Brian Eno - The revolutions of the “non-musician”

Pioneer of ambient music and glam rock, video artist, philosopher of music, sculptor, singer, multi-instrumentalist, maître-à-penser of pop culture, godfather of "no wave", electronic dance and new age, producer, talent scout. All of this is Brian Eno, a true guru of the music scene of the last three decades.

Born in Woodbridge, Great Britain, on May 15, 1948, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (his real name) grew up in Suffolk, near a US military base, fascinated by the "Martian" sounds of doo-wop and the primitive rock & roll broadcast by American Armed Forces radio stations.

In the Sixties, having left the Catholic convent school where he received his secondary education, he studied visual arts in Ipswich and experimental music in Winchester. He learned the techniques of musique concrète, chance music, gestural, minimal and electronic composition (he even invented a sound machine powered by rainwater and recorded a piece for metal lampshade percussion). A wealth of experience he gathered in the manifesto-book "Music For Non-musicians", in which Eno theorizes the figure of the "non-musician", technically incompetent but rich in creative genius. In his view, a work of art should be composed in three phases: conception of the piece, performance by individual musicians (who are indeed competent), and final manipulation of the tapes by the author. It's the third phase that interests him most.

His musical reference points lie mainly in contemporary music (John Tilbury and Cornelius Cardew in particular) and minimalism (John Cage, La Monte Young, Terry Riley), but his is a concept of music that transcends the simple musical fact, a multimedia theory ahead of its time, one might say. After a brief stint in Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, Eno formed an avant-garde music group, the Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, and a rock band, the Maxwell Demon. In 1969 he was working in London as a graphic designer and sound technician. And it's here that, two years later, his partnership with Roxy Music was born.

Eno joined the band as "electronic supervisor", soon becoming its keyboardist and, in his own words, its "sound architect". With Bryan Ferry's and Phil Manzanera's Roxy Music, he conceived two revolutionary art-glam-rock albums, "Roxy Music" in 1972 and "For Your Pleasure" in 1973, giving rise to one of the most innovative sounds of the Seventies.

His contribution consisted in grafting a series of bizarre, estranging electronic effects onto the band's lush jams, carried by Bryan Ferry's crooner delivery. But contrasts and rivalries soon arose within the band, leading to a split: Roxy Music would continue down the path of an equally refined but less avant-garde pop, while Brian Eno left the group for a solo career.

His first post-Roxy Music projects were particularly ambitious: he recorded No Pussyfooting with Robert Fripp (King Crimson), whose guitar arabesques were warped by special electronic devices ("frippertronics") at the cutting edge of sound treatment with loops, effects and sampling. During the same period, Eno devoted himself to producing two experimental albums by the Portsmouth Sinfonia (an orchestra of "quasi-musicians").

The 1973-'74 biennium marked the turning point: his first solo works arrived.

Here Come The Warm Jets (1973) still bears the mark of early Roxy's glam intoxication. "Needles In The Camel's Eye", for instance, brandishes Phil Manzanera's cutting guitars (he also co-wrote the track), drowning in languid Bowie-esque swoons. "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch" is another absurdist sketch: theatrical madness and manic keyboards sealing a murky piece. And then there's the acid-tinged fifties charm of "Cindy Tells Me", the keyboard-driven free-glam of "On Some Faraway Beach", the astonishing sax performance by fellow Roxy member Andy MacKay on "Some Of Them Are Old", the psychedelic anthem "Baby's On Fire", and the guitar apotheosis of the title track. All gems of a (post-)glam now derailed along the "oblique strategies" of the non-musician from Woodbridge.

A year passed. And the new venture is called Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974), bolstered by the contributions of Robert Wyatt on percussion and Phil Manzanera on guitars. Still with the detached irony of a dandy, Eno combines the new studio techniques with Wyatt's cerebral Dadaism, coining a genuine post-modern "musical treatise" that would set a standard for the sound of the Seventies.

