Name | Brian Eno |
---|---|
Caption | Eno at The Long Now Foundation, 26 June 2006 |
Background | solo_singer |
Birth name | Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno |
Born | May 15, 1948Woodbridge, Suffolk, England |
Instrument | Synthesizer, piano, keyboards, vocals, organ, saxophone, guitar, bass |
Genre | Experimental rock, ambient, minimalism, electronic, art rock, glam rock |
Occupation | Producer, musician, songwriter, artist |
Years active | 1970–present |
Label | Island, Polydor, EG, Obscure, Opal, Virgin, Astralwerks, All Saints Records, Rykodisc |
Associated acts | Roxy Music, David Bowie, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Robert Fripp, Cluster, Devo, U2, David Byrne, Robert Wyatt, 801 |
Website | brian-eno.net |
Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex, England, taking inspiration from minimalist painting. During his time on the art course at the Institute, he also gained experience in playing and making music through teaching sessions held in the adjacent music school.
He joined the band Roxy Music as their keyboards and synthesizers player in the early 1970s. Roxy Music's success in the glam rock scene came quickly, but Eno soon tired of conflicts with lead singer Bryan Ferry, and of touring, and he left the group after the release of For Your Pleasure (1973), beginning his solo career with the art rock records Here Come the Warm Jets (1974) and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974).
Eno extended his reach into more experimental musical styles with (No Pussyfooting) (1973) and Evening Star (1975), both collaborations with Robert Fripp, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis where his work is credited as "Enossification", and his influential solo records Another Green World (1975) and Discreet Music (1975). His pioneering ambient efforts at "sonic landscapes" began to consume more of his time beginning with Ambient 1/Music for Airports (1978) and later (1983) which was composed for the documentary film For All Mankind. Eno nevertheless continued to sing on some of his records, ranging from Before and After Science (1977) to Wrong Way Up (1990) with John Cale to most recently Another Day on Earth (2005) and Drums Between the Bells (2011).
Eno's solo work has been extremely influential, pioneering ambient and generative music, innovating production techniques, and emphasizing "theory over practice". He also introduced the concept of chance music to popular audiences partly through collaborations with other musicians. By the end of the 1970s, Eno had worked with David Bowie on the seminal "Berlin Trilogy," helped popularise the American punk rock band Devo and the punk-influenced "No Wave" genre, and worked frequently with Harold Budd, John Cale, Cluster, Robert Fripp and David Byrne, with whom he produced the influential My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). He produced and performed on three albums by Talking Heads, including Remain in Light (1980); produced seven albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree (1987); and worked on records by James, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Paul Simon, Grace Jones and Slowdive, among others.
Eno pursues multimedia ventures in parallel to his music career, including art installations, a newspaper column in The Observer and a regular column on society and innovation in Prospect magazine, and "Oblique Strategies" (written with Peter Schmidt), a deck of cards in which each card has a cryptic remark or random insight meant to resolve a dilemma. He continues to collaborate with other musicians, produce records, release his own music, and write.
Brian Eno's professional music career began in London, as a member (1971–1973) of the glam/art rock band Roxy Music, initially not appearing on stage with them at live shows, but operating the mixing desk, processing the band's sound with a VCS3 synthesizer and tape recorders, and singing backing vocals. He then progressed to appearing on stage as a performing member of the group, usually flamboyantly costumed. He quit the band on completing the promotion tour for the band's second album, For Your Pleasure because of disagreements with lead singer Bryan Ferry and boredom with the rock star life.
In 1992, he described his Roxy Music tenure as important to his career: "As a result of going into a subway station and meeting Andy [saxophonist Andy Mackay], I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now". During his period with Roxy Music, and for his first three solo albums, he was credited on these records only as 'Eno'.
These four albums were remastered and reissued in 2004 by Virgin's Astralwerks label. Due to Eno's decision not to add any extra tracks of the original material, a handful of tracks originally issued as singles have not been reissued ("Seven Deadly Finns" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" were included on the deleted Eno Vocal Box set and the single mix of "King's Lead Hat" [which is an anagram of "Talking Heads"] has never been reissued).
During this period, Eno also played three dates with Phil Manzanera in the band 801, a "supergroup" that performed more or less mutated selections from albums by Eno, Manzanera, and Quiet Sun, as well as covers of songs by The Beatles and The Kinks.
