How the synthesiser gave Brian Eno his musical purpose
Although Brian Eno describes himself as a “non-musician”, he is easily one of the medium’s most influential and innovative figures. After joining Roxy Music in 1971 as a synthesiser player, he left the band two years later to focus on his own music and forged a career like no other.
His debut solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets, was created with the help of 16 musicians who he believed to be musically incompatible. Eno “got them together merely because I wanted to see what happens when you combine different identities like that and allow them to compete”. However, by the late 1970s, Eno had moved towards making ambient music, a term he coined himself. In the liner notes of his seminal album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, he wrote: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Alongside his solo work, Eno has collaborated with some of music’s biggest names, producing albums for the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Devo. It’s hard to imagine such an innovative talent doing anything other than creating music. Yet, Eno asserts that if it weren’t for his chance meeting with Roxy Music saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, “I probably would have been an art teacher now”.
During a 1979 interview with Lester Bangs, Eno revealed that when he was asked to join Roxy Music, he had never even played a synthesiser. “I’d never touched one before, but Andy knew that I had been doing things with electronics for a long time, five or six years, particularly using tape,” he said. “Since I was about fifteen, really. I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was just like a magic thing, and I always used to ask my parents if I could have one but I never got one, until just before I went to art school I got access to one and started playing with it, and then when I went to art school they had them there. I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.”
Furthermore, Eno described his love for synthesisers and how they helped to shape him as a musician – even if he refuses to be labelled as one. “I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general,” he commented. “They seem to me not threatening like other people find them, but a source of great fun and amusement, like grown-up toys, really. You can either take the attitude that it has a function and you can learn how to do it, or you can take an attitude that it’s just a black box that you can manipulate any way you want. And that’s always been the attitude I’ve taken, which is why I had a lot of trouble with engineers because their whole background is learning it from a functional point of view and then learning how to perform that function.”
Eno shared his preferred way of using the instrument: “I made a rule very early on, which I’ve kept to, which was that I would never write down any setting that I got on the synthesiser, no matter what how fabulous a sound I got. And the reason for that is that I know myself well enough to know that if I had a stock of fabulous sounds, I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones. So it was a way of trying to keep the instrument fresh. Also, I let it decay, it keeps breaking down and changes all the time. There are a lot of things I’ve done before that I couldn’t even do again if I wanted to.”
Listen to one of Eno’s greatest ambient compositions below.
