Brian Eno
Electronic music didn’t start with Eno, but it was certainly never the same after him. On Roxy Music’s first two albums he helped make synthesizers and tape effects part of a rock lineup, pricking the ears of future synth-pop creators such as Human League. As a solo artist he forged a new genre, which he dubbed ambient music, before effectively becoming a one-man genre himself, lending touches to Genesis (where he’s credited with “Enossification”), John Cale, and Bowie during his golden Berlin period. There wasn’t much in the way of experimental ’70s music that wasn’t made a little odder by Eno’s touch. But that touch could also be a multiplatinum one, as he showed as a producer for U2 in the mid-’80s and Coldplay 20 years later. In the ’90s he created perhaps the most widely heard music of all: the six-second start-up sound for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. Typically mischievous, he later let it be known that he’d created it on a Mac.
In his lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy New York City 2013, Eno shared insights from his four decades of work in the music industry and exploration of the creative process.
Hosted by Emma Warren A very big welcome, please, for our guest, Eno. [applause] Brian Eno Thank you. That’s enough. Emma Warren [laughs] Now you’ve just come back from putting the very final finishing
touches to the New York edition of 77 Million Paintings. I wanted to ask you, because you’ve done this in a
few different places now, how does the location affect the way the piece plays
out? Brian Eno Well, it affects it in this case, because it’s a big place. So this is
actually the biggest indoor version of this piece that I’ve made. None of you
have seen this piece, so we won’t talk about it too much, because it will be
completely mysterious to you what we’re saying. But essentially, it’s a large
light work and this is the largest indoor version of it. The largest outdoor
version of it was on the sails of the Sydney Opera House, which I did about
three years ago. And that was a very big piece indeed. But this is the largest
one that’s ever been inside a building. So, for me, the building has to be pretty quiet. And this one, even though it’s on West 32nd Street, is astonishingly quiet. You just step off the road and you’re into the show. With very little in-between you and the work. And it’s as quiet as you can imagine.
You can’t really hear anything from outside. And the music that I’m using
there is designed to make any sounds that you hear outside sound like they’re
part of the music. So there’s quite a lot of quasi-musical material in the music, which could sound a little bit like traffic, or people leaning on car horns, or breathing heavily, or the sorts of things that people do in cities: sneezing, cursing each other, knifing each other. Those sorts of noises. So, in fact, the outside doesn’t really sound like it’s not part of the music. And
you go into this large, dark room, and you will possibly sit there for a few
minutes. Some people sit there for several hours and have to be persuaded to
leave by burly security guards. Emma Warren That will be a story, “I got chucked out of 77 Million Paintings.” Brian Eno [laughs] But the story has been told several times. I had an opening in
Italy a little while ago, and it had been well-publicized, so a lot of people
turned up for the opening, and there were about a thousand people standing
along the side of the road in a typically unruly Italian queue. The place was
only big enough to hold about 60 people. The first 60 went in and never came
out. [laughter] And the rest of the queue was getting more and more irate. So after about an
hour, I had to go in and plead with them to leave so that other people could
have a chance to see it. It’s quite hypnotic, I would say is the word. Emma Warren And was there something else about the history of the building? Particularly
the fact that Glenn Miller used to play there when it was the Hotel
Pennsylvania that appealed to you? Brian Eno I didn’t know that. Emma Warren Oh! Brian Eno I am a Glenn Miller fan, but I didn’t know that story. Emma Warren I heard you saying a few years ago, you were talking about your artwork, and
you were saying, “I should stop thinking of this in the realm of art, and I
should start thinking about it in the realm of health.” And quite recently
you’ve done a piece for a hospital in Brighton, in England. Can you tell us a
bit about the context of the music that you’ve made there? Brian Eno OK, so, I had a show in Brighton, a slightly smaller version of the show I
have here now, about three years ago. And a surgeon came to the show, bringing
with him his mother-in-law, who he describes as a woman whose hair is constantly on fire. She’s a highly nervous, talkative, ebullient, active person. She came to the show with him and sat in a chair and was quiet for two hours, which hasn’t happened since before she could speak, apparently. And he was so impressed by the effect that this had. And then she came back the next
day, apparently, bringing some friends with her, and spent more time there. So
he was at that time involved in the design of a new hospital in Brighton, which has now opened, and he thought that a space like this would be a very good idea for people who’d just had done treatment, or chemotherapy in particular, he was thinking of. So people whose nerves were a bit jangled and needed to reassemble themselves and quiet them down. So he approached me and
this project went ahead. So it’s quite a small room, but it actually seems to
be very successful. Surprisingly, not only with the patients but also with the
staff, who find it very, very nice to have a place to go where they can calm
down. So I did sort of know that there was this angle to this kind of work
before, because I’d been told by many mothers that they have had children
listening to my records. I don’t know whether the records were the cause of
this, or not... [laughs] If this is now a replacement for IVF – Brian Eno’s
records. It’s cheaper, and it works. [laughter] But I’ve met a lot of children who were born listening to one record in particular, which is Discreet Music. I should think by now I’ve met about 60 or 70 kids who
came out of the womb listening to that record, which of course, is any
marketing department’s dream. Get in there right at the beginning, you know?
[laughs] But the kids look fairly healthy, and they have unnaturally large
eyes, in many cases, but… Emma Warren There’s a small clip of the hospital piece on a website. Can we listen to a
tiny bit of it? Brian Eno Yeah. Of the music? Emma Warren Yeah, if you don’t mind. Brian Eno So, this is a piece of music that I made specifically for this situation. It
isn’t released as a record. Emma Warren You’d have to be there. (music: Brian Eno - excerpt from art and sound installation at Hove
Hospital, Brighton) Brian Eno [comments over music] Sounds like everything else I do, really, doesn’t it?