In 1972, Eno developed a tape-delay system first utilized by Eno and Robert Fripp (from King Crimson), described as 'Frippertronics', and the pair released an album in 1973 called (No Pussyfooting). It is said the technique was borrowed from minimalist composer Terry Riley, whose tape delay feedback system with a pair of Revox tape recorders (a setup Riley used to call the "Time Lag Accumulator") was first used on Riley's album Music for The Gift in 1963. In 1975, Fripp and Eno released a second album, Evening Star, and played several live shows in Europe.
Eno was a prominent member of the performance art-classical orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia – having started playing with them in 1972. In 1973 he produced the orchestra's first album The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics (released in March 1974) and in 1974 he produced the live album Hallellujah! The Portsmouth Sinfonia Live At The Royal Albert Hall of their infamous May 1974 concert (released in October 1974.) In addition to producing both albums, Eno performed in the orchestra on both recordings – playing the clarinet. Eno also deployed the orchestra's famously dissonant string section on his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). The orchestra at this time included other musicians whose solo work he would subsequently release on his Obscure label including Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. That year he also composed music for the album Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy, with Kevin Ayers, to accompany the poet June Campbell Cramer.
Eno continued his career by producing a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely credited with coining the term "ambient music", low-volume music designed to modify one's perception of a surrounding environment.
His first such work, 1975's Discreet Music (again created via an elaborate tape-delay methodology, which Eno diagrammed on the back cover of the LP ), is considered the landmark album of the genre. This was followed by his Ambient series (Music for Airports (Ambient 1), The Plateaux of Mirror (Ambient 2), Day of Radiance (Ambient 3) and On Land (Ambient 4)). Eno was the primary musician on these releases with the exception of Ambient 2 which featured Harold Budd on keyboard, and Ambient 3 where the American composer Laraaji was the sole musician playing the zither and hammered dulcimer with Eno producing.
In 1980 Eno provided a film score for Herbert Vesely's Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung, also known as Egon Schiele Excess and Punishment. The ambient-style score was an unusual choice for a historical piece, but it worked effectively with the film's themes of sexual obsession and death.
In 1981, having returned from Ghana and before On Land, he discovered Miles Davis' 1974 track "He Loved Him Madly", a melancholy tribute to Duke Ellington influenced by both African music and Karlheinz Stockhausen: as Eno stated in the liner notes for On Land, "Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the "spacious" quality I was after, and like Federico Fellini's 1973 film Amarcord, it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently."
Eno describes himself as a "non-musician" and coined the term "treatments" to describe his modification of the sound of musical instruments, and to separate his role from that of the traditional instrumentalist. His skill at using "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" (the title of an essay by Eno) led in part to his career as a producer. His methods were recognized at the time (mid-1970s) as unique, so much so that on Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he is credited with 'Enossification'; on Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard with a Direct inject anti-jazz raygun and on John Cale's Island albums as simply being "Eno".
Eno started the Obscure Records label in Britain in 1975 to release works by lesser-known composers. The first group of three releases included his own composition, Discreet Music, and the now-famous The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) by Gavin Bryars. The second side of Discreet Music consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition which Eno had previously chosen to precede Roxy Music's appearances on stage, to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Side 1 consisted of a tape loop system for generating music from relatively sparse input. These tapes had previously been used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with Fripp, most notably on Evening Star. Only 10 albums were released on Obscure, including works by John Adams, Michael Nyman, and John Cage. At this time he was also affiliating with artists in the Fluxus movement.
In 1980–1981, Eno collaborated with David Byrne of Talking Heads (which he had already anagrammatized as 'King's Lead Hat') on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was built around radio broadcasts Eno collected while living in the United States, along with sampling recordings from around the world transposed over music predominately inspired by African and Middle Eastern rhythms.
He worked with David Bowie as a writer and musician on Bowie's influential 1977–79 'Berlin Trilogy' of albums, Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, on Bowie's later album Outside, and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". In 1980 Eno developed an interest in altered guitar tunings, which led to Guitarchitecture discussions with Chuck Hammer, former Lou Reed guitarist. Following on from his No-Wave involvement which brought him in contact with the "renegade" artist Greg Belcastro, who introduced him to the guitar techniques of a fledgling Sonic Youth, Eno has also collaborated with John Cale, former member of Velvet Underground, on his trilogy Fear, Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy, Robert Wyatt on his Shleep CD, with Jon Hassell, with the German duo Cluster, with composers Harold Budd, Philip Glass and Roberto Carnevale. A new collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno titled Everything That Happens Will Happen Today was released digitally on 18 August 2008, with the enhanced CD released in October.
