Brian Eno

English rock singer, songwriter, and keyboard player

• Born: May 15, 1948
• Place of Birth: Woodbridge, Suffolk, England

Eno achieved early fame playing synthesizers with the pioneering British glam rock band Roxy Music. He went on to define the ambient music genre, and he brought his distinctive sound to the production of hit albums for other artists, such as U2, the Talking Heads, and Devo.

MEMBER OF Roxy Music; Fripp and Eno; Portsmouth Sinfonia; Cluster; Harmonia 76; 801

The Life

Born in England in 1948, Brian Peter George Eno grew up near a US Air Force base. The sounds of early rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues music, with the tight harmonies and nonsense words of doo-wop, coming from Armed Forces Radio provided early inspiration to Eno. He attended the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, where he encountered the music of contemporary composers, including minimalists such as John Cage, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young. He studied avant-garde subjects such as conceptual painting and sound sculpture. In 1967, Eno married Sarah Grenville, and their daughter, Hannah, was born later that year. He graduated from college in 1969.

After finishing school, Eno moved to London, where he cofounded Roxy Music. At first his role was offstage, mixing the band members’ instruments and voices through synthesizers and other electronic devices and occasionally creating loops for live playback on tape recorders. He later joined his bandmates on the stage, where his outrageous makeup and drag costumes helped define the band’s aesthetic. After Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, came out in 1973, Eno left the band, citing creative differences with the lead singer, Bryan Ferry, and general boredom with the rock-and-roll lifestyle.

Eno immediately embarked on a number of projects, beginning with a collaboration with King Crimson cofounder Robert Fripp. A series of health problems changed Eno’s course, starting with a collapsed lung that forced him to abandon a British tour as front man of a band called the Winkies. A year later, in 1975, Eno was in a car accident, and his injuries left him bedridden. His immobility allowed time for contemplation of the environmental sounds around him, and in this situation, Eno’s concept of ambient music was born.

In addition to recording ambient music’s seminal early albums, Eno was collaborating with musicians such as David Bowie, John Cale, and David Byrne. In 1988, after the demise of his first marriage, Eno married his manager, Anthea Norman-Taylor, with whom he had two daughters, Irial and Darla. Solo albums and collaborations continued, and at the same time Eno found success as an installation artist and a video artist. In 1975, Eno published, in conjunction with artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards that offers solutions for overcoming creative block. In 1996, Eno founded the Long Now Foundation, which encourages public consideration of the long-term future of society and culture. He was also fairly active in social and political issues, voicing opposition to Israeli military policies in the twenty-first century and urging fellow British citizens to vote to remain with the European Union (EU) in 2016.

The Music

As a teenager, Eno made his first recording: the sound of a pen tapping a tin lampshade. He slowed it down and played it back, and in this way the foundation for his experimental, electronic, and ambient music was laid. For Eno, the tape recorder became an instrument. He was inspired by twentieth century minimalist composers’ reliance on chance, and he used tape-delay feedback systems, synthesizers, and computer-generated compositions. Though his earliest solo albums were oriented toward the pop sound, in the 1970s Eno created and coined ambient music, that is, music intended to alter the experience of the surrounding environment, generally played at a low volume in the background. Eno brought his distinctive, eclectic, and sought-after sound to the production of hit albums by Paul Simon, U2, and Coldplay.

Roxy Music. Roxy Music’s eponymous first album was released in 1972. The band’s music was an amalgamation of postmodernist, art-school, and glam rock. The album contained a variety of cultural references, including to Humphrey Bogart, to the Beatles, and to Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (1870). It was recorded in one week’s time, before the band signed a contract with Island Records. Eno sang backup vocals, and he played the synthesizer, creating weird, atonal noise using tape recorders. With this debut album, Roxy Music joined the ranks of the significantly influential avant-garde bands of the era, such as the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart, paving the way for subsequent groups that relied on electronics to define their sound, such as the Cars and Devo. When Eno departed Roxy Music after its second album, the remaining band members pursued a smoother, less-cutting-edge sound, becoming known for the polished music of their hit 1982 album, Avalon.

Another Green World. Eno released this solo album in 1975, following two other successful solo albums: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Here Come the Warm Jets. Another Green World was a bridge between the experimental pop that came before it and the ambient music that followed. Nine of the fourteen songs were instrumental, and those that were not contained strange, unconventional lyrics. Though many found the album less accessible than Eno’s prior work, critics and fans praised it. Fripp played guitar, and Eno mixed and distorted that sound with keyboards and complex rhythms. Genesis member and future solo artist Phil Collins played drums on three tracks, and Velvet Underground cofounder Cale played viola. The textures of the sounds on Another Green World create a haunting, lovely album that is widely considered to be one of Eno’s masterpieces.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Eno’s long-term collaboration with the Talking Heads, a new wave band made up of art students inspired by Roxy Music, began with their second album, 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food. Eno produced two more albums for the Talking Heads, most notably Remain in Light in 1982. Later, however, his relationship with the band soured, although he remained friends with Talking Heads frontman Byrne. In 1981, Byrne and Eno released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album comprising recordings of radio broadcasts and other found recordings, sounds made with random objects such as frying pans and cardboard boxes, and complex African and South American rhythms that would later be termed world music beats. Solidly within Eno’s oeuvre, the album was an early indication of the direction in which Byrne’s solo career would proceed.

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. This 1983 album is one of Eno’s best-known ambient recordings. His younger brother, Roger Eno, and the producer, musician, and composer Daniel Lanois collaborated on the writing, production, and music. It was originally composed to accompany a filmed collage of footage from the US Apollo space program called For All Mankind. However, the film was not released until 1990, when National Geographic issued one non-narrative version with Eno’s music and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released another version, replacing the soundtrack with interviews and commentary. The music evokes both the Western frontier and the final frontier of space. Lanois’s performance adds a flavor of country music to the recording, and the combination of acoustic and electronic sounds has a complex, mesmerizing quality. A seminal album of the genre, it may be considered a primer on ambient music.

