost note by note. If you go through step by step, just following your nose, you will make quite different decisions because you wouldn’t be subject to purely muscular habits that say “my fingers should be this far apart if I want to follow this chord with that chord.”
If you were a teacher, with a well-trained pianist as your student, how would you help him or her past that barrier of habit?
Studios offer a big way past that. If you start thinking of music as something you don’t have to do in real time but something that can be built up, like a painting, that gives you a different way of working. You can think about it on, shall we say, the atomic level. The other level you can think of, through working with the kinds of processing equipment that studios have, is as a way of making atmospheres, landscapes, whatever you like. Nearly all the processing equipment you find in a studio gives you a way of changing the sense of space that the music is happening in. Now, this option doesn’t really exist in classical music. We’re familiar with the idea of using space as an element of composition, but mostly classically trained musicians have no conception of that.
For example, I have a young friend who plays violin and viola, a very good player. She started coming around to my studio because she was fascinated by what I was doing. I took it upon myself to try to help her escape her training [laughs]. I evolved quite a few exercises for her. Some of them were purely to do with listening in a different way. For instance, I discovered that like most classical players, she couldn’t play pushed time at all.
“I often define classical music as music without Africa.”
Pushed time?
You know, the kind of time that’s built into any funk or soul record, where you’re feeling 3/4 as well as 4/4. All music that comes from Africa has that feeling, which is why I define classical music as music without Africa. So I gave her a Neville Brothers record and I said, “Why don’t you try to learn the bass part on this record and play it on your viola?” She did, and it was the biggest thrill for her. I opened her life musically.
So your advice to trained musicians isn’t to keep finessing their technique but rather to use their limitations to do something new.
Well, finessing is worth doing too. You might think of it as a two-stage process: Some people invent new words, but other people learn how to speak well with them. The people who exercise the vocabulary are doing something very important. I’m not one of those; my fun is thinking up other words to fit the vocabulary. It’s like being a collage artist: You take this postcard, which somebody else made, and you stick it next to that photograph, which somebody else made. Then you put a bit of paint over the two of them and join them together. This is very in tune with what has been going on pinpointing for the past fifteen years or so, with people sticking together not just abstract qualities of sounds but the references that carry with them. All the engineers working with rap bands are having a terrible time because the artists insist on leaving all the scratches on the records they sample. What they’re saying is, “Hey, this is taken from somewhere else, from another time and place.” So part of the message of the music becomes the fact. It’s collage, binding together history as well as sound.
It also creates an impression you described in another interview as cultural ambiguity. What makes this postmodern approach more interesting than the traditional exercise of digging deeply into one’s own native culture?
I wouldn’t say it is necessarily more interesting. Equally interesting is the fact that some people, like Ry Cooder or perhaps Neil Young, keep digging in the same little trench, as it were, and coming up with neat stuff. What’s changed is the overall dynamic of where you search and what you look for has widened. It is possible now for there to be music stars who, in terms of the range of their work, are something like Samuel Beckett: They stay in the same place their whole lives and get better and better at what they’re doing. Or it’s possible to remain an eclectic gadfly. Neither of these choices was possible twenty years ago. You were expected to have a boringly predictable rate of change in your career, to vaguely embrace new ideas as they came out but not to lose your identity, as they say in marketing. So the possibilities of range have changed: You can be very focused, you can be in the middle, or you can be vague.
Ambience
You once suggested that ambient music is about getting rid of nervousness. Did you begin doing ambient music in part because the world needed it?
Yes. In the Seventies, a few friends of mine and I used to compile tapes for each other. We did this because we were dissatisfied with the way records were laid out: fast song, slow song, dance song, ballad — this pathetic concept of variety, which was based on the idea that your attention span for any particular mood could be counted on for three and a half minutes, and after that something else had to be thrown at you to keep you listening. My friend Peter Schmidt and I used to do two-hour tapes that changed mood only in the most subtle way. I remember he did one for me that was the slow movements of all the Haydn string quartet. He arranged it so that the key changes were very nice, from one slow movement to the next. So we were putting on music to create an atmosphere, a mood, in a place. We didn’t want a different mood every three or four minutes.
Did your ambient experiments also function as a kind of personal therapy?
Really, they did. I described it on the back of Discreet Music. I remember it so clearly. I had had an accident and I was confined to bed. A friend of mine came to visit me, and as she left I said, “Can you put a record on for me?” She put it on, but it was much too quiet — plus, one side my hi-fi had broken down. At first I was listening and thinking, “Oh, shit. I can't hear the music.” But then I realized I wasn’t just listening to the music; I was listening to the rain and to these occasional pieces of sound drifting above the level of the rain. I thought, “Now, this is interesting, the idea that music shouldn’t exclude but should include, that the music you make can be a background against which other sounds can perform.”
Melodies sweep you along through verses to a chorus and on through other episodes to the conclusion. Your ambient music is more static, yet it moves as nature seems to move, without apparent direction.
That’s right. Most music has a very strong sense of narrative. It’s teleological, as art historians say. Therefore, it has a strong sense of time being cut up into sections. That’s exactly what you don’t want if you’re trying to dream. You don’t want to be constantly brought back to a world that’s cut up into little chunks. Most pop music does that. It’s very exciting if you’re dancing; it’s not so nice when you’re having a massage.