This is quite a lot louder than it ever is in the hospital. This is usually
about [turns music down], it’s about down there. It’s so that you could
whisper over it, if you felt like whispering. Emma Warren Have people done any sort of research into what effect the music has? I mean,
I understand that doctors in the hospital have been going down and doing a few
ad hoc blood-pressure readings. Brian Eno Yes, there has been some research. It’s not very-good-quality research,
as far as I can tell. And part of the reason is that it’s very difficult to
control for this situation. You don’t really know what would have happened to
people if they hadn’t been listening to the music. But what seems to be the
case to me is that what one does as an artist can stimulate one or other of
the nervous systems that we have: the sympathetic or the parasympathetic. So,
the sympathetic is basically the part of you that deals with fight and flight. And Red Bull is a specialist in that area of the nervous system. My work, on
the other hand, seems to address the parasympathetic, which deals with digest
and rest and calm down and connect things together, and so on. Emma Warren That’s the part of the nervous system that also processes the stuff which is pushed out by the nervous system, isn’t it? The parasympathetic. I had a bike
accident once, and I felt terrible afterwards, not just because I had a bruise
that looked like a map of the incident, but because I felt very bleak afterwards. And someone said to me, “Oh, you’re having a parasympathetic nervous system response. Your body is processing the chemicals that were kind of thrown out by this experience.” Brian Eno Well, that sounds right, yes. I think processing is what goes on there. And
it’s part of our being that we actually don’t address very much, particularly
in urban environments. In urban environments, we’re mostly living off the
sympathetic nervous system. Because we’re mostly in situations which require
speed, alertness, quick decisions. Possibly they’re dangerous, you know. There
are cars flying around, people with knives, policemen, and drug dealers, and
dangerous old people with Zimmer frames. So we have to be paying attention all
the time, basically. And I think what happens with this kind of music and
these kinds of shows is that you can stop trying to be in control of things
and you can allow yourself to surrender. Now, I use this word “surrender”
quite a lot. And it doesn’t immediately have the right connotation, but there
isn’t another word for it. What I mean by “surrender” is a sort of active
choice not to take control. So it’s an active choice to be part of the flow of
something. For instance, I think we certainly enjoy surrender situations, and
the ones we typically enjoy are sex, drugs, art, religion. Those are all surrender situations, I’d say. They’re all situations where you stop, where you deliberately let go of some control, to be carried along on something. And for me, the perfect analogy is surfing. Which I don’t do, by the way, but I have watched with some interest. [laughs] I don’t do anything, really. I
just watch documentaries about it and then make theories. [laughter] Emma Warren Learning by osmosis! Brian Eno So what you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily, to situate themselves on a wave, and then they surrender. They’re carried along by it, and then they take control again, and then they
surrender. I think that’s a very good analogy of what we do throughout our
lives, actually. We’re constantly moving between the control phase and the
surrender phase. The only thing is that we tend to dignify the control side of
the spectrum, the repertoire of our behavior, more than the surrender phase.
We tend to dignify people who are good at control. We think those are the
masters of the universe. And we don’t particularly pay attention to people who
are good at surrender. But if you think that the control part of our being is
really quite recently evolved. You know, if you think of the 99.8 % of
human existence until 2000 years ago, most of the time one was surrendering gracefully and trying to stay afloat, trying to use what little bit of control you had, in a mostly surrendering environment. So we’re good at surrendering, actually. We evolved to do it. And I think we like doing it. Emma Warren Is this part of the reason why you think you enjoy singing in choirs so much? Brian Eno Yes. Definitely, yes. It’s very interesting. I have a little a capella group
in London, which has a sort of open membership of people who largely can’t
sing. [laughs] Or didn’t think of themselves as singers before they joined
this group. People weren’t chosen on the basis of their competence but on the
basis of their enthusiasm, really. We now sound quite good. But the membership
is constantly shifting, and some people join for a little while and then they
move somewhere else, and other people join in. So it’s a changing entity. But
the most interesting thing that happens is that occasionally I’ll have a
friend drop in who’s a famous singer or other, and they are the ones who find
it most difficult to join in. Because the point about being a choral singer is
that you don’t stand you. You become part of the sound. You don’t try to stick
out. Whenever we have classically trained singers come in, they always have to
hold the note a little bit longer than everyone else, as if to show you that
they can, you know? Whenever we have good lead singers, they always kind of
wobble about all over the place and dive through the other singers, and so on.
It’s like having an unruly parrot. [laughs] And so the singers that really
seem to work well are people who just want to be part of a sound. They don’t
want to present themselves, in particular. And that’s a kind of stepping-back
from individualism in favor of a community sound. Emma Warren And that’s different from the gospel choir you’re involved with? Are you still
involved? Do you still sing in a gospel choir as well? Brian Eno No, I only sang in a gospel choir when I was in New York, when I lived here, actually. I lived here until almost exactly 30 years ago
this month. I lived here for five years. And during that time, I joined a gospel choir in Brooklyn, and I was the only white atheist member in the choir.
[laughter] Emma Warren So that was when some gospel choirs were embracing disco. So, like, the New
York Community Gospel Choir, the Joubert Singers. Was your gospel choir kind
of feeling a sort of disco tip as well? Brian Eno Nope, they were very fiercely resisting disco. It was a small church and a
very normal and very exciting choir. It was great to be part of it. Emma Warren There’s one thing that you’ve talked about it in the past, this idea of “scenius,” which is a word that you coined to describe the kind of extreme genius that happens when a group of people come together around something that they all love. So they might not all be doing the same thing, but kind of this oscillation of enthusiasm and interest creates something amazing. Is there
anything at the moment that you see as kind of having scenius in it, or anything to add about to that subject? Brian Eno Well, actually, I’ll explain the idea a little bit more, because I think there
are quite a few things going on like that today. So, this word came about when
I went to a painting exhibition at the Barbican about 25 years ago, and it was
an exhibition about a period of painting that I know more about than any
other. It’s my favorite era of painting, which was the early 20th century in
Russia. And so it was from about 1905 to 1928 was the period covered. And, as
I said, this was a period that I thought I knew a lot about. I knew a lot of very obscure painters who few other people had heard of. And, of course, I knew who the stars were, Kandinsky being one of the early refugees from that period, I would say. And then, you know, Rodchenko and so on, the other people. So, I went to this show and I saw work by about 150 painters I’d never
heard of. Now, this was really a surprise to me, because I really thought I
knew that period quite well. And the interesting thing about them was that
there wasn’t a huge distinction of quality. It wasn’t like Kandinsky right at
the top there [gestures], and then all these other people. There was
actually not much difference in quality between the work of some of the people
I’d never heard of, and the work of the people that everybody’s heard of. And
so I suddenly started to have a different idea of art history. So, you know,
the word “genius” applies to people like Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the big
names, Picasso. But actually they don’t sort of come out of nowhere. They come out of a whole scene of people, who support them in various ways, and from whom they grab ideas, actually. You know, if you look at Picasso, look at the period that he was living in Paris, and you look at what else was going on in Paris at that time, Picasso was a brilliant thief, and quite happy to
acknowledge it. Like any pop musician is, you know? Nobody works in a little
cage, they’re always grabbing things and repackaging them. And it isn’t only
from other artists. It’s not only other artists who are an important part of
what I call the scenius. In the case of Picasso, there’s a very interesting
thing. So, in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, there’s one room on the top