The album flaunts surreal pieces like the martial waltz of "Back In Judy's Jungle" and the pub-choir title track, but also the experiments of "Fat Lady Of Limbourg", "Great Pretender" and "China My China" - essentially a study in how Eastern tradition (Japanese dirges, Chinese drumsticks, gongs, etc.) can be wedded to rock instrumentation. Another hallmark of the record are its neurotic nursery rhymes, such as "Mother Whale Eyeless" and "Burning Airlines", with their obsessive refrains sung in a detached, android-like voice. Eno's "oblique strategy" aims to introduce pop and retro elements into avant-garde music, playing recklessly with sounds and abstractions.

After touring with the English band The Winkies and playing a memorable show with Kevin Ayers, plus John Cale and Nico of Velvet Underground fame (later released as “June 1”), Eno is forced to stop for several months, first due to serious lung problems, then because of a car accident. In 1975 he returns with Another Green World, another superb production featuring Robert Fripp on guitar, Phil Collins on drums and John Cale on viola. Through bold cross-genre blending (avant-garde music and pop, psychedelia and soundtrack work), Eno pushes beyond the boundaries of rock, crafting a series of soundscapes that already hint at what would become known as “ambient music”, a genre he can rightly be considered the founder of. That same year, the “non-musician” launches his own avant-garde label, Obscure Records, on which he releases Discreet Music as part of a ten-volume series devoted to experimental music (among the artists who inspired it: Michael Nyman, John Cage, Harold Budd). Eno also publishes two books, “Music For Non Musicians” and “Oblique Strategy”, laying out his “non-musical” theories.

Closing out the trilogy is the excellent Before And After Science (1977), conceived in Germany, where Eno has relocated with Fripp and David Bowie and is collaborating with Cluster.

The ten tracks are as many snapshots of fifty years of rock music, but Eno is not merely a cold scientist conducting a microscopic analysis of tradition — he's also an outstanding composer. The magic of the record lies precisely in putting that talent at the service of formal rigor. Add to that the fact that Eno surrounded himself with musicians of the caliber of Phil Collins, Phil Manzanera, the ever-present Robert Fripp, and the two “Cluster” members Moebius and Roedelius, and it's easy to picture the result.

The ethno-funk syncopations of the opener “No One Receiving” anticipated by a few years that extraordinary post-punk movement, also better known as “white funk”, which took hold in the most alternative clubs of England and the United States, bringing a breath of fresh air to modern dance music. The electronic contaminations that set “white” funk apart from its “black” counterpart all stemmed from Eno's work, a concept he would later revisit with even more conviction, first contributing to the Talking Heads' “Remain In Light” and then duetting with David Byrne on the splendid My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. But it's all already here. All the irresistible drive of Collins' percussion and drumming, all the cavernous pulse of the fretless bass, the impertinent buzz of the synth, and that unmistakable sing-song delivery that has always been the trademark of Brian Eno the “pop songsmith”. On this front, “Kurt's Rejoinder” pushes even further, delivering a stammering tribalism that drags us into unsettling nocturnal African landscapes. It's practically a preview of what Talking Heads would soon become.

With “Backwater” the mood shifts completely. We move into more properly rock-pop territory. An irresistible, infectious little tune, proof of the English artist's knack for churning out sticky choruses. Another surprise: “Energy Fools The Magician” is a two-minute interlude, an instrumental dominated by Collins' extraordinary drumming, which ticks away like a clock about to explode, holding back its force right at the moment of detonation. “King's Lead Hat” is Eno's take on “pure, hard” rock, skewed by dissonant piano stabs, jittery handclaps, hypnotic electronic loops, and blazing guitars. Another irresistible song, another chorus to sing along to like a maniac, another move from rock's artisan-intellectual.

“Here He Comes” is a track of astonishing clarity, of enormous class, one that could play on a loop for an hour without ever growing tiresome. “Julie With…” is a study in ambient-pop, one of those hazy, soft, utterly delightful miniatures that Eno excels at. Another unmistakable trademark of his are the famous “vignettes”, so ethereal they're almost less intrusive than silence. The gorgeous instrumental “Through Hollow Lands”, dedicated to Harold Budd, belongs to this category too. The album's best-known track, though, is “By This River”, which Nanni Moretti was so insistent on using in his film “La stanza del figlio”. The usual rarefied atmosphere, with Eno singing in a subdued, resigned tone, while piano and keyboards caress each other, weaving an exquisite fabric. “By This River” is a peace of the senses, a yawn of the soul, a moment of stillness and calm. And also a masterpiece. Closing the album, whose second half is far more relaxed than its first, is “Spider And I”, a moved farewell dissolving into cosmic nebulae, almost announcing the dawn of a new era. Indeed, the era of “after science”.

