Brian Eno – 2/1

Conceptually, spiritually, historically, and anagramatically, Brian Eno is the one. Brian Eno has probably had as much to do with the form and function of contemporary music as anybody, and his shadow falls large across all styles of music. He is the puppet master, a marvelous mandarin, able to move easily between the rarified air of the more arcane elements of 20th century music composition and theory and the blatantly populist arena of rock stars and commercial recordings. Although briefly attached to the fledging Roxy Music for their highly regarded first album, Eno soon struck off on his own and developed his uncanny ability to predict trends in music well before they became apparent to anybody else.

Although his own albums don’t sell particularly well (I’d be very surprised if any of his titles went silver, let alone gold or platinum), he wields enormous influence through his followers and collaborators. He is the godfather of ambient music – coining the phrase as well as setting down a lot of the early ground rules – and he has helped shape the sound and careers of musicians as diverse as Talking Heads, U2, Robert Fripp, Ultravox, and Devo.

The first thing to really strike the ear of young Eno, growing up in England, was the unearthly sounds of doo-wop groups that American sailors used to play and sing. The tight harmonies and unusual arrangements were so foreign to Brian that they inspired a curious mixture of elation and fear in him. He found himself free-falling – his assumptions and expectations disintegrating beneath him, and it was a feeling that he would work the rest of his life to capture and duplicate.

He also had a strong affinity for machinery and had built up an impressive collection of faulty tape recorders by the time he was a teenager. He liked that they were faulty and never tried to get them fixed because he liked the random element that they brought to a project. In fact, he has stated that he never services any of his equipment because he likes the idiosyncratic elements that such chaos produces. And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of Brian Eno. He is less a musician than a systems designer – in fact he proudly and emphatically refutes that he is a musician at all. He’s much more interested in process than product and many of his pieces are just the detritus left over after an interesting system has been put into place.

Curiously, in the 1960s in England, art school was a fertile place for bands to be born. John Lennon did time in an art school, key members of the Rolling Stones met at art school, and Brian Eno met some of the musicians that would later become Roxy Music at an art school (later disciples Talking Heads also met at art school – the Rhode Island School of Design). While working on some early material, Bryan Ferry and Phil Manzanera and other members of the fledging group invited Eno to help out in the studio. He got such interesting sounds out of an old synthesizer that was lying around that the band hired him on the spot. Soon he was wearing a dress and flamboyant make-up and taking the stage with his arsenal of synthetic sound. But the band started getting too polished and professional – too controlled – and Eno went looking for greener pastures.

Over the next few years he released four solo albums, each one split between rock songs and instrumentals. Although popular with critics and, especially, other musicians, the albums never caught on with a larger public. The music was too cerebral, too intellectual to really crack the Top 40, but the punks and the new wavers were paying close attention. Those albums are interesting from an historical point of view, but are not my favorite Eno efforts. It was after the release of his Before and After Science album, when he abandoned the so-called “idiot energy” of his rock songs and started focusing more on instrumentals and sound-producing processes that he really came into his own.

In addition to his affiliation with the popular music crowd, he also had a deep and abiding interest in more experimental/academic music. Inspired by John Cage’s book Silence, Eno began incorporating chance elements into his work, whether it be the i ching or his more personal form of arbitrariness, the Oblique Strategies.

In conversations with painter Peter Schmidt, Eno discovered that they had much in common in the way they worked – particularly when stuck on some problem. Each of them had come up with a number of little tricks or triggers for helping them get unstuck, for helping them think outside the box, if you’ll excuse a hoary cliché. Together, they drew up a list of about 100 maxims for getting you out of jams and wrote each one on a card. The idea, then, was to wait until you were stuck on some creative project. Then you’d pick up the deck and shuffle it while thinking about your problem (much like a Tarot deck), and draw one card out of the deck. The pronouncements ranged from proscriptive (repetition is a form of change) to abstract (rain), and you were supposed to try to apply this new direction in your work, no matter how obtuse or irrelevant it seemed. They published a small set of these cards and sold them to others who might be interested. When Peter Schmidt died, Eno took them off the market.

I had heard about the Oblique Strategies for years and despaired that I would ever find a copy. I mentioned this one day to my friend Ramon, and he nodded his head enigmatically and said he’d see what he could do.