floor which is the Picasso room. And it’s an amazing room. There’s about 20
paintings in it. And they range from sort of late blue period to cubism to things that look like fauvism, to all sorts of stuff, it’s all over the place. And you think, “Wow, what an amazing guy he was, that he was doing so many different things.” Then, if you walk around the room, you realize that every picture in the room was painted in 1908. And that makes it even more amazing. So then you think, “He was a bit confused, wasn’t he, really?” [laughs] And
so I started to look into that period, 1908, and actually it turns out that the story is that at that time, his primary collector - Picasso was still quite young then - his primary collector was a white Russian prince, who had come to Picasso’s studio in Paris, and he’d look around the studio and he’d say, “I want that one.” And Picasso would say, “That’s not finished.” And he’d
say, “No, I want it just like that. And I want that one.” Picasso would say,
“Well, that’s shit.” He’d say, “I want it.” And he just walked around Picasso’s studio, taking everything that was going on, every experiment, and I think this was very important for Picasso, because he suddenly stopped thinking of himself as the person who knew best about his own art. Now, this is what happened, I think, to Miles Davis as well. He started to think, “Actually, I don’t really know how to judge it. It comes out of me. It’s probably good. Has been in the past. Why should I ask questions about it? I’ll let history decide.” And I think that’s a way of being an artist, to say “I
just do it. You lot decide about it.” I think Prince is another example of
that kind of artist. So, the people who create the conversation around a work of art are actually very important as well. You know, in the case of music, it’s DJs, for example. They’re an incredibly important lubricant of the whole scene. Sorry, you didn’t mean me to answer this question at this length. Emma Warren No, no, no, but this question is going into a lovely direction, so please
continue. Brian Eno OK, you shouldn’t have said that. [laughter] Emma Warren No, no, no, I should have said that. Brian Eno So I started to think that because we come from a culture that wants to create heroes and champions, which I, of course, have benefited from, we tend to do that at the expense of realizing that nobody comes out of nothing. We’re all born out of complicated scenes. Which, of course, in the case of music, involved technology a great deal. You know, whoever invented and wrote the code for Logic, which I know was a lot of people, is their musical
contribution less significant than, say, Coldplay? Or any other group you can
mention. So much music is made out of the possibilities of that particular
system. So, you can’t look at what is happening in music now without looking
at the technology that gives rise to it. Emma Warren So, really, to paraphrase your saying, the parameters are now set by
coders or by other people. Is there something in there about making it easier
or more difficult for people to do things wrong? Because doing things wrong,
using stuff as it’s not meant to be used, has been a really important part of
the way that new music’s always been made. Brian Eno Yes. So, you have to find out how you can fuck up new technologies, and that usually takes a few years. Because technologies are always invented for a historical reason. For instance, if you think about multitrack recording. That wasn’t recorded so that Phil Spector could create walls of sound. It wasn’t invented so that myself and Shuggie Otis and Prince and so on could build up pieces of music over a series of months. It wasn’t invented so that any of you could sing a 40-piece choir. It was invented so that recording engineers could balance the voice against the rest of the music. That was the modest and simple idea that gave
rise to multitrack recording. It was just a convenience for engineers. It was
a way of them not having to make a decision at the moment of recording about what the balance should be between the lead voice and all the other instruments, which they had been stuck to before that moment. So now they had two tracks. The voice was on one track, and everything else was on the other.
So they could later come back to it and say, “Should we have it a little bit
later there?” “No, I don’t think so.” And all the endless, tedious arguments
in recording studios were born on that day. And then it wasn’t until Les Paul came along and started to think, “Hey, I could play one guitar on there, I could play another one on top of it there, then I could mix both of them down and then put another one on top.” So that’s the creative beginning of multitrack recording. But like all technologies, it wasn’t made with that idea in mind. So what always happens, I think, is that technology appears, it does something
historical – and “historical” could mean it does a job that we could already do but it does it quicker or cheaper or more portably, or anything else. But it’s basically a job that we already knew about. But as soon as the technology sits there, then some person, like somebody sitting in this room, comes along and thinks, ‘Hmm, you know you could do something else with that that nobody’s
ever done before.’ So then they do that. And then, of course, somebody else, a
technology designer, says, “Oh, the tool they’re using for that could be much
better. I’ll redesign the tool.” And then this person says, “OK, that’s a new
tool...” So it’s a constant dance, really, between artists and technologists. But the technologists are so important in that. I’ve been working recently with a guy, a coder, he’s also a musician, called Peter
Chilvers. We’ve done some apps
together. And that’s been a critical part of the process, working always between technology and art, of saying, “What’s possible? What can we do with it that nobody thought of doing before? What do we have to improve in it to make it better, to make it work better?” And, of course, with modern
technology, one of the biggest difficulties is cutting out options. So, actually that’s the problem with digital technology, because options keep proliferating. [to audience members] Now, I don’t know how many of you are musicians. How many are you, actually? Players, I mean? And how many of you
play analog instruments, primarily? And how many of you play digital instruments, primarily? OK, so I’m actually in the latter camp, because I can’t play anything real. But doesn’t it strike you as interesting that here we are in the second decade of the 21st century, and a lot of the most
interesting music is still being made by people playing very primitive instruments, like electric guitars and drums? I mean, what is a drum kit? It could be a bunch of old chairs, couldn’t it? Or cans, or anything. It’s really quite an arbitrary bunch of junk. But why is it that people can still make interesting stuff, and not only interesting but innovative stuff, using those tools, which, in digital terms, are hopelessly limited compared to all the
fabulous possibilities of software synths and so on that we have in a program
like Logic? Well, the reason is because it’s hopelessly limited. The reason is that you very quickly can understand what you can do with an electric guitar, or a violin, or a set of drums, and you stop looking for more options, and you start grappling with it. You say, “OK, this is what it does. So what do I do?” The problem with software-based work is that you never know what it does, you can never exhaust what it does, basically. So you can always cover the fact
that you haven’t got an idea by trying another option in the tools. So, if you
have a lot of options, you don’t usually have a lot of rapport with the
instrument. If you have a few options, your rapport keeps increasing, because
you understand the options better and better. And this is why people still
make good music with crude instruments, simple instruments. Because they
understand them better than us software people understand our instruments. Emma Warren Is that the same for you when you’re working with music by yourself than if you’re collaborating with somebody else, or working with somebody else? Brian Eno When I’m working with other people, one of the things I spend quite a lot of time doing is banning options. Emma Warren Excellent. Can you give us an example of how that might work, what you might ban and why? Brian Eno Well, for instance, one day in the studio, I said, “Today, there will be no multiplication of any kind.” Now, if you think about that, that cuts out most
of the things you do in a studio. It doesn’t only mean no double-tracking. It
means no echo, no repeats. It means no process by which you synthetically
duplicate things. So if you want echo, then you have to find some other way of
doing it. Emma Warren And how else do you get it then? How do you do it? Brian Eno Play the same thing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times and put them
all at a different distance from each other. Emma Warren So what other methods did you come up with to replicate the things you needed under the kind of parameters that you had set? Brian Eno Well, actually, most of the time we didn’t try to replicate anything. We just
said, “We won’t go there.” Another kind of option-cancelling device is to say, “Let’s not use anything on that side of the room.”