In Berlin, Eno collaborates on another great trilogy, that of the “electronic dandy” David Bowie: “Low“, “Heroes” (with Fripp on guitar) and “Lodger” mark the most experimental chapter in the Thin White Duke's output, forging a sound that would prove highly influential on the European new wave scene to come. But Eno also leaves his mark on the music of Talking Heads (“More Songs About Buildings And Food”, “Fear Of Music” and “Remain In Light“) and on the fledgling New York “no wave” scene, releasing “No New York“, a landmark compilation featuring bands like DNA, The Contorsions and others. These same years also see collaborations with Ultravox and Devo on the rock side, and with Harold Budd and Jon Hassell on the avant-garde front.

The solo career of rock's most famous “non-musician”, meanwhile, focuses on the development of ambient music, through two evocative albums: Music For Films (1978) and Music For Airports (1979). The former is a collage of 18 instrumental miniatures, built from ecstatic, dreamlike atmospheres, spatial swirls, delicate sonic textures — a sublimation, in a minimalist and romantic key, of “musique concrète”, one that also passes through pieces of romantic (“Slow Water”) and religious (“Sparrowfall”, “Events In Dense Fog”, “Final Sunset”) intensity.

Music For Airports, on the other hand, is part of a “music for environments” project devised by Eno together with Harold Budd and Jon Hassell. The aim is to create background music designed for the vast halls of airports, but also for waiting rooms, exhibition pavilions and art galleries. Music as furnishing. Spaces as giant boxes to be filled with sound. The end of the traditional concept of “listening” and the birth of a new kind of soundtrack, designed to accompany spaces rather than images. More than just a record, Music For Airports is a musicological treatise, a definitive synthesis of that season of sonic research launched by Erik Satie in 1888 with the piece “Gymnopédies” and carried forward in the '60s and '70s by pioneers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich and John Cage, as well as by Eno himself. Music For Airports is the crowning achievement of those projects: it's only with its release, in fact, that the term “ambient music” is officially coined.

In his self-taught scientist's alchemy, Eno actually proceeds by subtraction. Back in 1968 he had already theorized “Music for Non-Musicians”, no longer the preserve of composers and performers but of “brilliant amateurs”, manipulators of tape, synths, equalizers and other electronic gadgetry. Then, with his “oblique strategies”, he set out to strip music itself of its pulp, reducing it to a hazy puzzle of sounds and tones, recycled in the studio through complex genetic-engineering-like operations. Stripped bare this way, shorn of its traditional harmonic structures, music becomes nothing more than part of an environment — be it a station waiting room or an airport terminal — absorbing its atmosphere and noises, turning into a background that no longer demands close listening (here's the final “subtraction”). It's music that often doesn't exceed 100 beats per minute and at times has no rhythmic component whatsoever. Music that finds its main reason for being in a symbiotic relationship with space.

The chosen setting, then, is the airport: an international crossroads, a point of arrival and departure, a place of meetings and partings, of waiting and tension. Eno's goal is to instill in its visitors a sense of calm and hope, gradually easing their stress. The experiment was actually carried out for a period at the LaGuardia Airport terminal in New York, just a few months after the album's release.

A kind of “meta-classical” symphony divided into four movements, minimalist down to its (almost nonexistent) track titles, Music For Airports revolutionizes not only the concept of musical creation but also that of its reception. The relationship between space and acoustics plays out as an alternation of silences, piano and synth phrases, choral parts and female voices, all duly broken down and reassembled at the mixing desk. The sound unfolds slowly; it's abstract, pictorial, cerebral. And yet it doesn't simply serve as “wallpaper” for the space — it helps shape the listener's perception of it, to the point of almost merging with it. Everything is hazy, incorporeal, rarefied. Turning the usual instruction found on record sleeves on its head, one might say “To be played at minimum volume”.

