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Famous Like Me > Composer > E > Brian Eno

Profile of Brian Eno on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Brian Eno  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 15th May 1948
   
Place of Birth: Woodbridge, East Anglia, England, UK
   
Profession: Composer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Brian Eno in 1977

Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (born 15 May 1948 in Woodbridge, Suffolk) is a British electronic musician, music theorist and record producer. As a solo artist, he is probably best known as the father of ambient music.

Eno first came to prominence as the keyboardist and sonic wizard of the 1970s art rock band Roxy Music. After leaving the group, Eno recorded a series of idiosyncratic rock albums, later turning to more abstract soundscapes on groundbreaking albums like Another Green World (1975) and Ambient 1/Music for Airports (1978). Since then, he has produced dozens of albums (many with similarly-minded collaborators such as Harold Budd and Robert Fripp) which have displayed his unique approach to music. He has also occasionally returned to the pop song format.

His production credits include some of the most respected albums of David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.

Eno has pursued several artistic ventures parallel to his music career, including visual art installations, a regular column in the newspaper The Observer and, with artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards recommending various artistic strategies.

Education and early musical career

Eno was educated at Ipswich Art School and the Winchester School of Art, graduating from the latter in 1969. While at art school, he developed an interest in using tape recorders as musical instruments, and he experimented with his first (sometimes improvisational) bands.

Roxy Music

Eno started his professional musical career in London, with the highly-successful glam/art-rock band Roxy Music, from 1971 to '73. As a self-professed "non-musician", at the band's early live shows Eno was to be found not on stage, but behind the mixing desk, where his efforts went way beyond the usual balancing of the volume levels: he would process the instrument sounds through his VCS3 synthesizer, tape recorders and other electronic devices, frequently singing backing vocals as well. Eno soon graduated to join the rest of Roxy on stage however, where his bizarre costumes contributed to a large part of the band's visual appeal. Public interest in Eno fuelled a rivalry between him and Roxy's leader, Bryan Ferry, who sacked him from the band on completion of the tour for their second album, while expecting Eno to keep his share of the band's considerable debts.

Solo work

Eno embarked on a solo career almost immediately. Between 1973 and 1978 he created four influential solo albums of electronically inflected pop songs – Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World and Before and After Science. Tiger Mountain contains the galloping "Third Uncle", one of Eno's best-known songs. Critic Dave Thompson writes that the song is "a near punk attack of riffing guitars and clattering percussion, "Third Uncle" could, in other hands, be a heavy metal anthem, albeit one whose lyrical content would tongue-tie the most slavish air guitarist." He played with Phil Manzanera in the band 801.

Eno continued his career by producing a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely cited as coining the term "ambient music," low-volume music designed to modify one's perception of a surrounding environment, producing his Ambient series (Music for Airports, The Plateaux of Mirror, Day of Radiance and On Land). 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-70s) as unique, so much so that on Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he is credited with "Enossification."

Eno started the Obscure label in Britain in 1975 to release works by less-known composers. The first group of three releases included his own composition, Discreet Music, and the now-famous The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars. The second side of Discreet Music consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's canon to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Side 1 consisted of a tape loop system for generating music from relative sparse input. These tapes were later used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, most notably No Pussyfooting. This methodology (coined Frippertronics) was later used by Robert Fripp, among other artists, on future albums. Only ten Obscure albums were released, including works by John Adams, Michael Nyman, and John Cage. At this time he was also affiliating with artists in the Fluxus movement and worked with the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

In 1981 he collaborated with David Byrne, of Talking Heads, on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was built around sampling recordings and radio broadcasts from around the world. Eno collaborated with David Bowie as a writer and musician on Bowie's influential "Berlin trilogy" of albums, Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, on Bowie's later album 1. Outside, and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". 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 composer Harold Budd and others. In 1992, Eno released his take on 'club electronica' titled Nerve Net.

Eno returned in June of 2005 with Another Day on Earth. It was the first major album of his since "Wrong Way Up" (with John Cale) to feature vocals prominently. The album is, unsurprisingly, different to his 70's solo work, as musical production has changed since then, as evident in Another Day on Earth's semi-electronic production.

Producing records and other projects

From the very beginning of his solo career in 1973, Eno has been much in demand as a producer. His lengthly string of producer credits includes albums for Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Ultravox! and James. He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT awards.