[laughs] Or, one that I particularly favor, is to take away all the cymbals
from the drums, for example. They’re totally redundant things most of the time
anyway. [laughter] Emma Warren So, there were a couple of things that you’ve done recently in collaboration
with people. Sebastian Rochford, the thing you did on Leaf, a track on the James
Blake album, and something on the last Coldplay album. And I wondered if we could listen to a bit of them and you could tell us where you are in it. Where a kind of banning or a thought or a moment is identifiably you. Is that possible? Brian Eno Well, we’ll try. I don’t actually know whether I’ll remember. Emma Warren Do you have a preference? Brian Eno Well, I’ve never heard Seb’s piece, so let’s hear that. Emma Warren Perfect. It’s called “Dream Nails.” Brian Eno This Seb Rochford is a fabulous English drummer. But I haven’t heard this song
yet. (music: Sebastian Rochford & Brian Eno - “Dream Nails”) Brian Eno [comments over music] That’s me! That thing, yeah. Good so far. The guitar
is Karl Hyde. And that must be Seb, I suppose. Sounds like I might be using the limitation, “Don’t change your note.” Emma Warren Quite possibly. Is that enough? Brian Eno Yeah, that’s enough. That reminds me, I just saw a very funny interview. We have a very serious news interviewer in England called Jeremy Paxman. He does this thing called Newsnight. Emma Warren Serious and cross. Brian Eno Yes, and he was interviewing Ann Coulter, who was being beamed in from over
the Atlantic. And he says, “Uh, Ann Coulter, so, uh, you’ve got a new book
here. The publishers have only sent me the first chapter. Um, does it get any
better?” [laughter] Emma Warren That’s Paxman. OK then, what about James Blake? This is “Digital Lion.” (music: James Blake (feat. Brian Eno) - “Digital Lion”) Brian Eno [comments over music] Only English people do music like this. Emma Warren What is it called? Music like what? What is it? Brian Eno I don’t know what you would call this. Is it dubstep? What do you think? Emma Warren I know that giving things a name gives them power, but does... Brian Eno You know what’s interesting about him as an artist is that he works mostly by subtraction. He’s always taking stuff out, as much as he can. And he ends up with these very skeletal pieces. But I can’t remember what I did on that. I know I co-wrote that. It says on the cover that I did. Emma Warren He did mention something, actually, that I thought perhaps was very you, although obviously not the only part of you. Was that he said that you came around and you had cups of tea together. And I wondered how important cups of tea were, generally, as a person who once had a cup of Earl Gray with Salvador Dali. Brian Eno [laughs] I did. Two. Well, tea is just an excuse to sit there, and when you’ve got something you can put in your mouth occasionally, you don’t have to
keep talking. [laughter] Emma Warren Ah, so it’s a cancelling tool. It’s a work-canceling, maybe conversation-canceling, maybe input-canceling device. I tell you what, next time I make myself a cup of tea, I’m gonna... Brian Eno Well, it’s better than saying “Uhhhhm, uhhhmmm,” which is what you do if you
haven’t got something to put into your mouth. Emma Warren And I thought I was just procrastinating every time I went to the kettle. Clearly not. OK, so one Coldplay track from the last album. When I was listening to it, I was thinking... actually, let’s just have a listen to it first. I selected this one because it’s the one that kind of... the noise, there’s a sound that kind of segues from track to track. Brian Eno Yeah. That sounds like me in the background there. Emma Warren OK, let’s have a listen. (music: Coldplay (feat. Brian Eno) - “Up with the Birds”) Brian Eno [comments over music] That’s a lovely song. You know, it’s funny that I
work with some people, who are very famous for their rock music, but who are
great ballad writers but don’t want to admit it. I think this is the best stuff that Chris does for me, this kind of thing. And Bono is an amazing ballad writer. He comes up with them, and he goes, “Aw fuck, not another bloody mid-tempo ballad.” And they get thrown out, you know? Emma Warren There’s two things I wanted to ask you about this, specifically. One is about, like, why people are afraid of popular music, because people are, aren’t they? They think popular music is kind of not as good as maybe niche music. And I also wanted to ask you as well about the sound. What makes something sound
popular? And what makes something sound... Brian Eno Niche-y. Emma Warren Yeah. Brian Eno Well, that’s a complicated question, because one of the things that makes things sound popular isn’t a pre-requisite of being popular, and that’s gloss. Sheen. Finish, you know? So if you listen to a Beyoncé record, or any modern R&B record, there’s a lot of finish on it. Emma Warren Can you break down what finish is? Brian Eno It’s a lot of attention to a particular kind of sonic production. You know, the really perfect sounds on certain instruments. Hi-hats that zing and sizzle, voices that are perfectly in tune, auto-tuned perfectly into tune. So, that’s one side of the popular thing, which is sort of flawless, faultless.
And one side of niche, in contrast to that, is clumsy, awkward, crude, unfinished. Things that actually we all like, in the right context, you know? The reason we like the Velvet Underground is not for their gloss. It’s for their roughness, for the feeling we have that this was really just breaking out and they didn’t know how to make it better. Because when something is new, you don’t know how to make it better. In fact, you don’t even consider that
you could make it better, you just think, ’Jesus, this is amazing.‘ Emma Warren Is that just because the newness is enough? The newness is kind of what makes
the excitement and the enthusiasm. Brian Eno That’s exactly right, I think. The newness is such a big thrill that you don’t
care about... In fact, it’s not even relevant to you to care about cleaning up
all the edges and, “That guitar’s slightly out of tune on the G string.” So all the bureaucrats come into the process later on. When everybody sort of understands it, they look back and they say, “Oh, Velvet Underground. Yeah, they were great but, a bit out of tune.” Now we’ll do the popular version of the Velvet Underground, the commercial version, where we’ll get everyone in tune, get some decent session musicians in, get a proper drummer, instead of
that woman from New Jersey. [laughs] So that’s a kind of professionalism, which, of course, doesn’t always produce bad results. Actually, you know, I
remember when I was in my 20s, or perhaps 30s, I don’t know, the biggest band
in Europe was ABBA. And nobody who was cool would admit to liking ABBA. It’s like people with dirty magazines, they would slide off into a corner to listen to ABBA songs and hope that nobody ever saw the ABBA records in their collection. But now, you know, everybody realizes that they were really great at what they did, and the music still hangs around, and it still sounds good.