In the overture, a wonderful sixteen-minute slow-motion adagio, it's Robert Wyatt who conjures an atmosphere of electronic ecstasy, endlessly repeating ethereal piano phrases, countered by the other instruments in free-flight and reworked through masterful mixing-desk direction. The second track is built on echoes and overlapping layers of an a cappella female choir that instills a sense of emptiness and vertigo. The third is a pastoral piece combining the choir with a piano, acting as an ideal synthesis of the two preceding movements. The fourth, a synth solo in darker tones, seems almost designed to leave behind a sense of intriguing incompleteness. Music For Airports, in fact, could go on forever, and would always hold back some imperceptible surprise. Behind its slow undulations, its obsessive calm, its hypnotic patterns, lurks a malign suspense, the wait for a twist that never seems to arrive — yet one that might come with every new listen. But perhaps that, in itself, is its twist.

The project continues, amid swirling sounds and cosmic echoes, with Films, On Land, which heightens the “thriller” quality of its ambient watercolors, making room for darker, more menacing tones. The more “cosmic” side of his music, meanwhile, takes center stage on Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks from 1983. But Eno also wants to try his hand at visual art. And so come the video-frescoes “Fifth Avenue” and “Mistaken Memories”, which celebrate, in artistic form, the birth of the new multimedia medium of the videocassette.

In the '80s, the “non-musician” from Woodbridge becomes a sort of universal guru of rock, assembling a stable of talents and producing a seemingly endless string of records. All of this in complete independence, never beholden to the commercial strategies of record labels, relying only on his own private recording studio. From 1980 he begins collaborating with his brother Roger and, above all, with Canadian sound engineer Daniel Lanois. During this period, Eno also keeps an eye on other scenes, collaborating with artists from Ghana (Edikanfo), the Soviet Union (Zvuki Mu), Italy (Teresa De Sio), and developing an interest in ethnic music.

The great return to rock is marked by his production work on U2's U2 albums “The Unforgettable Fire” (1984) and “The Joshua Tree” (1987). Thanks to the extraordinary success of these two albums, Eno becomes one of the most sought-after producers in the world, even though he prefers to leave such duties to Lanois and devote himself to other projects, including the founding of an artist agency (Opal) representing musicians (his brother Roger, Lanois, Michael Brook, John Paul Jones) and visual artists (directors, photographers, painters). In the early '90s, Eno oversees ambitious recording projects such as Nerve Net (1992), The Shutov Assembly (1992) and the soundtracks to the films Blue (1993) and Glitterbug (1994), both by Derek Jarman. He also puts together visual installations, multimedia works (with Laurie Anderson) and even a series of audio samples for personal computer software.

But his collaborations in rock leave their mark on the decade: among others, he works with Arto Lindsay, Peter Gabriel (“Us”, from 1992), on the soundtracks for Wim Wenders' “Until The End Of The World” and the TV series “X-Files”, on U2's albums “Achtung Baby” (1991) and “Zooropa” (1993), on the “Passengers” project (“Original Soundtracks I”, 1995) and on “Outside” (1995), David Bowie's comeback album. “That record,” he recalls, “started from a sequence of improvisations that I recently listened back to and that struck me: David improvises lyrics built over complex harmonies, changing characters by altering his voice. He's ahead of everyone else in the world when it comes to imagination and expressiveness. I hope there's a follow-up soon.”

Recently, Eno released the album Drawn For Life, written, played and produced with J. Peter Schwalm, a DJ and musician from Frankfurt, and enriched by Laurie Anderson's voice: eleven tracks poised between jazz, chamber music and trip hop. “I always try to make the music I'd like to hear,” Eno says. “The process starts from a series of listening sessions during which I think: 'I'd like it to be a bit like this, a bit like that.' So I spend all my time sketching out in my head the kind of music I'd like to compose. During this period I haven't listened to much jazz or European art music, but I recognise they pointed me toward fertile ground. The other path was to fall back on those feelings I'd discovered about music as a kind of soundscape. I tried to steer all this toward a type of composition that was rhythmic and melodic, because for a long time I wrote pieces with no obvious rhythms or only faint melodic traces.”

