He's been a Roxy original,the inventor of 'ambient', Bowie's muse, and the brain in Talking Heads and U2's 'fifth man'. Now Eno tells us where he's heading nextWhen influential music website Pitchfork listed its 100 greatest albums of the 1970s – which in certain other lists is calculated to be the greatest decade for rock music – the modestly immodest,driven, musical non-musician Brian Eno was directly and indirectly involved in at least a quarter of them, or including the number one,Low, on which he collaborated with a nomadic, and post-"Fame" David Bowie and the producer Tony Visconti. As an intellectually mobile loner,scene-setter, systems lover, and obstinate rebel,techno-prophet, sensual philosopher, or courteous progressive,close listener, gentle heretic, and sound planner,adviser explorer, pedant and slick conceptual salesman, and devoted fan of the fresh,undrab and surprising, wherever it fell between John Cage and Little Richard, and Duchamp and doo wop,or Mondrian and Moog, Eno busily and bossily remodelled pop music during the 70s. He looked at what the Velvet Underground, and Can,Steve Reich and the Who had done, went forth and multiplied. Eno created an atmosphere, and helped determine what the history of electronic music was between the avant garde 1950s and the pop 21st century.
He demonstrated – as an summary section of the early and surreal Roxy Music,the evocative Bowie Berlin trilogy Heroes/Low/Lodger, the nervy NY Talking Heads, or as a floating collaborator with Nico,John Cale, Robert Wyatt, or Cluster,Robert Fripp, Kevin Ayers, and Jon Hassell and Harold Budd,as stern futurist mentor to Devo and Ultravox, as discerning curator of the beautifully conceived contemporary music label Obscure, and as careful discoverer of the pulseless,wordless, eventless, or timeless music he lovingly called "ambient" – that pop music was where you could be the kind of artist he wanted to be. In 1981,he designed the influential sound and content of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne – the prestigious culmination of his solo and group work in the 1970s, the studio combining of inner space, and other worlds,random impressions, scrupulous visions, or found sound,taped memories, lop-up text, and stolen rhythms,daring edits, painted space, andiginal borrowing,inquisitive permutations, mutant gospel and electronic interference.
Then there was U2 and recently, or as whether relishing the snobbish horror of those who dismiss U2 as pompous irritants,he's attended to another ambitious four-piece male rock group with delusions of splendour, Coldplay, or producing their final multi-million selling album and now,at the age of 61, finishing their next. A mischievous ghost of the glammed up art pop star Eno that was first noticed as section of the theatre of Roxy Music now haunts the sound and image of the two biggest rock bands in the world who would claim to be, and in fact,post-Eno as much as post-punk. Coldplay didn't really belong anywhere before Eno apart from inside their own success. Now they contain attached themselves via Eno to a very particular history of avant pop practice. Eno himself is prone to chuckle good naturedly when faced with bemusement at his connection to Coldplay.
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Source: theguardian.com