But they weren’t cool, because they were a professional, not to say Swedish,
outfit. Who ever heard of Swedish rock music? Emma Warren So why then are kind of cultured people, or people who think that they like music, afraid of popular music? Are they afraid of it? Brian Eno Well, people in the art world, in general, are afraid of popular, I think. Emma Warren Is this to do with not liking the people so much? Brian Eno I think it is a class thing, really. It’s the fear that if you like what everybody else likes, then you’re no different from them. You might just be like them. And people are quite frightened of that, I think. I mean, the kiss
of death in the art world is when an artist becomes popular. I’ve seen this in
England with Antony Gormley. I don’t
know if any of you know his work. He’s a very good sculptor. And everybody
knew he was a very good sculptor until he became popular, and suddenly he was not that good after all. Because ordinary people liked his work. Emma Warren I guess we’re kind of moving into something else I wanted to talk about, which
is you did a soundtrack recently for a Channel 4 program called Top Boy. Brian Eno Oh, yeah. Emma Warren Top Boy was a program about an estate in Hackney, in London. It’s sort of very beautifully made, and a carefully and cleverly made depiction of one
aspect of street life. Kids basically getting into drug dealing and all the
kind of traumas that that can bring. And you did a soundtrack for it. And I’ve
got a clip here. You can’t see it, but in a way it allows you to hear the
music a bit better. Can we play a little bit of it and talk, maybe? Because
what was interesting for me about that, apart from the sound was – and you won
a BAFTA for it as well, congratulations – was the fact that I have not, and it
might be my lack of knowledge, but I wasn’t really so aware of you doing work
which connected with the kind of grittier aspect of street life, or whatever
you might call it in the same way. So the scene that you’re hearing, just for
some context, is outside a school. This little kid who’s got in out of his
depth is outside the school, he’s about to kind of get picked up by this much
older kid who he owes money to, and then he ends up kind of, there’s a kind of
chase with the older guy chasing after the younger guy. Brian Eno OK, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about... First of all, I love doing film
soundtracks, because they’re a kind of alibi for stretching the music in different ways. If you’re making a film soundtrack, what you’re really doing is making music minus the subject. Because the subject is actually what’s going to be on the screen. So you’re really working in the area of just
creating an atmosphere. Which of course is what I like doing. And, in fact,
the way I really got into what I called ambient music was by making imaginary
film soundtracks. So in the early ‘70s, I was listening a lot to the Nino Rota
soundtracks for the Fellini films. And the [Ennio] Morricone soundtracks for the
Sergio Leone cowboy films. And I just loved the ambiguity of them. When you
hear the soundtrack without seeing the film, and you have just this sort of
atmosphere, just an air, and knowing that they were films made them very
powerful somehow. I would always find myself trying to imagine what the action
was there. What was happening on the screen when this music was playing? And I
gradually found myself, as I was working on my own records, I found myself at
the end of the day thinking, “Oh, now I think I’ll do the soundtrack mix.” So,
I’d have been working on something all day, in the way one does, you know,
adding this, taking that away, and so on. And then, at the end of the day, I’d
think, “OK, time for the soundtrack mix.” And I’d change the speed of the
tape, usually slow it down quite a lot, chuck out half the instruments, and
using whatever treatments and processors were available in the studio, I’d do
something dramatic to the others. And almost inevitably, that was what I liked. So the rest of the day’s work, eight hours, or ten hours, of careful study didn’t sound as interesting to me as that last 20 minutes. So gradually, I started thinking that this was actually what I liked doing. So I would
always have in my mind the idea that I was working for a film. I’ve actually been commissioned to do very few films. Or perhaps I should say I’ve accepted very few commissions to do films. But when I’m working, I’m nearly always imagining that I’m actually doing film music. Even sitting at home in my studio late at night, I start playing around with something and I think, “Ah, that feels cold.” As soon as I get a sensation of some kind, I’m on the way,
you know? Then I’m starting to make a picture. Emma Warren So all music has a kind of visual content for you, in your head? Brian Eno Yeah. Emma Warren So this one, should we have a listen now? (music: Brian Eno – Top Boy soundtrack excerpt) Brian Eno So, the way I worked on this film – in fact, the way I prefer to work with soundtracks, because I don’t like being on the phone to directors much – is I get the idea of what the thing is about and then I just produce a lot of music, and say, “Here it is. Cut your film to this music.” [laughs] Emma Warren So you’re giving them the kind of materials with which they can build what’s in their head, rather than you building something that’s in your head, in response to the images that you’re seeing. Brian Eno Well, I’m working in response to what I think is the atmosphere. But, you see,
this comes from the early days of watching Fellini and so on. Those Nino Rota pieces are not scored to the film, they’re pieces of music that sit... Sorry, I can’t hold this bloody mic all the time. I know this looks like sort of auto-fellatio, but... [laughter] The Hollywood idea of film soundtrack-making is that you sort of tailor every
moment. Because the audience must not be allowed to have any other ideas about
what this is about. And I hate that. I really despise it so much when you’re
led emotionally by the nose through every single scene. And, you know, there
are so many bloody old tricks for doing it. “How do you make people feel a
little bit sentimental?” “Oh, we’ll have that high piano and string stuff.”
“How do you make them feel a bit frightened?” “Ooh, let’s have some low,
rumbly stuff.” It’s just pathetic. It really is a fucking awful world. And so, but what I always liked when I saw Fellini films, was that there was one reality in the film, and then another one in the music. And they aren’t really resolved. So it’s sort of like there’s two versions of the same story at once. It’s a little bit like having two different camera angles, where you see the
same thing from two different emotional perspectives. And I thought, “That’s
what I like. I don’t want the music to just be bolted onto the film that way.