But Eno has also produced “Space”, the latest record by James, which he calls “the best since the band's been together”. He took part in David Toop's project “Sonic Boom: the art of sound”, an exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery described as “the largest exhibition of art and sound ever held in Britain”, featuring contributions from Russell Mills and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, exploring post-rave, post-ambient and post-techno sounds. And among the English artist's “oblique strategies” is also Aiming for Zero Landmines-The First Prayer of the 21st Century, the soundtrack to a Japanese TV programme produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto aimed at abolishing landmines. Eno appears, alongside Kraftwerk and David Sylvian, among the contributing composers.

While music remains his main activity, art is always at the centre of his thinking. At San Francisco's MoMA he created “Compact Forest Proposal”, part of an exhibition celebrating digital technology and art titled “101010”. Eno's project is to create a wordless musical environment, with no melody, no rhythm, and that never sounds the same way twice, through 11 CD players transmitting music, noise, distant voices, the sound of bells. Finally, his great dream: to get permission from the authorities at London's Heathrow Airport to create a room for travellers where one can listen to “music suited to a modern airport”. It would be the logical close to a conversation he opened more than twenty years ago with Music For Airports.

In 2005, surprisingly, Another Day On Earth comes out. Billed as a new album of songs, it's anything but a return by Eno to his four “pop” albums. As unpredictable and rollicking as those records were, this one is polished and sterile to the point of monotony. An ambient album in pure Eno-style, just sung rather than purely instrumental.

Once that's clear, you can give yourself over to the pleasure of a high-class listen, free of jolts — though maybe not entirely: because on hearing the opening track, “This”, any fan of “pop” Brian Eno will surely feel a genuine pang of nostalgia: there it is, one of his typical nursery-rhyme tunes that sticks in your head and won't leave. The words, sounds and melodies reveal a melancholy, almost subdued Eno, as if troubled by having to express himself again through words as well as sounds. Above all, returning to singing after so long, Eno no longer finds the vocal freshness that marked his '70s records. He relies instead on the vocoder in the delicate, aching “And Then So Clear”, probably the finest track on the record.

The rest of the album, unfortunately, doesn't live up to these two gems placed at the start: it harks back all too closely to the master's recent, less-than-thrilling ambient work. “Caught Between” at least finds a mood that's once again strikingly evocative and emotionally engaging, but it's a fairly isolated moment amid the general torpor. The album's fortunes improve toward the end thanks to the shadowy “Bonebomb” and “Just Another Day”, and above all the splendid “Under”. In the end, it's a record that's easy enough to listen to, but as a whole it never really takes off or truly engages.

To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Eno reunites with his historic partner David Byrne. But Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, billed as an “electronic gospel” album, falls short of expectations.

The weak point lies not in its leaning toward pop, but in how that pop is executed: while the obsessive repetition of the title in the opening “Home”, or the discreet harmonic openings of the title track, at least show some character of their own, however seasoned with banality in style and lyrics, there's no other way to describe the rhythmic choices of “Strange Overtones”, the forced, youth-pandering arrangement of “Life Is Long”, or the baffling stadium-chorus march of “One Fine Day” than as embarrassing. The only track that lives up to the declared electro-gospel intent is “Wanted For Life”, a piece that otherwise has neither head nor tail. As throughout the rest of the record, there's a lingering sense of unjustified grandiosity here too, unsupported even by the necessary interplay between writing and compositional elements: the former shaky and blurred, the latter dull and lacking character, which only once (“I Feel My Stuff”) hint at an attempt at fusion otherwise absent from the rest of the tracks.

Having thus dusted off a few facets of his multifaceted genius, the Leonardo da Vinci of rock music returns to the creative method he holds dearest for Small Craft On A Mlik Sea, an album that makes more of a stir for Eno's other side-role as talent scout (towards the two talented Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams, who take part in the record) and especially for the Warp deal behind it, than for its actual content.

Eno fails to go beyond polyrhythmic sketches like “Bone Jump” and “Dust Shuffle”, at times even slipping back into his now-dated modernist funk (“Paleosonic”). His ambient grace is only appreciable in the (unresolved) prelude of “Emerald And Lime”, or at most in the 8-minute musing of “Late Anthropocene”.

Probably caught up in an inner urge to reassert his relevance for new generations, the album sounds confused and out of focus, far from the mysterious balance of “Another Green World”, generic in composition and clinical in production, despite the excessive array of bonus editions (the humble “Invisibile” being the one exception worth saving).