During the 1990s, Eno became increasingly interested in self-generating musical systems, the results of which he called generative music. The basic premise of generative music is the blending of several independent musical tracks, of varying sounds, length, and in some cases, silence. When each individual track concludes, it starts again mixing with the other tracks allowing the listener to hear an almost infinite combination. In one instance of generative music, Eno calculated that it would take almost 10,000 years to hear the entire possibilities of one individual piece. Eno has presented this music in his own, and other artists', art and sound installations, most notably "I Dormienti (The Sleepers)", , Music for Civic Recovery Centre, The Quiet Room and "Music for Prague".
Eno returned in June 2005 with Another Day on Earth, his first major album since Wrong Way Up (with John Cale) to prominently feature vocals (a trend continued with Everything That Happens Will Happen Today). The album differs from his 70s solo work as musical production has changed since then, evident in its semi-electronic production.
In early 2006, Eno collaborated with David Byrne, again, for the reissue of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in celebration of the influential album's 25th anniversary. Eight previously unreleased tracks, recorded during the initial sessions in 1980/81, were added to the album, while one track, "Qu'ran", was removed due to requests from Muslims. An unusual interactive marketing strategy coincided with its re-release, the album’s promotional website features the ability for anyone to officially and legally download the multi-tracks of two songs from the album, "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody". Individuals can then remix and upload new mixes of these tracks to the website so others can listen to and rate them.
In late 2006, Eno released 77 Million Paintings, a program of generative video and music specifically for the PC. As its title suggests, there is a possible combination of 77 million paintings where the viewer will see different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched. Likewise, the accompanying music is generated by the program so that it's almost certain the listener will never quite hear the same arrangement twice. The second edition of "77 Million Paintings" featuring improved morphing and a further two layers of sound was released on 14 January 2008.
In 2007, Eno's music was featured in a movie adaption of Irvine Welsh's best-selling collection . He also appeared playing keyboards in Voila, Belinda Carlisle's solo album sung entirely in French.
Also in 2007, Eno contributed a composition titled "Grafton Street" to Dido's third album, Safe Trip Home, released in November 2008.
In 2008, he released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today with David Byrne, designed the sound for the video game Spore and wrote a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky).
Eno revealed on radio in May 2009 that a skin graft he received as treatment for a severe burn on his arm was part human skin, part carbon fibre. He explained that as human skin is based on carbon, the experimental treatment was likely going to work out well for him, in spite of the fact that he feels a lightness in the affected arm.
In June 2009, Eno curated the Luminous Festival at Sydney Opera House, culminating in his first live appearance in many years. "Pure Scenius" consisted of three live improvised performances on the same day, featuring Eno, Australian improv trio The Necks, Karl Hyde from Underworld, electronic artist Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams.
Eno scored the music for Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lovely Bones, released in December 2009.
Eno released a new solo album on Warp Records in late 2010. Small Craft on a Milk Sea, made in association with long-time collaborator Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, was released on 2 November in the United States and 15 November in the UK. In April 2011, Eno announced that Drums Between The Bells, a collaboration with poet Rick Holland, would be released in July 2011.
Despite being a self-professed "non-musician", Eno has contributed to recordings by artists as varied as Nico, Robert Calvert, Genesis, David Bowie, and Zvuki Mu, in various capacities such as use of his studio/synthesizer/electronic treatments, vocals, guitar, bass guitar, and as just being 'Eno'. In 1984, he (along with several other authors) composed and performed the "Prophecy Theme" for the David Lynch film Dune; the rest of the soundtrack was composed and performed by the group Toto. Eno produced performance artist Laurie Anderson's Bright Red album, and also composed for it. The work is avant-garde spoken word with haunting and magnifying sounds. Eno played on David Byrne's musical score for The Catherine Wheel, a project commissioned by Twyla Tharp to accompany her Broadway dance project of the same name.
