Brian Eno

As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (born 15 May 1948), commonly referred to simply as Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.

Quotes

• I, I wish you could swim
  Like the dolphins
  Like dolphins can swim

  Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
  We can beat them, forever and ever
  Oh, we can be heroes just for one day.

  • "Heroes", co-written with David Bowie

• When you see people like Ken Loach, David Miller, Jackie Walker, when you see those people being accused of antisemitism, you cannot help but say this is all made up.
  • From Brian Eno's contribution to Let's Talk It Over, a monthly online debate, as cited in "Roger Waters defends Ken Loach", The Jewish Chronicle (17 March 2021)
  • Discussion of Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party and related issues.

On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno (2010)

• A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. To some extent, this was how ambient music emerged. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to, not because I wanted a job as a musician. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist. It's like having a ready-made formula if you are able to read it. One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real.
  • June 16, 2010 | Source

A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

• Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
  • March 23, 1995, p. 81

• If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.
  • March 24, 1995, p. 83

• The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
  • June 2, 1995, p. 126

• Ideas worth questioning: "Being an artist is a job for life."
  • June 25, 1995, p. 140

• The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.
  • July 19, 1995, p. 159

• Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
  • August 2, 1995, p. 165

• My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e.g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something ­– in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another" – a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts).
  • December 15, 1995, p. 178

• Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
  • December 7, 1995, p. 272

• As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
  • October 25, 1995, p. 233

• Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable [sic] as it is interesting.
  • September, 1978, Linear notes from the initial American release of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports / Ambient 1", PVC 7908 (AMB 001)

• At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly."
  • • p. 285

External links

• EnoWeb (unofficial website)
• Interview with Brian Eno from The Guardian (19 May 2006)
• "Brian Eno: The Philosophy of Surrender" Interview (November 2008)
• Paul Morley interviews Eno in The Guardian (17 January 2010)