Despite being a self-professed "non-musician", Eno has contributed to recordings by a huge number of artists as varied as Nico, Robert Calvert, Genesis, Edikanfo, and Zvuki Mu, in various capacities such as use of his studio/synthesizer/electronic treatments, vocals, guitar, bass guitar, and even just as being 'Eno'.

He collaborated on the development of the Koan algorithmic music generator.

Eno has also been active in other artistic genres, producing videos for gallery display and collaborating with visual artists in other endeavors. One is the set of "Oblique Strategies" cards that he produced in the mid-70s, which was described as "100 Worthwhile Dilemmas" and intended as guides to shaking up the mind in the process of producing artistic endeavors. Another was his collaboration with artist Russell Mills on the book More Dark Than Shark. He was also the provider of music for Robert Sheckley's In the Land of Clear Colours, a narrated story with music originally published by a small art gallery in Spain.

In 1996 Brian Eno, and others, started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public into thinking about the very long term future of society.

Eno is a columnist for the British newspaper, The Observer.

In 1994 Eno was approached by Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk, senior designers at Microsoft on the Cairo project. The result was the start-up sound for the Windows 95 operating system (which Eno created on his Apple Macintosh). From an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

In 2003 he appeared on a Channel 4 discussion on the Iraq war with top miltary spokesmen. He was highly critical of the war. In 2005 he spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, London.

Discography

  • (1972) Roxy Music (by Roxy Music)
  • (1973) For Your Pleasure (by Roxy Music)
  • (1973) No Pussyfooting (with Robert Fripp)
  • (1973) Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics (with the Portsmouth Sinfonia)
  • (1973) Here Come The Warm Jets
  • (1974) Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
  • (1974) June 1, 1974: Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno, Nico (live)
  • (1975) Evening Star (with Robert Fripp)
  • (1975) Another Green World
  • (1975) Discreet Music
  • (1975) Peter & the Wolf (various artists) (Viceroy Music)
  • (1977) Cluster & Eno (with Cluster)
  • (1977) 801:Live (Phil Manzanera with Eno, Lloyd Watson, Francis Monkman, Bill MacCormick, and Simon Phillips)
  • (1978) Before and After Science
  • (1978) Ambient #1 / Music for Airports
  • (1978) Music for Films
  • (1978) After the Heat (with Roedelius and Dieter Moebius aka Cluster)
  • (1980) Ambient #2 / The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd)
  • (1980) Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics (with Jon Hassell)
  • (1980) Ambient #3 / Day of Radiance (by Laraaji with Eno producing)
  • (1981) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (with David Byrne)
  • (1982) Ambient #4 / On Land
  • (1983) Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
  • (1984) The Pearl (with Harold Budd)
  • (1985) Thursday Afternoon (soundtrack to an art gallery video)
  • (1985) Hybrid (with Daniel Lanois and Michael Brook)
  • (1989) Textures
  • (1990) The Shutov Assembly (All Saints Records)
  • (1990) Wrong Way Up (with John Cale) (All Saints Records)
  • (1992) Nerve Net (All Saints Records)
  • (1993) Neroli (All Saints Records)
  • (1995) Spinner (with Jah Wobble) (All Saints Records)
  • (1995) Original Soundtracks No. 1 (with U2)
  • (1997) The Drop (All Saints Records)
  • (2001) Drawn From Life (with Peter Schwalm)
  • (2002) Lightness
  • (2002) I Dormienti
  • (2002) Kite Stories
  • (2003) Music for Civic Recovery Centre
  • (2003) Compact Forest Proposal
  • (2003) January 07003 | Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now
  • (2004) Curiosities Volume 1
  • (2004) Curiosities Volume 2
  • (2004) The Equatorial Stars (with Robert Fripp)
  • (2005) Another Day on Earth

Singles

Year Title Chart positions Album
US Hot 100 US Modern Rock US Mainstream Rock UK
1990 "Been There, Done That" (with John Cale) - #11 - - Wrong Way Up

Trivia

The character of I-No (pronounced the same as "Eno"), in the videogame series Guilty Gear is most likely a reference to Brian Eno. This is one of dozens of music references in the series.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Brian Eno