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Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, usually given as Eno, (born May 15, 1948), is an electronic musician, producer, and music theorist who started his musical career with Roxy Music. He then went on to produce a number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely cited as coining the term "ambient music" in his Ambient series (Music for Airports, The Plateaux of Mirror, Day of Radiance and On Land). Eno describes himself primarily as a "non-musician" and is indeed best known for "treating" instruments rather than playing them himself. 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 being unique, so much so that on one album he contributed to (Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) he is credited with "Enossification."

He collaborated with David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was one of the first albums not associated with hip hop to extensively feature sampling. 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 Robert Fripp of King Crimson, Robert Wyatt on his Shleep CD, with Jon Hassell, with the German duo Cluster , with composer Harold Budd and others.

In 1975, Eno released Discreet Music. The second side consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's canon to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognisable. 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, and the methodology (not entirely original with Eno) was used by Fripp (on his Frippertronics albums) and others.

Eno has acted as a producer for a number of bands, including Talking Heads, U2, Devo, and James. He has contributed to albums by artists as varied as Nico, Robert Calvert, Genesis, Edikanfo , and Zvuki Mu . He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT awards . He is an innovator across many fields of music and recently he has collaborated on the development of the Koan algorithmic music generator.

Eno started the Obscure label in Britain in the early 70s to release works by less-known composers. Only 10 albums were released. Works released included early albums by John Adams, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars (the famous The Sinking of the Titanic), John Cage, and others. At this time he was also active in the Fluxus movement and his work with the Portsmouth Sinfonia came out of this.

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

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.

His younger brother, Roger Eno is also a musician, who combines ambient styles with classical music instruments on some of his albums.

The band A Certain Ratio took their name from the lyrics of Eno's song "The True Wheel" (on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)). British 1990s band The Warm Jets were named after Eno's 1973 album.

Brian is also responsible for the start-up sound to the Windows 95 operating system. Brian was given the directions to create something that was "...'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 3¼ seconds long.'"

Discography

See also

External links

  • EnoShop http://www.enoshop.co.uk - Brian Eno Recordings and Products Online
  • EnoWeb http://www.enoweb.co.uk/ - Unofficial Eno Web site
  • Profile of Brian Eno http://www.synthtopia.com/artists/BrianEno.html with discography and reviews of his work.
  • Open Directory Project: Brian Eno http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Bands_and_Artists/E/Eno,_Brian/
  • Allmusic.com entry http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=SEARCH&sql=Bjg8gtq8ztu48
  • The Revenge of the Intuitive http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/eno.html - Essay by Brian Eno
  • MORE DARK THAN SHARK http://listen.to/brianeno




Last updated: 02-08-2005 13:59:53
Last updated: 02-24-2005 14:41:11