Drums Between The Bells, once again a collaboration — this time with poet-lyricist Rick Holland (capturing nearly a decade of artistic encounters between the two) — an album that seems to serve mainly to keep the new Warp deal running at full tilt, is even more half-hearted.

In 2012, his latest offering in generative music software, Scape, appears on the App Store, once again in collaboration with Peter Chilvers (with whom he had already created Bloom, Trope and Air).

This also helps him complete his grand comeback. Thanks to this very app, he manages to create a new symbolic work of his non-music, the solo ambient record. Lux is thus a collection of extended pieces that aim to continue the tradition of his great “discreet” continuums, but which betray themselves in trying to override the dictatorship of the “generative” medium through forced, generic evocations - even with some flashes of craftsman's skill and evocative poetic intensity - forgetting the classic spontaneity of his past work.

Surprisingly, the next chapter of Eno's 2010s comes two years later and marks a partial return to that famous unforgettable foursome of masterpieces that had preceded his ambient devotion. Made in collaboration with Underworld mastermind Karl Hyde, Someday World neither is nor tries to be the sequel to Before And After Science, but it certainly recovers quite a few of its traits, updating the sounds, ideas, cues and aesthetics to the present day. Take, for example, the splendid post-funky jubilation of “Daddy’s Car”, the varied “Man Wakes Up” and the tribal pulse of “When I Built This World”. Engaging, interesting ideas that translate into good songs, whose real strength lies in those exquisitely arty arrangements that Eno continues to pull out of his hat like no one else. It's precisely these arrangements that manage to lift up even the weaker tracks on paper, such as the climax of “Witness”, the ballad “Mother Of A Dog” and the overly saccharine closer “To Us All”.

There's no shortage of masterstrokes reaffirming a brilliance that had recently seemed to have dried up and faded: the delightful music-box charm in the vein of Peter Gabriel on “Strip It Down”, the gem paying tribute to the romantic Foxx on “Who Rings The Bell”, and the imaginative, elegant nineties nostalgia of “The Satellites”. It's not a case for shouting miracle, but it is an operation worth praising for managing to look to the past while staying well clear of mere imitation, displaying a wealth of class, elegance and restraint - qualities Eno has always placed front and centre, and which are (too) often missing nowadays.

A few months later comes High Life, the second and unexpected chapter of the collaboration between Eno and Hyde. Just six tracks, six long, mostly instrumental rides, which truly represent the other side of the coin of their artistic dialogue - though lacking that perfect, hidden chemistry that had played the role of secret, decisive ingredient. The two instead limit themselves to fishing back into Eno-the-producer's glorious past, giving themselves over almost entirely to craft and nostalgia. That doesn't mean there aren't sporadic displays of class, such as the dazzling opener “Return” - nine minutes of what “The Joshua Tree” would sound like in 2014 - and the guitar apotheosis of “Lilac”. Funky is the watchword today just as it was in the days of Talking Heads, exhumed without heart on a formally orgasmic “DBF” that nonetheless grows tiresome over time, and on a “Moulded Life” whose sci-fi swagger soon proves anachronistic. “Time To Waste It” is also a letdown, a sort of ethno-gospel number where Hyde lends a hand (and his distorted voice) but which, for all its undeniable elegance, hides no real feeling behind it. Then there's the episode that stands at least partly apart from the rest, namely “Cells & Bells” - read: Eno taking the podium to remind everyone that he was also the master and originator of ambient music as we know it today, long before Music For Airports. But it's not only the unreachable paradise of the second half of Before And After Science that remains out of reach, but also the deep, majestic suggestions of the best moments of Another Day On Earth. Hyde, for his part, slips in his unmistakable Underworld touch, made of synthetic spirals and whirls, but once again it's only class that rises above the ordinary.