I want it to be another part,” you know? I like that even within music, as
well. I don’t like it when things are too solidly one emotion. I like it when they’re confusing. For instance, bittersweet is always better for me than just bitter or just sweet. It’s when the thing is poised and you have a complex emotional response to it. Emma Warren And do you think that’s one of the reasons why that soundtrack worked so well, because it was there, in the background, up against some quiet, sort of forward-sounding kind of grime tracks, or other things that were kind of on the soundtrack in that way? Brian Eno Yeah, I think it worked, because the temptation for a film like that, if you’d
been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor all the time. Well, the film is really about children, actually. Children in a pretty bad situation. And so my choices were always to do with, “What’s the internal world of the children? Not only what’s the external world that they’re in?” But “What’s the world they
are in inside?” as well. And so, I was always choosing things because I thought this has something of the kid’s experience in it, rather than our experience watching the kid. So quite a lot of the stuff I made was deliberately sort of naive, inside this hard edge that it had. But inside that, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple. They weren’t sophisticated, grown-up melodies, you know? Emma Warren I think you can hear that. I’ve got a couple more completely unrelated questions before we hand it out to you lot for questions. Brian Eno About the national debt, for example. Emma Warren They’re related broadly, but they’re not related to each other or what we were
just talking about. I was going to ask you a few questions about Lux, about the
last album that you’ve made, but I know that there are a couple people in the participants who had things they wanted to ask you about that. But the thing I wanted to ask was there was a remix of that by Nicholas Jaar for Record Store Day. And I thought, as a man who’s full of good ideas, I wondered... you know, Record Store Day is all about celebrating the record
shop. And record shops have reinvented themselves as kind of niche places to
go, they’ve kind of done things to change how they operate in the world. But I wondered, if you were redesigning record shops, or places where you go to purchase music or musical experience, how would you reinvent them, over and above just putting a kind of coffee shop in there? Brian Eno Well, in my early life, record shops used to have listening booths. And that was really fantastic, they were tiny little booths, like this, with that sort of stuff with holes in it, on the soundproofing on the side. And you’d sit in there and listen to something in a much better way than you ever could listen to it at home, because nobody had headphones then. Headphones only existed in record shops. And I think that wouldn’t be a bad idea, to parcel out the territory, so that there’s lots and lots of little places where you can actually do some research. Because that’s what it was, effectively. You’d go in there, and I’d talk to Sandy, who I always fancied anyway. [laughs] And I’d ask Sandy if I could hear the new Dionne Warwick B-side, or something like that. And Sandy would have a stack of things that she’d put on, and she’d play
them and I’d go like that [gestures thumbs up]. And then she’d put the next
one on. And that was I how I heard a lot of music that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. So that wouldn’t be a bad thing to do. Emma Warren It’s a good point, because often listening posts that they have in record stores often have very short wires on the headphones, so you have to stand up, and also it’s not a very comfortable way to listen to music. Brian Eno No, that’s right. This is the same as art galleries, though, you know? Art galleries never have decent seats in them, because they want to get you through quickly. And anyway, you’re not important. Emma Warren Like McDonald’s seating, which I heard once was designed to make you leave after 17 minutes. Brian Eno Yes, well, they don’t need just the seats to do that. [laughs] I find I’m persuaded by most of the things in there to leave in a lot less than 17 minutes. Emma Warren: So, my last question, really, was that you benefited from a kind of radical
arts education under a gentleman, Roy Ascott, is that right? At Ipswich? Brian Eno Yeah. Do you know him? Emma Warren No, I don’t. But I just think he sounds like an amazing person. Like having Pythagoras as your math teacher or something. He sounded amazing. And like, for example, in one of his classes he might do things like expose you to flashing lights and loads of darkness, and then make you leave the room onto a floor that was covered in marbles. And that was his idea of a lesson. He got
fired from a lot of places. Brian Eno Yes, he did, yeah. Emma Warren: I wanted to ask you... Brian Eno He’s still getting fired. Emma Warren Fantastic! He sounds like someone else who should be running the world. Brian Eno Yep. I wish he was. Emma Warren So I wanted to ask you, do you think kind of creativity can be taught, and what should places that purport to teach be doing more of? Brian Eno Well, first thing I think is that we are born endowed with a lot of creativity. Of course, it’s not the same for everyone. Some people seem to have more than others for various reasons. But we then go through an education system that very carefully is designed to get rid of most of that creativity. In England now, we’ve got it down to a fine art. We can educate people for 12 or 15 years, and they come out absolutely thick. It’s a triumph, actually. Emma Warren You know whose fault that is? Teachers. Brian Eno No, it’s actually not to do with teachers. Emma Warren No, I’m paraphrasing the kind of general feeling that everything is teachers’
fault. But anyway, that’s another topic. Brian Eno No, it’s the ideologues’ fault in England. I know you have it here in America
as well. There’s a sort of ideological attitude to education, which is based
on the idea that you have to educate people to fit into this society as it
stands now. Which, of course, is stupid because they aren’t functioning in
this society as it stands now. They’re going to function in one 12 or 20 years
hence, and that won’t be the same society at all. My girlfriend’s son is currently going through the education system, and two of my daughters are going through it as well. So I’m quite aware of the horror of the whole
thing. And my feeling is that everybody should actually go to an English art
school. I really think that would be a very good idea, for a year or two. Because the idea of art schools, though, of course they’re getting constrained now as well, but the idea of art schools used to be - and in some still is - that you go to them to discover what parts of your creativity you want to explore, and to enlarge it in some way. You don’t go there to learn to be a
flower painter. Or to learn to draw nudes, or something like that. You might do that on the way. But what you really do is you go there to learn how you can apply yourself creatively to a situation. How you can get the best out of it, how you can think about it in a new way. How you can approach it in a way that nobody has done before, and how you can extract something from it that is
valuable. Well, this is exactly what we would all like to do. My girlfriend’s
son, who’s a natural philosopher, he’s a thinking child, you know, he’s
studying philosophy now for what we call A Levels, which I know in America has
a different meaning. Oh, you don’t read personal ads, obviously. [laughs]
Sorry. But he’s been reading philosophy, and he occasionally argues a point
with the teacher, who has to say, “Don’t try to interpret it, please. Just
read what it says in the book and learn it.” Now this is philosophy, right? What is philosophy about except exactly that? This is a tragedy that education’s got to this point of telling you that you shouldn’t try to have theories of your own about philosophy, you should just learn what the
philosophers did. Emma Warren Seconded. So before we get the microphone ready for questions from here, is there anything you can tell us about that you’re going to be working on in the
near future that we may be interested in? Brian Eno God, that’s always a hard question. I don’t think too much about the near future. Distant future I think about quite a lot. Well, I’m working on more hospital things. I’m very interested in that, because it seems that at last I found a use for myself. [laughs] After half a century of pissing around. [laughter] Emma Warren And that question, “What am I doing? Is it any good? And what is it for?” Brian Eno Exactly. Those questions now look like they could be briefly, temporarily answered. So I’m looking forward to that. Emma Warren Excellent. And I’m sure all the poorly people of Brighton, and hopefully other
places as well, will be grateful, too. So, questions. And the microphone. Who’s gonna go? OK, perfect. Audience Member Hello, Mr. Eno. About your lecture today, I can’t figure out how you, with limitations, generate ideas. I would like to know what limitation or what process you use to finish and not develop, but when’s the time you finish [the] idea? Brian Eno Well, that’s a very good question. My daughter recently asked me the same thing, because she was in my studio, and she was looking at my archive, where I have 2,809 unreleased pieces of music, and she said, “Dad, how do you actually finish any of these?” And I said, “When there’s a deadline.” And that’s really true, but I’ll tell you why that’s true. When there’s a
deadline, there’s also a destination, a context, a reason for something. And
that’s what makes me finish it. Up until that point, it’s an experiment. It’s
sitting on my shelf, and I can take it down again, as I often do, work on it
again, put it back on, take it out two years later, work on it some more. So,
everything’s in progress until there’s a reason to finish it for me. Now, when something like Top Boy comes along, I don’t actually start from scratch.