Oddly enough, much of the uptempo music that comes out of rave culture functions similarly to your ambient works. There’s more emphatic rhythm, but it flows by. You lose track of where the eight-bar phrases fall. You might think of it as frenzied ambience.
That’s quite true. I used to say that the closest thing to ambient music was heavy metal. If you’ve ever been to a heavy metal concert, everything becomes irrelevant except this blast of sound. It’s an amazing experience to see a good heavy metal band. You’re experiencing pure, physical sound. That is what’s happening in clubs. The beat has gone down a bit in the past few months, but they reached a peak here last year when it was up to 150 or 160 bpm, sometimes even faster. When a beat is that fast, it almost stops being a rhythm and just washes over you, like pure sound. So you’re right, it’s an ambient experience for people with a lot of energy.
So many vital musical trends, from ambient to techno, were on your agenda years before other artists picked up on them. What put you ahead of the parade?
Well, because of coming into music from a visual arts background, it wasn’t possible for me to make music like other people did. So I would sit and fiddle with things, and then listen to what happened. That’s probably the first distinction: I actually listened to things, not to what I thought they were supposed to do but what they actually were doing. Most people picked up synthesizers expecting them to do something they’d heard before. When they did do something they heard before, they were happy with that. But I thought the synthesizer could do entirely new things. When it did, I was pleased and would pursue them. Similarly, when I first started recording, the idea was that the studio was a kind of transmitter of pre-written songs. You’d go in there and get them on tape, with a bit of confectionery from the producer. But as soon as I sat in the studio and started listening, I thought, “My God, this is music like I’ve never heard before!”
Uncanny Predictions
What changes do you see in the future to the experience of listening to music?
Well, first of all, audiences are probably sick to death with music. I know I am. I don’t listen to music very much. I have three or four hundred CDs on a shelf next to my desk. I bought only about six of those; the rest have all been given to me. It’s just so much stuff! How do you navigate through all this? What is it that catches your attention? That’s why I think there’s going to be a role for curators.
What sort of curators?
I can imagine somebody putting together collections of music that he likes and selling them.:“Oh, that’s a nice collection! I’ll buy his next one as well.” This person creams off a little percentage on top, having put these things together. Sooner or later we’re going to be delivering music down phone lines. There are going to be people, something like DJs, who package it for you. These curators are essentially two things: They’re filters who save you from having to listen to everything, but they’re also connectors in that they make taste connections that you might not have made yourself. Eventually computers will be able to start doing this too. If you say to a computer, “I like Teardrop Explodes, Velvet Underground, Abba, Silver Apples and Sinead O’Connor,” I can imagine a well-programmed database saying, “In that case, have you heard Elastic Pure Joy? You might like them.” It would scan the groups of things that people like and spot certain regularities of connection, like the fact that people who mention Tony Bennett generally didn’t mention the Velvet Underground.
You could also do percentages, suggesting that you like Tony Bennett about two-thirds as much as you like the Velvet Underground.
It would help to specify particular songs as well. It would probably end up working a bit like the evolutionary synthesizer. Imagine you don’t know anything about music. You walk into a record shop, and here are thirty-two buttons. You press one, a bit of music comes out, and you say, “I don’t like that.” Press another: “That’s more like it.” Press another: “Oh, yeah! That’s quite good! Show me a lot of other things that are like that.” Somehow or another, you might be able to navigate into rather interesting and remote areas of music.
Eventually, you might even be able to morph your own hybrid artist.
Exactly! That doesn’t seem too far off.
What other predictions can you make for music at the end of the millennium?
You know the thing that happened with David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino? The music they put onto their records was given an extraordinary resonance by the fact that it was associated with their films. This was a trick I learned a long time ago. If you call something “music for film,” that says to people, “Imagine what the film would be for this music.” You evoke a whole set of imaginative skills that people have, but they think it’s in the music. It’s a trick, really, to use their own imaginations to flatter your music. What Tarantino did with the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction, for instance, was very interesting. He’s kind of sanctified some rather nondescript music, given it a real zing and a resonance. That soundtrack is great to listen to because you know there’s a story there.
So seeing Pulp Fiction changed your own appreciation of the songs in its soundtrack?
In fact, I’ve never seen the film! I’ve only heard the soundtrack. But as soon as I heard it, I thought, “Oh, yes. I see. I see how this could fit in here. This is the way in which a multimedia form will come into being, through back avenues like this.
One Eno Is Enough
Do people misunderstand your work, to the extent that it’s used as an excuse to produce technically unsophisticated trance music?
[Laughs.] Yeah. But I don’t mind that. In fact, I rather like all the misinterpretations. That’s part of the bonus. Misinterpretation is a great source of innovation. It’s the basis of biological evolution, after all. If all you’ve got at the end is more people doing things that you had expected them to do, that wouldn’t be too interesting.
