May 15, 20205 min read

Brian Eno Artist Research

Updated: Jun 10, 2020

Brian Eno: the contemporary English artist, musician, theorist and 'the father of ambient music'.

Eno's discography includes collaborations with musicians and artists, having produced music with names such as David Bowie, Coldplay, being the producer of the group U2, and he's written soundtracks, such as for the film Apollo.

The story goes that Eno was recovering from a car accident in 1975, unable to get up to alter the music playing in the room, and so he was left listening to a record which was subdued by the sound of the rain outside. In an interview with the Telegraph in 2016, Eno said that "this presented what was for me a new way of hearing music -as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and sound of the rain were parts of the ambience"

Born in 1948, Eno studied painting and experimental music in the mid 60's at the art school of Ipswich Civic College, and then at Winchester School of Art. He was a synthesizer player for the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early 70's before going on to record solo albums. He started on a minimalist direction in the mid 70's and came up with 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports' in 1978, the album that coined the term 'ambient music'.

Eno fits into the genres of rock, ambient, electronic and experimental, and his medium of choice is a recording studio. Despite a history of playing in bands, Eno doesn't claim to play instruments and calls himself a 'non-musician'; instead, he uses a library of sound samples and automated instruments which he merges together with loops and effects to produce his music.

ANALYSIS

The album 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports' is one of his most famous works, the first album ever to be explicitly created under the label 'ambient music'.

Image: Album cover of Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Click image for the album to open in new tab.

The album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of different lengths. It was designed to play on a continuous loop as a sound installation to defuse the tense atmosphere of an airport terminal. It features piano and synthesised voices as well timbres that are hard to distinguish, all manipulated in a studio. The melody played by piano is repetitive and hard to pinpoint, it's not a typical tune you can hum back, rather a phrase that has been looped and progresses with slightly different 'aahs', long tones and contributing noise.

As an audio work, it is difficult to analyse the formal elements like a piece of visual art. Whilst I can make observations about the composition techniques, the premise behind the work and the effect of transience that the final sound evokes, I think the onus is on the individual to imagine their own connotations of colour and what the piece represents to them. Music for Airports was "intended to induce calm and a space to think" after all.

Eno's notion of creating work that is 'as ignorable as it is interesting' relates to the themes of having nothing particularly distinguishable, which in itself is the distinguishable feature of the ambient music. This would be highly relevant in my own work, as I am thinking of composing an audio work accompanying a visual piece of art. Whilst I am yet to decide if the visual elements will be abstract or figurative, I can use these ideas of ambience as a starting point for experimentation.

INFLUENCE ON MY OWN WORK

The more I listened to his albums and watched his interviews, the more I wanted to experiment in creating my own ambient music. These are Eno's words which explain the process and premise behind producing an ambient song:

"The creation of a piece of music like this falls into three stages: the first is the selection of sonic materials and a musical mode - a constellation of musical relationships. These are then patterned and explored by a system of algorithms which vary and permutate the initial elements I feed into them, resulting in a constantly morphing stream (or river) of music. The third stage is listening. Once I have the system up and running I spend a long time - many days and weeks in fact - seeing what it does and fine-tuning the materials and sets of rules that run the algorithms. It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like." (Brian Eno discusses Reflection, on his website)

"One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be a melody, or words, or a beat."

"A piece of music becomes real for me when it seems to become a place, when I can sort of feel what the temperature would be , what the light that would go with it would be, and what colours. I just started making music deliberately to create a more desirable reality."

(From the documentary: Arena -Brian Eno -Another Green World)

His official Twitter account gives an insight to his influences and the sources Eno uses. One resource he shared was a BBC collection of sound effects, from machine noises to choirs, which inspired me to start collecting my own recordings, to later sample into my own ambient music.

I found an online version of his 'Oblique Strategies' -cards he co-made with artist Peter Schmidt in the mid-70's that have influenced many of his creations. When collaborating with other musicians, the these cards played a role in making the ambient sound Eno is famous for.

The element of chance is a key part of the process, and his Oblique Strategies are one of the things that interested me the most about his work.

Below are screenshot examples of the cards, randomly picked by pressing a button, which I could use in my own music production process.