What I do is, I think, “OK, Top Boy. What’s that? East End? Hackney? OK,
children, drugs, OK.” And I think, “Oh yes, that, I think that’s something
that might be relevant.” So I take out a piece, and I start then now I know what it’s for, I know where it’s going to go, so then I can finish it. And also, you know, they want it by the end of next week as well, which helps. So, I’ve always thought that the two things that really make for good records are deadlines and small budgets. The things that make for bad records are no
deadlines and endless budgets. ‘Cause you can piss around forever with that,
you know? And I remember working with one famous band. I had heard something
that they’d done in the past and I thought, ‘They just spent too much time on
it.’ You all know what that sounds like, when something has been sort of
beaten to death, basically. And every detail has been finessed so many times
that there’s no life left in it. It’s a little bit like British cooking before
1970. [laughter] Emma Warren That wasn’t cooking, that was just spaghetti in tins. Brian Eno Yeah, that’s right. So anyway, I took this band to a very good Italian restaurant in London, and I had already arranged with the manager that I could take them into the kitchen. So this is a fantastic restaurant, very famous, very cool, with impeccably dressed waiters and good service, and it’s all very chic. And you go into the kitchen and it’s like a scene from hell. There’s
people dashing around and swearing and food flying everywhere. It’s incredible, watching something being cooked there. It’s like, great ingredients, as little as possible time spent in the pan, and then it’s on the
plate. And this food tastes like it, it’s fresh and is exciting and thrilling.
You can feel the speed of the preparation, actually, and you can feel the life
in the whole thing. And so I said, “This is how we should make records.” It
worked for a few days. [laughter] Audience Member Hi, sir. A bit about technology, maybe. You came from a long line of helping musicians, being with apps or narrowing possibilities. I myself am a big fan of Oblique Strategies, it’s kind of a “I Ching” for musicians, in a way. So it’s very helpful. I just wonder, nowadays, with so much possibilities and so much ways of programming and coding things, your iPad or iOS apps are amazing, kids love it, and you
can really make good music with so few possibilities, sonically speaking. I’m
just wondering if you intend to work on something new with the digital domain
that helps musicians to create or to solve some concepts. Brian Eno I don’t have a specific next app in mind, at the moment. But the last one we did, which was called Scape, I think it’s gonna take a couple of years for that to really sink in. [laughs] It’s a very powerful idea. And I really made it to try to make film soundtrack writers redundant. I was trying to think, ‘Is there a way I could automatically generate film soundtracks?’ So that when someone calls up from Hollywood, I don’t have to say, “Oh god, I couldn’t face speaking to him on the phone again, so I won’t do the job.” But I could say, “Yes, I can do that in no time at all. Just send the check. And here it is.” [laugher] So the idea was to make a program that could generate really, really interesting soundscapes. And that’s what Scape is. Well, it sold quite well, but nowhere near as well as Bloom. Bloom is a much simpler thing to understand. Scape is a little bit more complicated. But I think that’s a good tool for musicians. If I were a young musician now, and I was trying to do something interesting with my instrument, I would take Scape, I’d get a piece going, and then I would play over it. Because it’s unpredictable enough to lead you somewhere that you wouldn’t expect to go, musically. Audience Member It has to do a bit with logic and stochastic algorithms, Euclidean logic, and... Brian Eno Yeah, so, all the processes are stochastic processes, in that they have a margin of randomness, you’d say. So they’re not entirely random, but they’re on the cusp - they’re indeterminate is another way of saying it. And indeterminacy is a nice world to work in. If you’re working with most
sequencers, you’re really working in a completely determinate world, because
you’ve built it all. The thing about Scape is that you can build the world,
but then it has its own rules for how it behaves. Within Scape, there are a
lot of internal rules, which tell different elements in Scape to pay attention
to each other. So, one of the elements might say, “You’re only playing if
she’s playing.” Another element might only play in the evenings. Another element might only play when there are three other things playing, or four other things playing. Otherwise you’ll never hear it. So there’s a lot of internal logic, which you might become familiar with eventually. But it’s
surprising. It does things that you wouldn’t expect from something in an iPad. Audience Member It’s really great. Brian Eno Thank you. See that? It’s really great, he said. [laughter] Why don’t the rest of you know this? Audience Member OK, here we are again. What’s going on? My question is, you do films, scores and stuff like that, right? I was watching this documentary about Basquiat. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. The painter from out here, about his process when he was painting. And he had the TV on, he’d have a record playing, and he’d have the radio on. And I find myself doing that, too. ‘Cause
I was gonna be an illustrator before I decided that I wanted to stick with
music. But I’ll find myself having the TV on, with no music on, and I have my
music playing and just have me writing and drawing, just trying to figure
ideas that’ll produce the best music possible. Does that kind of stuff go on
when you’re deciding how you want things to sound when you’re producing? You
know, your process? Brian Eno Well, one of the things I’ve noticed is that when one used to use studios, years and years ago, you’d shut all the doors, the studio would be very much a sealed closet, you know? You were inside the music, and you didn’t want to hear anything else. But what I have noticed now, with most of the young
musicians I work with, is that they are constantly listening to other things.
