Eno

Something you're playing. (laughing)

Okay, I better, better get serious.

What I feel when I listen to this is that it needs

punctuation of some kind.

It would be nice if something went...

As soon as I hear that, it's a place.

I think about it in terms of geography.

You know, I think I've got the,

I've got something going on down there.

Now I want something going on up there.

I want something in, I want a sky.

What else do I want in this world?

Some creatures, something that sounds like life.

I can sometimes stand in that room

and work for six hours

and I'm just making something and it's happening

and I'm happening along with it.

It's my way of making a space for myself.

A place that I want to be in.

When you create something, you are doing this thing

that humans are very good at, which is imagining.

It's a way of entering another world, looking at its values,

seeing how they work out,

and that tells you something about yourself

that gives you a core from which to take action.

I now have 50 years of work behind me

and I talk about it now as if I had

the whole thing figured out in my head, but I didn't.

They were just feelings of somewhere I was going.

Can you tell us your full name?

Brian Peter George.

St. John Le Baptist De Lasal Eno.

- Frank Zappa once said that rock criticism

is people who can't write

talking to people who can't speak

for people who can't read.

Brian Eno, composer and theoretician,

I assure you can do all three very well.

I ask you, please help me welcome Brian Eno.

It's safe to say that more people are familiar

with your music than with your visual work.

You're the producer for U2 and David Byrne.

I wonder if to begin we could talk a little bit

about your roots.

What kind of music and other art

and cultural experiences were resonant

for you when you were growing up?

Actually, I know the first song

that really made an impression on me was

"Get a Job" by the Silhouettes.

Because the first time I heard that, I decided that

that was great music

and I would never get a job.

And I never did.

I've never really had a job.

- So there were these things sitting on the back of a leaf.

I've never seen anything like that before

and I thought, I don't think those are eggs.

I think those are spiders, little spiders.

Okay.

So I came back today to look at them

and I touched the leaf, which is this leaf here,

and they all fell off

and sort of shot off in every possible direction.

Yeah, I can see one right there.

Now let me see if I can take a picture of that.

It's now gonna come next to that stone. Got him.

Look okay, now you can see it.

Now you can see what they are.

Little beetles.

Okay. That's pretty exciting.

I wanted to ask you about

how you got into making generative music and art.

- I'm always thinking about how things happen in nature.

I started becoming very interested in evolution theory.

I think the thing that thrilled me most about evolution

was the idea of complexity arising out of simplicity.

Things started out simpler and they've ramified into more

and more complex and beautiful things.

I realized that it was possible to make music like this.

Instead of trying to specify every moment of a piece

of music in advance, you're setting up a system

or a process. They're sets of rules basically,

which generates music.

That's where the word generative came from.

That's why I use that word.

So let's say that's my beginning phrase.

This piece of software lets me leave out 30% of the notes.

And then maybe I'll occasionally get one of those notes

to repeat a few times.

Okay, there it goes. One of those repeats.

So I have a loop,

but it's a loop that is changing each time it plays.

So you're sort of sculpting something that

has a life anyway.

You're just watching it evolve.

So I started thinking of myself as somebody

who created things that would

carry on having their own life.

Instead of thinking I'm gonna make something

and that's it, that's the end of it, that's finished,

you think, I'm gonna plant something,

I'm gonna plant the seeds of this piece of music

and then that piece of music is gonna flower in thousands

of different ways in the course of time.

You know all of the ingredients,

but you don't know the result

of letting them repattern in that way.

Our brain is very creative.

It wants to find patterns.

So one of the key aspects of generative art,

assuming the audiences are intelligent participants.

The audience's brain does the cooking

and keeps seeing relationships.

I joined Roxy Music almost by accident.

I was invited around by Andy and Brian

just to tape some of their songs.

While I was there, I began showing them some

of the things you could do with a tape recorder other than

just record music with it.

Andy had a synthesizer

and I was quite naturally interested in that.

Synthesizers were quite new

and nobody really knew what to do with them.

I couldn't play any instruments,

but here was an instrument that I could play

because there was no way of saying how

that instrument should be played,

so I could make the rules for that.

Suddenly I thought, oh, there's a whole set of tools here

that I'm as well qualified as anybody else to use.

There was always an ambiguity about

where the sound actually came from.

You know, people always used to say

after concerts, "I dunno what you were doing,

"but I think I liked it." (laughing)

Phil would be playing guitar.

The guitar was coming into my synth, so I could do things

with it, like duplicate it and copy it and change the time.

It was a way of bringing some of the things

that recording studios had made possible

into a live situation.

That was part of the identity of the band at that point.

We made sounds that other bands couldn't make.

If you take something from the past

and put it in the context

of other things in the present, you change it anyway.

I mean it's like creating something, something new.

I mean we don't, we don't just play rock revival.

We also put it in the context of say, electronics and oboes

and the way Bryan sings and so on.

So it becomes a a different kind of--

- I think if you ever-- - ...experience anyway.

- It probably works in the sense that we take one step back

and two or three steps into the future.

- We wanted to start being conscious again of those things

that had been rejected as showbiz-y,

like stage costumes,

and we thought a lot of the people we really like,

like Little Richard, put on a show for their audience

and we want to put on a show.