Nerve Net. In 1992, Eno returned to a more rock-inflected sound with this album. Several guests, including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ drummer Benmont Tench, guitarist Robert Quine, and Led Zeppelin multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones, contributed to the tracks. "My Squelchy Life," a song Eno had recorded earlier for a more pop-oriented album he never released, made it onto Nerve Net. The album received mixed reviews, but it was notable for foreshadowing the wave of techno rock that soon became popular.

Another Day on Earth. Eno's 2005 release was his first in over a decade to mainly feature songs with vocals. Its songs were a mixture of more pop-oriented material and the experimental and ambient textures Eno had focused on in previous years, including generative music, a concept in which a work self-generates and changes through software or other means of introducing chance. The album again received mixed reviews but marked the beginning of something of a resurgence of Eno's more traditional music career. Another collaboration with Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, followed in 2008, receiving strong reviews and three Grammy Award nominations. The solo album Small Craft on a Milk Sea was released in 2010 and the ambient piece Lux appeared in 2012. Someday World and High Life, collaborations with Karl Hyde of the electronic group Underworld, were issued in 2014, and yet another Eno solo ambient work, The Ship, was released in 2016.

Reflection. In 2017, Eno released Reflection, an album in the series of Eno's ambient album series. Nominated for a Grammy award in 2017, the album's release included a unique, limited-edition disc with one of a kind music on each.

Musical Legacy

A founder of ambient music and a pioneering electronic musician, Eno recorded a large number of albums beginning in the early 1970s, ranging from solo pop efforts, to ambient recordings, to collaborations with some of the most influential and respected artists in rock. His production work, or what his management company calls sound landscaping, is recognizable on the recordings of musicians as diverse as Jane Siberry and U2. Eno’s creative drive led him to a variety of endeavors. He composed the six-second set of notes that accompanied the start-up of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. In the mid-1990s he collaborated with software engineers to create a computer program that would compose music; his software album Generative Music 1 was a product of it. His video artwork and installations have been displayed around the world, and his theories about creativity and the artistic process have reverberated not only with musicians but also with visual artists and writers. In 2020, Eno released Music for Installations and Film Music 1967-2020, tracks he recorded for art pieces and film or television, respectively. He also worked with his brother to create a collection of tone poems called Mixing Colours (2020). In 2023, Eno collaborated with musician/producer Fred again on the ambient pop album, Secret Life. A year later, Eno was the subject of a documentary film, Eno, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

Principal Recordings

ALBUMS (solo): Here Come the Warm Jets, 1974; Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), 1974; Another Green World, 1975; Discreet Music, 1975; Before and After Science, 1977; After the Heat, 1978 (with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius); Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 1978; Music for Films, 1978; Empty Landscapes, 1981; My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981 (with David Byrne); Ambient 4: On Land, 1982; Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, 1983; Music for Films, Vol. 2, 1983 (with Daniel Lanois); Thursday Afternoon, 1985; Music for Films, Vol. 3, 1988; Wrong Way Up, 1990 (with John Cale); Nerve Net, 1992; The Shutov Assembly, 1992; Neroli, 1993; Robert Sheckley’s In a Land of Clear Colours, 1993 (with Peter Sinfield); Headcandy, 1994; Spinner, 1995 (with Jah Wobble); Generative Music 1, 1996; The Drop, 1997; Extracts from Music for White Cube, 1997; Lightness: Music for the Marble Palace, 1998; I Dormienti, 1999; Kite Stories, 1999; Music for Civic Recovery Center, 2000; Music for Onmyo-Ji, 2000 (with D. J. Jan Peter Schwalm); Drawn from Life, 2001 (with Schwalm); January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, 2003; Another Day on Earth, 2005; The Pearl, 2005 (with Harold Budd); Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, 2008 (with Byrne); Small Craft on a Milk Sea, 2010; Lux, 2012; Someday World, 2014 (with Karl Hyde); High Life, 2014 (with Karl Hyde); The Ship, 2016; FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, 2022; Secret Life, 2023.

ALBUMS (with Cluster): Cluster and Eno, 1977.

ALBUMS (with Fripp and Eno): No Pussyfooting, 1973; Evening Star, 1975; The Equatorial Stars, 2005; Beyond Even (1992-2006), 2007.

ALBUMS (with Harmonia 76): Tracks and Traces, 1997.

ALBUMS (with Portsmouth Sinfonia): Plays the Popular Classics, 1974; Hallelujah, 1976.

ALBUMS (with Roxy Music): Roxy Music, 1972; For Your Pleasure, 1973.

Bibliography

Ankeny, Jason. "Brian Eno." All Music, 2024, www.allmusic.com/artist/brian-eno-mn0000617196. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Bracewell, Michael. Re-make Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music. Da Capo Press, 2008.

Brian Eno, www.brian-eno.net/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Dayal, Geeta. Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Continuum, 2007.

Eno, Brian. A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno. Faber and Faber, 2023.

Eno, Brian, Russell Mills, and Rick Poyner. More Dark than Shark. Faber and Faber, 1986.

Frere-Jones, Sasha. "Ambient Genius." New Yorker, Condé Nast, 30 July 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/ambient-genius. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Prendergast, Mark, and Brian Eno. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. Bloomsbury USA, 2001.

Scoates, Christopher. Brian Eno: Visual Music. Chronicle Books, 2019.

Sheppard, David. On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno. Orion, 2015.

Stump, Paul. Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.

Tamm, Eric. Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. Da Capo Press, 1995.

Toop, David. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds. Serpent’s Tail, 1995.