So, for instance, with James Blake, for example, when we were working on that
piece, a little thing came up and I said to him, “Have you heard “Peace Be
Still” by James Cleveland?” Has
anyone ever heard that? Oh God, you’ve got a thrill coming. You’ve heard it. Just write this down and go and hear “Peace Be Still” by the Reverend James Cleveland. And the... is it the Shiloh Baptist Choir? I can’t remember. Someone like that. It’s an amazing experience. And we listened to that, and we
didn’t then go and copy it, but it changed what we did afterwards, because it has this amazing moment in it, which I won’t describe, because I’ll give the game away. But there’s nothing else like it in music, as far as I know. This moment where an absence is incredibly powerful. There’s suddenly a huge hole that the music falls into. Anyway, you gotta hear it. So, we listened to that, and we thought, “Yeah, we get that. That’s an idea. That’s a good idea.” So, the idea – not the way of doing it, but the idea became... and I notice this a lot with, when we’re playing, we’re working on something in the studio and
somebody says, “No, no, no, I don’t want that kind of sound. I want more
like... that.” [laughs] And so we listen to that and we say, “So what is
that exactly? What do you like about it?” “Ah, right, it’s a thin sort of
sound.” “I see. Yeah, OK, so we’ll do that.” So, people never used to do that
in studios. It was the old idea of the artist who’s working entirely from his
own mind, and it all comes out of there, and nothing else in the world is
relevant. Of course, that’s never been true with pop music, but now it’s more often acknowledged in the studio that you’re working in a scenius, basically. Audience Member Thank you. Emma Warren So where’s the microphone traveling to now? Brian Eno I hope it’s not gonna travel too much further, because I need to go to the
toilet. If you don’t mind me talking about such matters. I do have bowels,
just like everybody else. [laughter] Emma Warren Would you like us to finish up soon? Brian Eno Not too long from now, unless you want an embarrassing incident on your sofa. Emma Warren So we’re saying two more questions. Audience Member Mine is kind of quick. First, for me, it’s like a true highlight. There’s so much stuff you have done. You say you don’t look, like, to the near future. What about, like, the all the way through. I mean, society has this thing about pinpointing an artist to a specific kind of work. How do you see we’ll
look at your work? What’s that thing we’ll mostly remind us of you? Brian Eno Well, of course, my reputation, in this hemisphere at least, is mostly to do
with music, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the light work that turns out
to be more interesting in the long term. Because I think it’s less like
anything else. I hope you’ll go and see my show, not because I want your
admission fee or anything like that, but because then you’ll have an idea of
what I’m talking about. But that, to me, that is less like... I don’t know
what else is like it. It’s a completely separate... Audience Member It’s special, it’s you alone... Brian Eno It’s just me. Nobody else does anything like it. And so I think, in the long run, I think that will stand as a sort of the beginning of something. I don’t know what it’s the beginning of. Audience Member Thank you. Emma Warren OK, so one more. Audience Member Hi. Brian Eno Hello. Audience Member You were talking earlier about singing in a choir and being an atheist as well. And I’ve found, I’m not a religious person at all, but a lot of the music that I really, really love is religious music. Brian Eno Yes. Audience Member I find kind of levels of intensity and passion, that I don’t hear in other
things, to the point that I’m making music myself and wishing I was religious
almost, so that I could make something like that. What should I do? [laughter] Brian Eno You could find Jesus. Audience Member That’s just never gonna work with my mind. I’m looking for an alternative. Brian Eno Well, this is a very interesting question, and it’s one I’ve thought about a lot. Because a lot of the music that I’m most moved by is religious music. And so this is why I started to think about this idea of surrender. I started thinking, “What is it I’m liking about that music that I’m not hearing in other music?” And I think it’s the fact that the people doing it are completely engaged with it, not in an egotistical way. They’re not there to present themselves, they’re there to receive something. They think it comes from outside. I think it comes from inside. But nonetheless, they are there to open themselves up to something. So what you like is the sound of someone being opened up, being in a receptive and trusting and vulnerable condition, basically. So that’s your choice. You can try to be in that condition as well. I mean, I get that feeling from singing. You know, I’m not a good singer in any classic sense. I don’t have a great voice. But I have a voice that mixes well with other voices, you might say. So I do backing vocals with practically
everyone I work with. It’s me singing at the back there, quite often. In fact,
recently, I was on three different stages on one night. I was singing with U2,
Coldplay, and James on the same night. In three different continents. Because
they sample me, you see, and they take me with them on tour. [laughs] But
what you have to do is to find the moments when that happens to you, when you get that feeling, and it might be the most embarrassing part of what you do. For instance, I don’t know... what do you play? Audience Member I make electronic music. Beats and stuff. Brian Eno So, I think the thing is sort of admitting to yourself when that feeling is happening to you. And it might not be the part of yourself that you want to admit to. As I’ve said, it happens to me when I’m singing. Well, I stopped thinking singing was cool about 35 years ago. And started getting into much more intellectual pursuits. But actually, it’s singing that does it for me.
And I have to admit that that’s when I am that person that I want to be, that
I want to feel. With you, you’re an electronic musician, it might be playing
blues on a rusty old guitar or something is actually what you should be doing if you want to have that feeling. But I think you should think about this control and surrender thing. Because that’s what I think this question is about. It’s about where am I allowing myself to be on this spectrum? Us
electronic musicians, a lot of our time is spent in control. That’s what it’s
all about. It’s about fiddling with software and code and plug-ins and what
have you. And not a lot of our time is spent listening to what we’re doing. So
I have a trick that I use in my studio, because I have these 2,800-odd pieces
of unreleased music. And I have them all stored in an iTunes file, you know?
So when I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often, and it’s quite a
big studio, I just have it playing on random shuffle, and so suddenly I hear
something and often I can’t even remember doing it, or I have a very vague
memory of it. Because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started
at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave
some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely
forgot about. And then years later on the random shuffle, this thing comes up
and I think, “Wow, I didn’t even hear it when I was doing it.” And I think
that often happens. We don’t actually hear what we’re doing . We’re so in
control mode that we don’t go into that other mode, which is listener mode,
surrender mode, let-it-happen-to-me mode. So I think you should try to find ways of letting that happen to you more often. And then you’ll find the places where you’re getting that feeling. It may all be there already. You just haven’t noticed it. That often happens. I mean, I often find pieces and I think, “This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?” Emma Warren Well, whichever me it was, we’re very grateful to all your me’s. Brian Eno Thank you very much. [applause]