Why “the sound of failure” becomes the defining force of art, according to Brian Eno
If you believe music should sound traditionally “musical”, graceful, melodic and easy on the ears, then you might need to rethink that idea, because Brian Eno sees it very differently.
In the early 1970s, Eno rose to fame as part of Roxy Music, a cult band known for their exciting, inviting musical experimentation, and between 1978 and 1980, he worked with Talking Heads and produced More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light, soaring in with funk inflexion and rhythmic warbles, challenging that popular misconception about meliflious music.
In 2025, David Byrne would release a song, ‘The Avant Garde’, both celebrating and bemoaning the odd entailments of the impish and overly intellectual avant-garde: “It’s a passionate life, it’s a head of the curve, it’s deceptively weighty, profoundly absurd,” the musical maestro sings on the track. He may as well be talking about a friend and old collaborator, Eno, addressing his gives-no-fucks attitudes to bending and misshaping usual sonic niceties.
Writing in his diary on December 19th, 1995, Eno mused, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” For him, while everybody avoided, or moved away from, the sketchy and the fizzing uncomfortable particularities of a sound, he was all for it. Examples included CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit…the sounds, therein, of a process failing.
In this sound, we hear human progress, our natural inclination to strive toward greatness and to keep defying the odds, to persist despite the raw, messy evidence of our falling down the metaphorical cliff. Eno could write it better than I…
“It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart”.
Though over three decades on, Eno’s prophesying is still true: today it seems the biggest band on earth (or at least, in the Far Out world) is Brooklyn four-piece Geese, whereby it was rumoured that Paul McCartney and Noel Gallagher were on the guest list for their latest London show. In our four-and-a-half-star review of the project, Far Out lifted much of this rhetoric, stating that the album represents the “immersive brilliance of music, creating a record that sounds coherently chaotic”.
Eno suggested that this “sound of failure” reaches into other mediums, too: “The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Go to any South London experimental film night, and you’ll see reel after reel of films burning and twisting in upon themselves, the medium extracting like a diagraphm in active hyperventilation. When a real human connection is contained within art, the art cannot so succintly contain it. It seeps outwards.
The sound of failure is not a mistake, nor a warning that the artist should stop in their tracks and turn back to safer waters. In his diary entries, published in 1995 under the title A Year with Swollen Appendices, Eno provokes us to think otherwise, and to include the listener on this journey: “Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.”
