“Sits outside music”: The artist Brian Eno said invented his own musical style
Above merely a producer or studio mage, but Brian Eno stands as one of popular music’s most lauded muses.
The moment he called it quits with Roxy Music in 1973, the mysterious EMS VCS 3 synth operator and then mononymous Eno pointed to a creative direction his former band may have charted if frontman Bryan Ferry hadn’t assumed artistic control, dropping a string of leftfield glam records from 1973’s Here Come the Warm Jets that captured an art-rock embrace unimpeded by pop accessibility.
By Another Green World two years later, the ambient washes that would sonically define him seep in, a pivotal record that heralded Eno’s embrace of heady electronics for much of his following 50-year output.
Yet, Eno’s lasting legacy will always be his fruitful work with some of music’s biggest names, a vast litany of artists owing much of their creative development and key chapters of their back-catalogue to Eno’s gift for unveiling horizons of novel thinking and coaxing new kinds of material.
From his unorthodox shaping of Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’, the injection of polyrhythmic flourish on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, or pushing U2 to the planes of multi-media overload on the Zoo TV tour, Eno wielded experimentalism not as some directionless jam, but armed with a well-honed methodology dedicated to arriving at artistic vitality.
Surrounding himself with likewise avant-gardists and musical innovators from Gavin Bryars to John Cale, Eno identified what the common thread was between his most notable collaborators. “It’s standing outside of music in some way,” He told Uncut in 2017. “Looking at it and seeing it not only as something you love and you’re passionately engaged with, but as a set of experiments you could do in other ways. If you broadly divide musicians up, you have the kind who are so into a style that’s what they do—nothing wrong with that, they’re great players”.
Eno then reached into prog’s canon and highlighted a guitarist who embodied what he felt were the exact attitudes he sought in the studio: “[Robert] Fripp, by contrast, is someone who sits outside music and thinks, ‘You could do it differently. You could have a kind of music that goes like this…’ So he invents so new strange and very hard for most other people to play music style”.
Providing King Crimson with their complex fretwork, Fripp pursued a heady, soaring style of playing that unmistakably sings on Eno’s early solo records, coated in his innovative use of analogue tape delays, more concerned with mood and textures over the axe-shredding dominating the 1970s rock world. Joining forces with the Fripp & Eno series of droning expanse LPs, Fripp’s feedback loops on Bowie’s ‘”Heroes”’ stand as his defining work, playing different guitar notes fed through Eno’s EMS Synthi gear.
“Liberated is the word,” Fripp remarked to Musician in 1982, discussing the time with Eno working on 1973’s (No Pussyfooting). “I had a lot of difficulty working with other musicians, because I’m not a forceful player, and I have a lot of difficulty with enthusiastic drummers thundering around. So just to be able to develop at my own speed, without any useful suggestions…really was liberating”.