In 2016 comes a new solo chapter, the sixth release in six years since his welcome landing at Warp. The Ship already sounds, from its very title, like the closing of a circle in which the image of the ship serves as a constant thread - a non-place of continuity and detachment from the earthly dimension, and also the sole vehicle capable of marking that very detachment. The title track, moving from reflections on the wave-like nature of human life between highs (aspirations, translated into a sacrifice of the world in the name of technique) and lows (the failures of that same technique), tells of the journey towards that “world without sound” dreamed of in “Spider And I” and sonically attained through generative music. Eno disguises his voice, dehumanises it, kneads together fragments of memories torn from their contexts and vague metaphors, amid scattered faint electronic mutations, nocturnal, sinister howls alternating with dim harmonic progressions, over a backdrop of barely perceptible drone textures. The faint, eclipsed sun takes centre stage across the eighteen minutes of the first movement bearing the same title, “Fickle Sun”, in a crescendo that turns almost symphonic around the track's midpoint, ready to be swallowed by the funereal omnipresence of the voice - first free of the vocoder and human, then increasingly cold, darkened, gripped and made dissonant by the clutch of poisonous frequencies towards the end.

Introduced by the suspended recital of “The Hour Is Thins”, the proto-paradise of “I’m Set Free” - an unexpected and surprising cover of the Velvet Underground - is perhaps the first genuine return to song form since Before And After Science, without the help of Karl Hyde. Eno turns it into a languid, almost carefree ballad, as sung by someone who has already boarded the ship and wishes to bid farewell - with a newfound awareness of his own finitude - to the world before setting sail.

“I’m set free to find a new illusion”: the destination of the journey, precisely because it remains undefined, is still entirely to be discovered.

Less than a year after the album proper, on the first of January 2017 Eno delivers to the world his new musical object, understood as the ultimate objectification of his own creative thought.

Reflection: the outward projection of the self observed through one's own eyes, the only instrument for visually reading reality. In the simplest, most innocent way possible, this latest work risks calling into question everything ambient music has been since Discreet Music onward: sonic material that, like the “furnishings” of Erik Satie, aspired to settle into the background of perception and act “by reflection” on the experience - of life, rather than of listening - of those within its range; and which instead, in its discreet perfection, kept coming back to the fore, overshadowing by sheer superiority every other concurrent stimulus.

Foreground, background - these still concern a threshold of perception close to us. Reflection occupies neither one nor the other: it is itself the plane, the degree of neutrality, the zero point around which everything exists and manifests itself. Obviously this is not silence, but rather a transparent, breathing space onto which droplets of pure sound fall, settle and expand in concentric circles.

If the meditative state coincides with the laborious - if not impossible - suspension of mental activity, across the span of these 60 minutes Brian Eno perhaps performs his most definitive exercise in absence, abandoning even the faintest imaginative character to take the decisive step towards the digital emptiness of a screensaver for the mind, an infinitely thin film laid over sensible reality.

In 2018 the box set Music For Installations is released, gathering material largely already issued on limited-edition CDs under the Opal label. With these works Eno has reached the point of severing the ties between the process of reduction and its final result, seemingly eliminating the distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon of his sonic craft.

His processes of expressive synthesis thus find new fulfilment in his installation works, whose purpose-built compositions are projected onto a potentially infinite horizon, engaging in dialogue with physical spaces and objects and so reshaping the ordinary experience of time in music, chasing the utopia of an autonomous, immortal music, ever less dependent on human action in order to (re)generate itself ad libitum.

From works created for solo exhibitions to dialogues with sculptures (“I Dormienti”) and museum collections (“Lighting”), by way of software offering countless audiovisual combinations (“77 Million Paintings”), every part of this precious art collection holds within it, in nuce, the very reason why today we listen to and look upon Brian Eno's work with reverence - an artist who, appearances notwithstanding, has never stopped chasing new levels of formal perfection through which to outlive himself, leaving posterity an inexhaustible musical legacy.

2020 marks the year of the first official collaboration with his brother Roger. Colours and worlds blend together to give life to the new Mixing Colours, born out of a long series of short piano compositions by Roger, later revised and reworked by Brian, in a manner fairly similar to Brian Eno's two collaborations with Harold Budd, “The Plateaux Of Mirror” (1980) and “Pearls” (1984). Roger's brief piano sketches are manipulated by his brother and enriched with new tonal colours (hence the title), lending fresh substance to what could have been a simple, straightforward modern classical piano album.