Eno co-produced The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991), and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) for U2 with his frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, and produced 1993's Zooropa for the band alone. In 1995, U2 and Eno joined forces to create the album Original Soundtracks 1 under the group name Passengers; songs from OST1 included "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo". He also produced Laid (1993), Wah Wah (1994) and Pleased to Meet You (2001) for James.
Eno played on the 1986 album Measure for Measure by Australian band Icehouse. He remixed two tracks for Depeche Mode, "I Feel You" and "In Your Room", both single releases from the album Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993. In 1995, Eno provided one of several remixes of "Protection" by Massive Attack (originally from their Protection album) for release as a single. The single also included more remixes by DJs J-Swift, Tom D, and Underdog.
In 2007, he produced the fourth studio album by Coldplay entitled Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, which was released in 2008. Also in 2008, he worked with Grace Jones on her album Hurricane, credited for "production consultation" and as a member of the band, playing keyboards, treatments and background vocals. With frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois, he worked on the twelfth studio album by U2, titled No Line on the Horizon. It was recorded in Morocco, South France and Dublin and released in Europe on 27 February 2009.
As a guest on The Museum of Curiosity radio show, Eno stated that the list of adjectives, which included "sexy", comprised "about one-hundred and fifty adjectives" and that the music was to be no more than "3.8 seconds" long.
As C.S.J. Bofop, in 1996, he said:
Eno appeared as Father Brian Eno at the "It's Great Being a Priest!" convention, in "Going to America", the final episode of the television sitcom Father Ted, which originally aired on 1 May 1998 on Channel 4.
In March 2008 Eno collaborated with the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino on a show of the latter's works with Eno's soundscapes at Ara Pacis in Rome.
In 2008, Eno designed the procedurally-generated music for the video game Spore.
In October 2008, Eno collaborated with Peter Chilvers to create an application titled Bloom, Trope, and Air for the iOS platform.
Eno will be the guest curator of the 2010 Brighton Festival.
Lizard Point from On Land is featured in the 2010 film Shutter Island.
While not the only inventor of ambient music, Eno is seen as a major contributor to the genre. The Ambient Music Guide argues that he has brought from "relative obscurity into the popular consciousness" fundamental ideas about ambient music, including "the idea of modern music as subtle atmosphere, as chill-out, as impressionistic, as something that creates space for quiet reflection or relaxation." His groundbreaking work in electronic music has been said to have brought widespread attention to and innovations in the role of electronic technology in recording.
In 2001 Half Man Half Biscuit released an EP entitled "Eno Collaboration", which contains a track of the same name. MGMT wrote a song about Eno, called "Brian Eno", in their 2010 album Congratulations.
In 2011, Belgian academics from the Royal Museum for Central Africa named a species of Afrotropical spider Pseudocorinna brianeno in his honour.
In 1996, Eno and others started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public about the very long term future of society. He is also a columnist for the British newspaper The Observer.
In 2003, he appeared on a UK Channel 4 discussion about the Iraq war with a top military spokesman; Eno was highly critical of the war. In 2005, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, London. In March 2006, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration at Trafalgar Square; he noted that 2 billion people on this planet do not have clean drinking water, and that water could have been supplied to them for about one-fifth of the cost of the Iraq war.
The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition mobile phone features exclusive music composed by Eno. Between 8 January 2007 and 12 February 2007, ten units of Nokia 8800 Sirocco Brian Eno Signature Edition mobile phones, individually numbered and engraved with Eno's signature were auctioned off. All proceeds went to two charities chosen by Eno: the Keiskamma Aids Treatment program and The World Land Trust.
In 2006, Eno was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions.
In December 2007, the newly-elected Leader of Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, appointed Eno as his youth affairs adviser.
In January 2009, Eno spoke out against Israel's military action on the Gaza Strip by writing an opinion for CounterPunch and participating in a large-scale protest in London.
Category:1948 births Category:Ambient musicians Category:Aphorists Category:Astralwerks artists Category:Virgin Records artists Category:BRIT Award winners Category:British anti–Iraq War activists Category:English electronic musicians Category:English experimental musicians Category:English painters Category:English record producers Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Living people Category:New Age musicians Category:People from Woodbridge, Suffolk Category:Roxy Music members Category:Warp Records artists Category:People educated at St Joseph's College, Ipswich Category:English atheists
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.