Brian Eno prepares 12 albums of unreleased material and takes a swipe at Ed Sheeran: "He was weak"

Brian Eno is relaunching his historic label Opal Records and looking to the future of music, between new releases, artificial intelligence and experimentation. In an interview given to Sian Watson for the Associated Press, the British musician and producer talked about his plans for the label's rebirth, while also reflecting on the continued relevance of his most celebrated work, "Music for Airports", on his collaborations with David Bowie, and on his own political commitment to Palestine.

The relaunch of Opal Records

Founded in 1988 and dormant since 1991, Opal Records was once home to several key figures of experimental music, including Jon Hassell, John Cale and Eno himself. The decision to bring it back arises first and foremost from the wish to make two increasingly hard-to-find albums available again, "Drawn From Life" from 2001 and "Another Day on Earth" from 2005, but it could prove to be just the start of a far more ambitious project.
"I've recently been thinking about putting out a box set of twelve albums", Eno revealed. "I have an enormous amount of music that I've composed and never released, and a lot of this material fits together really well. It's a kind of functional music, the sort you can put on while cleaning the house, reading a book, or doing something that needs the right atmosphere." An idea entirely consistent with his vision of ambient music, conceived not only to be listened to actively, but also to accompany and transform the spaces of everyday life.

The enduring relevance of "Music For Airports"

On this note, Eno dwelled on the surprising longevity of "Music for Airports", the 1978 record that helped define the ambient aesthetic. "It's interesting that an album from 48 years ago still feels so current. It keeps selling, people like it, and sometimes I meet young people who've just discovered it and think it only just came out", he observed. According to the English musician, the secret lies above all in the absence of stylistic markers that would instantly tie the work to a specific era. "You can recognise almost any pop record from the 80s just from the way the snare drum sound is treated. 'Music for Airports', on the other hand, is such a stripped-back work that it has almost none of those telltale signs. It could have been made today." Eno also jokes about the possibility that someone might already be producing his contemporary equivalent, perhaps titled "Music for Trains" or "Electric Bicycles".

His relationship with AI

His relationship with artificial intelligence is more complicated: he acknowledges the technology's enormous creative potential, but takes issue above all with how it is currently controlled. "I'm fascinated by the possibility of working with it. My problem with AI is about who owns it and the moral and social values of those people. They're some of the worst people you could trust with something so powerful", he stated. His concern also extends to the economic competition between big tech companies, more focused on outdoing one another than on considering the collective benefits of these innovations.
For Eno, the initial phase of a technology's development is decisive and should involve greater public participation. On the contrary, he believes that the current spread of increasingly autonomous and powerful AI systems, difficult to fully understand even for their creators, is the result of a serious regulatory failure.

Commitment to Palestine and the Ed Sheeran tour

The interview also touches on the artist's political activism, after he organised last year's benefit concert "Together for Palestine". Commenting on rapper Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's tour following some pro-Palestinian remarks he made on stage, Eno was mainly critical of those who would have blocked the collaboration from continuing, while also reserving some criticism for the British singer-songwriter himself. "I think Ed was weak. He could have said: I'm an artist, you hired me as an artist, and that means you accept my decisions about who performs with me." Eno nonetheless acknowledged how difficult it would have been to take a firm stance, given the tens of thousands of spectators who had already bought tickets and arranged travel.
The musician also recalled that he was born on 15 May 1948, a date associated with the Nakba, the exodus and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war. A coincidence that, he explained, helps make his connection to the Palestinian cause particularly deep and lasting.

Working with Bowie, and the present

As for his own artistic legacy, Eno seems little interested in looking back. He recounts having recently answered some questions about the historic sessions with David Bowie in Berlin and in France, during the making of the albums from the second half of the 70s. Revisiting those experiences proved more enjoyable than expected, but it remains an exception: "It's not something I do spontaneously. There are always enough things going on in the present that I don't need to keep going back to the past." Nor does retirement seem to be genuinely on the horizon. "I'd love to retire, but I don't know what I'd do if I stopped working", he admitted. After all, Eno doesn't consider himself a particularly goal-oriented person: what continues to fascinate him is not so much the final result as the creative process, the chance to invent new methods and new forms of expression. "I'm interested in understanding how things are made, more than in what comes out of it. I like inventing new ways of doing things."

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