Roger's romantic lightness connects with Brian's electronics to open new glimpses of light where colour dominates. Tracks like "Blonde", "Obsidian", "Cerulean Blue" and "Celeste" reveal an intent to explore timbre that alternates romanticism with a search for near-religious ecstasy, classical piano sonatas with attempts to move from a (sonic) image to blurred landscapes of memory. Among the many tracks - eighteen in all, for a total running time of seventy-five minutes - the most successful are those where the balance between melody and timbre is best focused, such as the tinkling of "Spring Frost" or "Burnt Umber", the churchlike organs of "Obsidian", the playful modern-classical flashes of "Blonde", the electronic lullaby of "Verdigris", and the Erik Satie-style classical sonata of "Iris".

After twenty years, Eno once again gives singing a leading role, a choice that created almost feverish anticipation for FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE (although this had already happened with Another Day On Earth), but the real point of interest is the deep reflection on the future of the planet and the climate emergency, the central thread of an album that ideally links back to the themes of Another Day On Earth (terrorism) and The Ship (the horror of war). Given these explicit conceptual premises, many hoped for a creative revolution, but musically FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is a subdued, solemn record, full of those already familiar affinities with late-period Scott Walker or David Sylvian. The comparison is evident in the project's two most intense episodes, first and foremost the remarkable "There Were Bells", a stream of synths with a hostile tone that not even birdsong and dreamlike, cosmic settings can fully soften. Even harsher are the minimal layers of "Garden Of Stars", amid cascades of dark synth textures and a merciless reality check: "These billions of years will end." The non-musician has never been so fatalistic and dramatic.

Yet FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE remains, despite everything, an ambient record: even the use of voice serves a single, strongly descriptive body of work ("We Let It In"), instrumental and vocal languor - among them a female voice - sketches glacial landscapes ("I'm Hardly Me"), to the point of almost disappearing altogether ("Making Gardens Out Of Silence In The Uncanny Valley", "Inclusion").

The peculiarity of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is that it is the English musician's most human and passionate album, a chapter marking a boundary whose physical and temporal dimensions remain unknown to us.

In 2023 came Secret Life, released by Text, the label run by Four Tet, born from the union of ambient pioneer Brian Eno and producer, enfant prodige and hit-maker Fred Gibson, aka Fred Again. The collaboration between the two began a long time ago, when Brian Eno helped the young DJ break into production work for high-profile artists such as Ed Sheeran, Swedish House Mafia and many others. In 2020 he urged him to release the album that would seal his fame, "Actual Life", put out during the first phase of the pandemic and built from sound samples taken from YouTube and Instagram videos, snippets of slam poetry, and the voices of the artist's friends and of complete strangers. That same year the Secret Life project began, though it was only released in 2023, closing out the "Actual Life" trilogy.

The album contains many of ambient music's cornerstones: vocal samples, slowly decaying piano notes, slowed-down voices, scattered synthesizers, a static hiss, all wonderfully held together by pioneer Eno's kaleidoscopic foundations. Among the most effective moments are the rarefied opening recitation of "I Saw You", the disorienting "Cmon", which seems to almost implode on itself after its initial bass grooves, and the dreamlike "Trying", with Lola Young's poignant vocals.

The production is excellent - which, given the artists involved, could hardly be otherwise - and the sequencing of the tracks allows the listener to access a single, extended introspective panorama.

The record floods the room and switches on the cerebral cortex, demanding attention and asking to be properly listened to as well. The joint work of the two artists transforms pre-existing techniques into a mainstream product, accessible to everyone, creating a new model of emotional perception, a prism of influences placed in rapid rotation.

Through noise and sampling, through the voice, which in turn becomes noise, Brian Eno and Fred Again have produced an album that can be both felt and listened to - indeed, that must be both felt and listened to - and which, in a cognitive-emotional ellipsis, creates a new sonic space for ambient music.

Contributions by Matteo Meda ("Someday World", "High Life", "The Ship"), Michele Mininni ("Before And After Science"), Michele Palozzo ("Reflection", "Music For Installations"), Mauro Roma ("Another Day On Earth"), Raffaello Russo ("Everything That Happens Will Happen Today"), Michele Saran ("Small Craft On A Milk Sea", "Drums Between The Bells", "Lux"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Mixing Colours"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE", "Liminal", "Lateral"), Giulia Papello ("Secret Life")

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