What I don’t like is when I hear something by someone who has missed the most important bits. For example, half the tapes that we get at Opal, our record company, sound like me or Roger [Eno] or Harold Budd. I don’t understand why people do this. I already have me, Harold and Roger. Why do they think I’ll want another one — especially one that’s not very good? We get lots of Harold Budds without the sinister undertones, lots of me without any sense of humor, lots of Roger without good tunes. So what’s the point? It just means that they didn’t hear us properly or else they wouldn’t have bothered to send this in.
What’s indispensable to me is that the artist has to be totally earnest about what he or she is doing. I’m really not interested in people piddling around or playing games. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing is somewhat humorous. I want for their commitment to be complete. There’s nothing worse than feeling yourself in a situation where you suddenly find that it doesn’t matter that much to them. You start thinking, “If it doesn’t matter to them, why should it mean anything to me?” It has to matter a lot.
Is it hard to find people with whom you can work?
I don’t really find them. I just wait [laughs]. But it isn’t hard. I don’t find myself thinking, “God, I wish there were some interesting people out there.” There are! They aren’t in a particularly coherent group, however. It seems to me that there's a continuum of music and I can hop around certain parts of the spectrum. I don’t care whether it falls into the category of jazz or poor whatever. These labels are supposed to close off certain areas. Well, they don’t close anything off for me.
“We’re definitely in the postmodern era of pop music.”
With all that diversity, what do you think audiences expect from you as an artist and producer?
Quite a few things. We’re definitely in the postmodern era of pop music. People are conscious of shuffling styles. To give you an example, I can’t imagine that Jefferson Airplane, Cream or someone like that were consciously shuffling styles. They weren’t even thinking about it, I would imagine. Style was not an issue. You played the way you worked it out to play.
They might cite varied influences.
That’s right. Or use a sitar. But postmodernism is different. I also call it ‘Ism-ism.” It’s really the manipulation of other historical styles. That’s certainly a condition of pop music at the moment. It’s an almost ironic position, one about which I have very mixed feelings, in which the artist is not in any way exposed any longer. Rather, he’s a puppet master, playing with different styles that are allowed to cross or combine with one another And explode in different ways.
It’s essentially an intellectual mix-and-match process.
Very intellectual, yes. It’s what painting and architecture are doing at the moment as well. There aren’t any major structural changes in buildings; they’re cosmetic changes. Ism-ism has very much to do with the look of things, the outside of things.
At the other extreme, there’s something I don’t have a name for, which is a real extrapolation of the Sixties thing: pop as religion, as a form of coming together communally. The most interesting aspect of religions in general is not what they specifically teach, but the nature of the experience of a lot of people coming together in one place agreeing to be moved in one way.
When did you first experience that feeling yourself?
I can remember very clearly. In 1965 there was a poetry reading at the Albert Hall in London. It had all the Beat poets — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and so on. I didn’t know anyone else who knew about it. I just went. The place was absolutely packed; there were about seven thousand people in there. And nobody knew that anybody else was interested! It was stunning to realize that many people were interested in what seemed a very obscure corner of modern culture at the time. That was really the beginning of what you’d call the Sixties in England.
How do you explain that turnout? Was it just because you had a lot of young people around — the baby boomers — with money to spend on distractions?
Yeah. And you had a lot of options. You could wander around for three years before getting a job. I know that I didn’t feel under any pressure to pull my life together. I didn’t feel competitive. There was a consensus that things were possible. That may be because people’s expectations of what they need to have in their lives have become so much greater. The idea of being poor doesn’t have a lot of glamour anymore. But it will again.
“I prefer to shoot the arrow and then paint the target around it.”
Now, though, artists understand that in the not-distant future we all might not be in a position to listen to music recreationally. The world may soon be struggling with existential challenges.
Well, something is always possible, though it might not be exactly what you expected. I often notice, when I’m talking with people involved in the arts, that their concept of what they want to do is to aim for the biggest, most obvious target and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. That’s success, whatever the particular field is. Of course, with everybody else aiming there as well, that makes it very hard to hit. It’s made hard to do. It’s made expensive. As Jon Hassell always says, I prefer to shoot the arrow and then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
What do you offer to artists in your service as their producer?
The only thing I can offer is that which most other producers don’t. Most other producers are going to push the “sure to be successful” side, which means the “sure to be recognizable” side of what people are doing. I’m very happy to see people being successful, of course. It’s nice to know that they do that kind of thing. But they don’t need my help at all. If they want a producer who will put a gloss on what they do, there are people who are much better at that than I am. If they really want help to pull out something that hasn’t come together, that’s in there but hasn’t forced its way out, that’s where you need a lot of encouragement and sympathy. That’s what another artist can do, because he’s seen the process. He’s seen how awkward it is at that stage.
I’m interested in pretending that I work in a niche while actually not quite being in there. I like to draw people in with all their expectations, including myself. I should never pretend that I do this to others and not to myself. We’re all drawn in. We’re all seduced into a way of listening. We think we know where we are, and then things happen which make us realize that we’re somewhere different.
Perhaps somewhere quite different.
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Holy cow, he nailed our current music consumption environment to the letter—curated playlists that even computers can make! (Was that part from 86 or 95?)
I had an idea for an evolutionary effects pedal... should have guessed Eno beat meet to it by a few decades.