Brian Eno

Brian Eno is the father of many phenomena and a phenomenon himself. Almost everyone has knowingly or unknowingly come into contact with his production. Eno has had a hand in amazingly different projects: the cult film Trainspotting, numerous TV adverts and even the Windows 95 starting sound, for which he composed the music. Such rock legends as Talking Heads, David Bowie and U2 can thank Eno for their sound. In addition he is known as the godfather of an entire brand of music, known as ambience. Eno is also a highly esteemed artist. His merit list is long and still growing.

A good 50 years ago in a Roman Catholic church in England a child was christened under the name of Brian Peter George St John de Babtiste de la Salle Eno. Perhaps it is out of obligation to that name that Brian Eno has later led such a colourful life. He was the second of four children born to postman William Eno and his Belgian-born wife Maria. His relatives are said to have had various creative hobbies: his uncle on his mother's side played the trombone and his father's passion was repairing clocks. His elder sister liked listening to American music. At seven years old Brian fell in love with the doo-wop music on his sister's records as soon as he heard it, and since then music in one form or another has always been central to him. Different kinds of music, including avant-garde pop, gospel, muzak and even Bulgarian choral singing have in turn held an important place in Eno's life. Brian was considered a gifted pupil at school.

At 17 he began to write down his thoughts in a small black exercise book. Today he still carries a black notebook in his breast pocket so that he can fill it with his ideas, drawings and theories. But his early years do not seem to hold the key to his paradox-filled life. Perhaps the description of Eno that nails him down the best can be found in a poem written by a good friend of his:

Sarajevo
Go-go
Dublin
Jig-jig
Brondesbury
Jam-jam
Meringue
In my pocket
I just can't get enough.

Brian Eno is best known as a musician and a producer and composer of music. He first took his place in the public eye as the androgynous keyboards player with the avant-garde pop group Roxy Music. Since then his name has appeared on the back of dozens of albums, both as solo artist and producer. However he himself states modestly: " You can't really call me a musician. I don't play instruments very well. Instead what I do pretty well is use them."

During his eventful life Eno has also worked as a multi-media artist, theoretician, curator, lecturer and professor. He comments on his breathtakingly complex career as follows: "One explanation as to how I am able to keep three careers going side by side is that I married my manager." Brian Eno's second wife Anthea Norman-Taylor still works as his manager. Playfulness combined with an experimental and open attitude have been characteristics of Eno's art from the start. He has had a liking for puns and anagrams, which accounts for the mysterious talents who sometimes appear on his albums -Ben Arion, Ben O'Rian and Brain One. On one album appears the strange number "King's Lead Hat", which turns out to be an anagram to do with a well-known band for whom Eno worked as a producer.

Chance lends a hand For Eno chance is a significant factor in finding new forms of expression.
While living in New York he left a video camera running by accident; lying on its side the camera filmed the slowly moving skyscape above the pulsating city. Watching the film, he even turned the television on its side, as an experiment. Thus Eno invented "painting" with a video camera.

Chance played a part again when, lying ill in bed, he happened to listen to a record being played through a broken speaker, and realised that music too can be used to paint and to sculpt space. It was after this that he created his "watchable" music, by using several cassette players to play elements repeated and multiplied in different ways.

The end results of processes initiated by chance have included not only ambience music but also impressive light and sound installations, now presented in art museums and galleries around the world. Eno's installations have been seen in Amsterdam's Stedelljik Museum, in the Venice Biennale and in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 1997 he presented his work Lightness in St. Petersburg's Marble Palace; according to Eno the work was a mixture of "cinema, pyrotechnics, environmental music and installation." In this way Eno still criss-crosses constantly from one area of life to another and tranfers familiar matters into an environment differing from the conventional one.

Ahead of his time?

Eno has made enthusiastic use of all that new technology has to offer, both in his music and in his art. In spite of this he sees digital technology as a problem, in that its output vanishes in a relatively short time. It may not be possible even to open a data file of ten years back on one of today's computers. Eno claims that western society's biggest problems originate from just this type of short-sightedness. 'The future' is only a few years away.

Eno is fascinated by the thought of longer-term views. He aims far into the future in an extremely concrete manner. Like his father before him, Eno is interested in clocks. He has used the recorded ticking of his pocket watch as a metronome and has also committed himself to a far-reaching clock project, the aim of which is to build a Millennium clock that will measure out 10,000 years. The clock will not be made using modern technology; its assembly will rely on tried and tested methods already in use in the Bronze Age, and known to endure. In this project, true to style, Eno winds the clock both forwards and backwards. At the same time he shows himself once again to be precisely that pop visionary, livening up our own time, that an unknown thinker has taken to comparing to refreshing fruit salts: "If culture is a glass of water, Brian Eno is its Alka-Seltzer."

Minna Raitmaa